Three stages of perceiving consecutively moral behaviors: Neurophysiological effect of agent and valence on the moral judgments

Abstract

ABSTRACT The present study investigates how agents and the moral valence of the acts affect moral judgments when two consecutively behaviors are perceived, with each describing morally salient behaviors done by the same or different agent(s). Participants had to rate the likableness/pleasantness of the agents/behaviors. Behavioral results indicated that rating the likableness of the agent was mainly depended on the morally diagnostic character of the agent while rating the pleasantness of the behaviors was mainly depended on the moral valence of the behaviors per se. ERP results showed: 1) larger N1 was found in response to the agent consistently acting immorally, indicating an early detection of social threatening information. 2) Compared with agents who consistently act morally which provided no norm- or expectation-violation information, other conditions induced larger N400, indicating greater cognitive effort was recruited when the present moral information violated the participants’ prior knowledge to the agent. 3) Increased LPP was found in response to the agent consistently acting morally (vs. moral behaviors acted by different agents), representing that people may allocate more attention to positive information during this stage. We suggest that this three-stage scheme is a common model when people encounter consecutive moral events.