Harsher Moral Judgments Research Articles

Ageing and disgust: Is old age associated with harsher moral judgements?

The physical decay of the elderly can cause disgust and social rejection. This social rejection may be a problem for older people leading them to exclusion. However, although the association between old age and disgust has always been dealt with in art, literature, religion and the popular consciousness, recent experimental studies on disgust have not paid it the attention it deserves. To address this need, this paper analyses the strength of this association using two experimental studies. After presenting some central and widely-accepted elements about disgust and its moralising and stigmatising nature, the first study starts with a well-established assumption in experimental literature: disgust, which is a rejection emotion, easily leads to moral disgust, i.e., it provokes harsher moral judgments on those who disgust us. If this is the case, elderly people should be more severely judged than the youth if they do something immoral, disgusting, or both. Our results, however, challenge this assumption, finding that elderly people are judged less harshly. This result is replicated in Study 2 which also shows that the higher the sensitivity to disgust, the harsher the moral judgment, regardless of the age of the vignette actor. However, interaction analysis establishes that less disgust-sensitive participants are more condescending to older people than to younger people. This leads us to think that a greater sensitivity to disgust is a likely source of hostility toward the elderly, and a lesser sensitivity may lead to paternalistic attitudes based on compassion.

Is Prick of Conscience Associated With the Sensation of Physical Prick?

“Prick of conscience” is a phrase to express feelings of guilt in both English and Korean. Particularly in South Korea, guilt is metaphorically associated with a sense of touch by pricking. Koreans commonly express feelings of guilt by using the metaphor, “It pricks my conscience.” Across three studies, we examined whether prick of conscience (i.e., feelings of guilt) is grounded in bodily experiences of physical prick (e.g., a needle prick), using a sample of Koreans. Participants who recalled past unethical acts were less likely to choose a needle prick rather than medication as a treatment for indigestion, whereas those who recalled ethical acts presented no significant difference in their willingness to receive either treatment (Study 1). Participants who decided to lie sensed the finger prick deeper and felt more pain as compared to those in the truth group or the control group (Study 2). Lastly, participants who had the finger prick rendered harsher moral judgments than participants in the control condition (Study 3). In line with an embodied cognition framework, these findings suggest that prick of conscience is not just a linguistic metaphor but can be embodied as physical sensations in forms of pricking.

On Trust and Disgust: Evidence From Face Reading and Virtual Reality

We report three studies exploring the relationship between disgust and trust. Study 1a measured emotions using face-reading technology while participants played a repeated trust game. We observed a negative correlation between trust and disgust. Study 1b employed self-reports along with the face reader. The self-report procedure adversely affected participants’ emotional state and eliminated the correlation between trust and other emotions. Study 2 induced incidental disgust or sadness using virtual reality and manipulated participants’ awareness of the source of their emotions. Disgusted participants judged others as less trustworthy and sent less in a trust game than sad or control participants. An interaction indicated that awareness of the source of emotions eliminated the effect. Our data are consistent with the association between disgust and harsher moral judgments and suggest that disgust is antithetical to the building of trust. However, the association disappears if individuals are aware that their disgust is unrelated to the setting.

Heading Right and Judging Harsher

Abstract. The term right may imply different meanings, for example, right can be the direction opposite to left, but right can also mean the opposite of wrong. In three experiments, we investigated whether orientation toward the right versus left direction can influence how individuals judge situational moral transgressions. Mental spatial orientation was manipulated by placing the text of moral transgressions on the left versus right side of the screen (Experiment 1) or by presenting different landscape pictures depicting paths that either lead to the left versus to the right (Experiments 2 and 3). In Experiment 3, we also manipulated participants’ physical spatial orientation. Results confirmed our main prediction that a mental rightward (vs. leftward) orientation can trigger relatively harsher moral judgments.

Supplemental Material for Individual Differences in Reliance on Intuition Predict Harsher Moral Judgments

Supplemental Material for Individual Differences in Reliance on Intuition Predict Harsher Moral Judgments

It’s not right but it’s permitted: Wording effects in moral judgement

AbstractThis study aims to provide evidence about two widely held assumptions in the experimental study of moral judgment. First, that different terms used to ask for moral judgment (e.g., blame, wrongness, permissibility…) can be treated as synonyms and hence used interchangeably. Second, that the moral and legal status of the judged action are independent of one another and thus moral judgment have no influence of legal or other conventional considerations. Previous research shows mixed results on these claims. We recruited 660 participants who provided moral judgment to three identical sacrificial dilemmas using seven different terms. We experimentally manipulated the explicit legal status of the judged action. Results suggest that terms that highlight the utilitarian nature of the judged action cause harsher moral judgments as a mechanism of reputation preservation. Also, the manipulation of the legal status of the judged action holds for all considered terms but is larger for impermissibility judgments. Taken as a whole, our results imply that, although subtle, different terms used to ask for moral judgment have theoretically and methodologically relevant differences which calls for further scrutiny.

Wealth and Welfare: Divergent Moral Reactions to Ethical Consumer Choices

Abstract This article examines perceptions of low-income consumers receiving government assistance and the choices they make, showing that this group is viewed differently than those with more resources, even when making identical choices. A series of five experiments reveal that ethical purchases polarize moral judgments: whereas individuals receiving government assistance are perceived as less moral when choosing ethical (vs. conventional) products, income earners, particularly high-income individuals, are perceived as more moral for making the identical choice. Price is a central component of this effect because equating the cost of ethical and conventional goods provides those receiving government assistance some protection against harsh moral judgments when choosing ethically. Moreover, earning one’s income drives perceptions of deservingness, or the right to spend as one desires. Those who receive assistance via taxpayer dollars are under greater scrutiny (frequently resulting in harsher moral judgments) by others. In addition to influencing perceptions of individual consumers, the results demonstrate that such attributions extend to groups who make ethical choices on others’ behalf, and that these attributions have real monetary consequences for nonprofit organizations.

A Lack of Material Resources Causes Harsher Moral Judgments

In the research presented here, we tested the idea that a lack of material resources (e.g., low income) causes people to make harsher moral judgments because a lack of material resources is associated with a lower ability to cope with the effects of others’ harmful behavior. Consistent with this idea, results from a large cross-cultural survey (Study 1) showed that both a chronic (due to low income) and a situational (due to inflation) lack of material resources were associated with harsher moral judgments. The effect of inflation was stronger for low-income individuals, whom inflation renders relatively more vulnerable. In a follow-up experiment (Study 2), we manipulated whether participants perceived themselves as lacking material resources by employing different anchors on the scale they used to report their income. The manipulation led participants in the material-resources-lacking condition to make harsher judgments of harmful, but not of nonharmful, transgressions, and this effect was explained by a sense of vulnerability. Alternative explanations were excluded. These results demonstrate a functional and contextually situated nature of moral psychology.

Not all financial speculation is treated equally: Laypeople’s moral judgments about speculative short selling

Since the recent financial crisis, regulators and the general public have focused on financial speculation as one of its potential causes. In addition to the roles played by rating agencies and complicated financial engineering, speculative short sales have been put into question. However, laypeople’s moral judgments about this type of financial speculation have rarely been investigated in economic psychology. The present study aims to fill this gap. Across four studies, we find that laypeople’s moral judgments of short selling are significantly harsher than their judgments of long positions. Both successful (Study 1) and unsuccessful (Study 2) short selling receives harsher moral judgments. In addition, studies which manipulate the moral character of the shorted asset (Study 3) or the time horizon of the investment strategy (Study 4) support the conclusion that short selling is considered less moral than taking a similar long position. The results present consistent support for a judgment bias of economic laypeople in the domain of financial economics.