The role of emotion in moral judgment

Abstract

[eng] Converging evidence suggest that emotion plays a central role in moral judgment. However, no study has ever asked its participants if they actually felt emotionally involved by moral stimuli and only one neuropsychological study has measured subject’s emotional responses in terms of psychophysiological arousal during a moral judgment task. The standard methodology for studies investigating moral cognition is using moral dilemmas as stimuli. All of the studies have been using a dilemma set (Greene et al., 2001) which is not designed to control for relevant variables and thus has important short-comings. The aim of the present research was to investigate whether general findings from other studies still hold when using a set of moral dilemmas specifically developed to control for relevant parameters in moral judgment, not yet paid attention to (Christensen et al., in preparation). First, we have standardized the stimulus set in terms of arousal and valence. Second, we have validated the set showing that people’s moral judgment is sensitive to the four conceptual factors which vary in a controlled manner across the set, giving rise to 16 different dilemma categories. Third, we conducted a pilot study in order to test whether the different variables had an effect on the level of psychophysiological arousal, expressed in differences in skin conductance responses. Behavioral results have shown that the revised dilemma set is able to detect differences in moral judgment which are highly sensitive to the conceptual factors of the set. Psychophysiological results also indicate that there are differences in arousal levels, but more testing has to be done in order to confirm these preliminary findings.