Aware or not aware—does it make a difference? The influence of moral emotions on deontological and utilitarian judgment
Marie Ritter
Universiteit van Amsterdam
MSc Thesis — Graduate School Psychology Supervisor: Professor Agneta Fischer Second Assessor: Professor Gerben van Kleef
31 ec
Author Note
Marie Ritter, Department of Social Psychology, Universiteit van Amsterdam. Master Thesis conducted under the supervision of Agneta Fischer, Department of Social Psychology, Universiteit van Amsterdam.
Abstract
This study investigates whether incidental emotions can influence the moral judgment process by informing whether a person should rely more or less on either an affective or reasoning pathway, akin to the feeling-as-information literature. In an online study, participants were presented with 20 moral dilemmas and accompanying pictures of facial expressions that were designed to induce either anger, contempt, or a neutral emotion. Additionally, half of the participants were made aware of the fact that their emotions might be affected by the study and that this could influence their judgments. Using a process-dissociation model, participants’ inclination to judge deontologically or
utilitarian was estimated separately. Because the manipulation was ineffective the results of this study remain inconclusive. Noteworthy exploratory results, limitations of the study, as well as recommendations for future research are discussed.
Keywords: moral judgment, feeling-as-information, process dissociation, moral emotions, incidental emotions
Aware or not aware—does it make a difference? The influence of moral emotions on deontological and utilitarian judgment
An airplane with 164 passengers aboard is kidnapped by terrorists who plan to attack a football stadium hosting 70 000 visitors. A fighter pilot shoots down the machine, saving thousands of people in the stadium, but sacrificing those on the plane. Is the pilot guilty or innocent? Were his actions right or wrong? These questions are presented to audience members of the play “TERROR” written by von Schirach (2016) who are then asked to deliberate and vote like a jury.
How audience members answer these questions is the result of moral judgment processes that have recently received much consideration from psychologists (Wojciszke, Parzuchowski, & Bocian, 2015). Since the new surge of attention, evidence has
amounted suggesting that context factors, such as emotions, can influence moral judgment decidedly (e.g., Baron, Gürcay, & Luce, 2017; Schnall, Haidt, Clore, & Jordan, 2008). Nonetheless, it is still unknown how emotional context information interacts with the judgment process. This study investigates the possibility that unrelated context information acts as information in moral judgment. Specifically, it was investigated whether emotions that are unrelated to the moral decision itself, so-called incidental emotions, can inform moral judgment.
Judging moral scenarios. In the discipline of ethics, moral judgments are often categorized in terms of two philosophical principles: deontology and utilitarianism. A deontologist, the most prominent being Kant (1785/1959), argues that actions are right or wrong regardless of their consequences. In short, a deontologist contends that killing is morally wrong in any circumstance even if killing some can save many others. In contrast, a utilitarian like Mill (1863) argues that moral actions need to be judged according to their consequences and what benefit they have for the “greater good”. Hence, saving many by sacrificing some is morally right.
In moral psychology, deontology has been associated with moral intuition, a quick and often emotional judgment (e.g., Haidt, 2001). In contrast, utilitarianism has often been associated with moral reasoning, an effortful and slow process that arrives at a judgment through deliberation and weighing of arguments or “moral arithmetics” (Greene, Morelli, Lowenberg, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2008). This mapping of a fast, automatic, and unconscious emotional process and a slow, deliberative, and conscious reasoning process aligns well with the dual-process concept (e.g., Evans, 2008). Indeed, there is evidence supporting the so-called default interventionist or dual-process model of moral judgment (e.g., Greene & Haidt, 2002; Greene, 2014a).
the one in the play “TERROR,” the two mentioned processes are triggered: an affective and a reasoning pathway. For example, an audience member could feel angry at or contemptuous towards the fighter pilot for killing the people on the plane. This person would intuitively think of this act as morally wrong. In parallel, the person could engage in conscious moral reasoning and might come to the conclusion that according to
utilitarianism the pilot acted right; the slower route has changed the person’s initial intuition to form a final judgment and decide what vote to cast. This chain of events is captured by the dual-process model and has been supported by a large amount of neuroscientific research (e.g., Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001; Greene, Nystrom, Engell, Darley, & Cohen, 2004; Sarlo et al., 2012; for a review see Greene, 2014b).
Moral emotions. An important part of the dual-process model are moral emotions. According to Haidt (2003), people feel moral emotions in response to aspects of social life that contain implicit norms, such as what is perceived as fair or permissible. This proposition has also received support from more recent studies (e.g., Laakusuo, Sundvall, & Drosinou, 2017). For example, people feel angry towards thieves, possibly as a means to discourage further stealing and enforce the norm that stealing is wrong. As such moral emotions serve the role of moral intuitions: When people feel bad about a moral action, they intuitively assume it to be wrong. Two prominent moral emotions that have been a frequent research subject are anger and contempt (Fischer &
Giner-Sorolla, 2016; Fischer & Roseman, 2007; Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999). Anger. Anger as one of the basic emotions (e.g., Ekman, Friesen, & Ellswort, 1971) has had the reputation of being an “immoral emotion” as it is often found in situations of goal blockage or frustration and prepares the individual to meet the
frustrating situation with aggressive behavior (Rozin et al., 1999). However, it has been found that anger often occurs in moral situations, especially when an act is perceived to be unjustified or unfair (Haidt, 2003; Rozin et al., 1999). Specifically, anger seems to respond to violations of autonomy: violations that restrict the freedom of an individual unfairly. Moreover, it has been found that anger is especially responsive to morality violations concerning the self (Hutcherson & Gross, 2011) and often motivates approach behavior (Harmon-Jones & Allen, 1998). As such, it has been argued that people feel anger when they think a wrong-doer can be coerced into changing his actions (Fischer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016). However, if a person transgresses multiple times in spite of the anger addressed at him, people might start to feel contempt.
Contempt. As anger, contempt has had the reputation of being an immoral emotion as its action tendencies include avoiding the person one feels contempt for, deriding and even socially excluding them (Fischer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016). A person
feels contempt when she blames somebody for an action and thinks that the wrong-doer has a bad character, is inferior and not worth any efforts (Fischer & Roseman, 2007). In contrast to anger, contempt is mostly felt towards a person and less towards an action and is often associated with avoidance tendencies (Hutcherson & Gross, 2011).
According to Rozin et al. (1999), contempt reacts to moral violations on the community level, such as failure to carry out one’s duty or violations of social hierarchy.
Furthermore, contempt is often felt towards other groups that are perceived to have a lower social status and as such often goes along with prejudice (Rozin et al., 1999). However, Fischer and Giner-Sorolla (2016) argued that contempt need not be seen as an altogether immoral emotion as it can also be felt “upward the social ladder”. For
example, protesters might feel contempt towards immoral bankers or politicians.
Process dissociation of moral judgment. Anger and contempt are only two moral emotions that have been connected to the intuition pathway of the dual-process model (Baron et al., 2017; Hutcherson & Gross, 2011; Szekely & Miu, 2015a, 2015b). This model has come under increasing criticism though with many studies providing evidence against the complete separation of emotional and cognitive pathways (Baron et al., 2017; Gamez-Djokic & Molden, 2016; Gürcay & Baron, 2017; Koop, 2013), the mapping of ethical standpoints on the separate paths (Bialek & De Neyes, 2016, 2017), or suggesting new model components, such as construal level (Körner & Volk, 2014). While a comprehensive critique of the dual-process model is beyond the scope of this project, the criticism of Conway and Gawronski (2013) is crucial for the current study and shall be explained further.
Conway and Gawronski (2013) argued that past studies were mostly concerned with the final moral judgment, so the result of the moral judgment process, rather than the so-called moral inclinations. It was assumed that a person who judges
deontologically relied on the emotional pathway; a person who judges in a utilitarian way relied on moral reasoning. While the final judgment might indicate which of the two pathways provided a stronger input, it cannot show which of the pathways was specifically affected by a manipulation. For example, one person in the theater audience might experience happiness and, as a result, might feel less inclined to reason
(unchanged intuition pathway, weakened reasoning pathway). Another person might feel angry and therefore have an increased tendency to rely on moral intuitions
(strengthened intuition pathway, unchanged reasoning pathway). Although very different processes are at work in these individuals, this does not show in their vote at the end of the play: both are more likely to cast a deontological vote.
This is problematic because it limits the ways in which the process of moral judgment can be researched. To salvage this draw-back of the dual-process model,
Conway and Gawronski (2013) proposed a process-dissociation approach to moral judgment research that allows researchers to estimate both the deontological and
utilitarian inclinations separately. Therefore, it became possible to investigate the moral judgment process in more detail, instead of only its result.
Incidental emotions as information. So far, the dual-process model of moral judgment has been presented as a closed system, taking input from the moral dilemma only. However, many studies have shown that factors such as incidental emotions that are independent of a moral situation or target can strongly influence moral judgment. For example, Valdesolo and DeSteno (2006) found that participants who were induced with a positive (vs. a neutral) affective state were more likely to decide in a utilitarian way. Other studies found that incidental disgust and anger can influence moral decisions (Seidel & Prinz, 2013; Ugazio, Lamm, & Singer, 2012) as well as induced amusement or elevation (Harlé & Sanfey, 2010; Strohminger, Lewis, & Meyer, 2011).
What these studies cannot provide, however, is insight into which parts of the moral judgment process are affected. One possibility that this study will explore is that incidental emotions act as information about which processing style is most appropriate in the current situation as in the feeling-as-information theory (for a review see Schwarz, 2012).
In short, feeling-as-information theory postulates that feelings, including moods, emotions, or so-called “meta-cognitions”, serve as a source of information for certain judgments, task demands, or states of the environment. Importantly, this information effect is assumed to only occur as long as people believe that a certain feeling is
informative for the task at hand. Because people generally believe that their feelings are related to their focus of attention (Higgins, 1998), misattribution of emotions is very common. When people become aware that their feelings are not in fact relevant to the task at hand, they discount them (Schwarz & Clore, 1983).
This can be used when researching the question whether moral emotions also function in the feeling-as-information framework. Were this the case, people should use an incidental moral emotion in their moral judgments as long as they are unaware that this emotion is unjustly influencing how they process the moral dilemma. As soon as people are made aware that the emotion they are feeling does not have informational value for the task, they should discount this information, maybe even overcompensate in their judgments (Strack & Hannover, 1996).
The integration of the moral emotion literature with the feeling-as-information hypothesis is, to the author’s knowledge, a novel approach to study moral judgment processes. In this manner, one possible explanation is tested that could explain the established effects of incidental emotions on moral judgment.
Current study. Whether moral emotions influence moral judgment by
informing the moral judgment process was investigated in this study by manipulating the incidental emotion and awareness of the emotion in an online experiment, resulting in a 3 (emotion: anger vs. contempt vs. neutral) x 2 (awareness: aware vs. unaware) between-subject design.
The study was designed to investigate not the moral judgments themselves but process by which they arrive. In order to do so, this study used the process-dissociation approach of Conway and Gawronski (2013). This approach provided the opportunity to estimate both a deontological and a utilitarian inclination for each participant so that it could be investigated whether a certain experimental condition affected only one or both pathways.
The induced emotions, anger and contempt, have both been frequently implicated in moral scenarios and can be assumed to affect the moral judgment process in distinct ways (Rozin et al., 1999) while keeping the valence of the emotions constant. Based on the review of Fischer and Giner-Sorolla (2016), it was expected that in the unaware conditions anger—being a “hot” emotion that promotes fast action—would strengthen the intuitive or weaken the reasoning pathway, while the “colder” emotion contempt would strengthen the reasoning or weaken the intuitive pathway. The neutral emotion condition served as the baseline against which the other conditions were compared. Based on this, the first hypothesis was formulated in two parts:
H1a: Compared to the neutral conditions, participants in the anger–unaware condition will show a higher deontological inclination, while participants in the contempt–unaware condition will show a lower deontological inclination.
H1b: Compared to the neutral conditions, participants in the anger–unaware condition will show a lower utilitarian inclination, while participants in the
contempt–unaware conditions will show a higher utilitarian inclination.
The awareness manipulation consisted of a simple instruction page alerting the participants to the fact that the task and moral dilemmas might stir up emotions that are unrelated to the moral dilemmas core judgment. These simple instructions have often proven to be effective in the feeling-as-information literature (e.g., Schwarz & Clore, 1983) and it was expected that the above mentioned emotion effects would only occur in the unaware conditions. Specifically, the second hypothesis was formulated as follows.
H2 : Participants in the anger–aware and the contempt–aware condition should not differ from the neutral conditions.
As the awareness manipulation made it necessary that the emotions were induced relatively inconspicuously, the experiment was introduced under the cover-story of a
perspective-taking study. Participants were instructed to take the perspective of protagonists of a moral dilemma (described in the second person: “you”) who feel a strong emotion towards a third party. In order to further strengthen the emotion
induction, participants saw a picture showing either an angry, contemptuous, or neutral facial expression from the Amsterdam Dynamic Facial Expression Set (ADFES;
Van der Schalk, Hawk, Fischer, & Doosje, 2011). This was introduced to the
participants in the framework of the perspective-taking instruction as depicting a facial expression the protagonist might display. As participants were instructed to judge the moral dilemmas as the protagonist, the protagonist’s and participant’s emotions should coincide justifying an analysis of the emotions on the intrapersonal level.
Methods Sample
For this study, 91 students (78 female, 12 male, 1 agender) of the Universiteit van Amsterdam were recruited via the Online Lab Tool from December 20, 2017 to January 15, 2018. On average, participants were 20.79 years old (sd = 4.37; range: 18 – 52 years). Random assignment to the six conditions created roughly equal-sized groups as seen in Table 1. Participants received 0.37 participation credits as reimbursement for the 30-minute online study. All participants provided informed consent in accordance with the regulations of the Ethics Committee of the Universiteit van Amsterdam.
Anger Contempt Neutral
Aware 15 16 16
Unaware 15 14 15
Table 1
Group sizes for six conditions, N = 91.
A conservative a-priori power analysis was conducted with G*Power (Faul,
Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007) expecting a small effect size (Cohen’s f = 0.1). It was estimated that with an α-level of 0.05 and a Power of at least 80% a sample size of 967 participants, 162 per group, was needed. This was an unrealistic target for a project of this scope, especially given the fact that previous studies in the moral judgment
literature (e.g., Seidel & Prinz, 2013; Ugazio et al., 2012) have found effects with group sizes of 30 to 40 participants. Ultimately, it was decided that the study would recruit as many participants as possible in the limited time frame available.
As an additional measure to make this study more attractive to potential subjects participants had the opportunity to request an “individual moral profile” at the end of
the study consisting of the participant’s individual deontological and utilitarian inclination score and a short explanation on the philosophical standpoints. Design & Procedure
Variables. The study follows a 3x2 between-subjects design. The first
independent variable was emotion with three levels: anger, contempt, and neutral. The second independent variable was awareness with two levels: aware and not aware.
This study used two dependent variables: deontological and utilitarian inclination of each participant that were estimated from the responses to the moral dilemmas following the process-dissociation approach of Conway and Gawronski (2013). These inclinations were taken as proxies for the separate pathways of the moral judgment process with the deontological inclination representing the intuitive and the utilitarian inclination representing the reasoning pathway.
Procedure. Participants were invited to an online study programmed in Qualtrics (qualtrics.com). After giving informed consent, participants were shown
further information on the study. They were informed that their main task is to take the perspective of the dilemmas’ protagonist. It was additionally explained that they would see photos of emotional expressions to aid perspective taking. The instructions page can be seen in Appendix B. Then participants were covertly and randomly assigned to one of six experimental conditions: anger–aware, anger–unaware, contempt–aware,
contempt–unaware, neutral–aware, neutral–unaware.
On the next page, participants were shown additional instructions. In the aware conditions, these were: “Please be aware that some information in the moral dilemmas and the pictures can affect your feelings. This could affect your moral judgment. Try to read all dilemmas very carefully.” In contrast, instructions in the unaware conditions were: “Please be aware that some information in the moral dilemmas and the pictures can be unexpected. This could affect your moral judgment. Try to read all dilemmas very carefully.”
After this manipulation, participants were asked about demographics and then proceeded to answer the 20 moral dilemmas. All moral dilemmas were taken from Conway and Gawronski (2013) and were adapted in the anger and contempt conditions to contain information that the protagonist is angry/contemptuous towards a third party. It was important that the induced emotion was not directed at the target or victim of the dilemmas as this could affect the moral judgment beyond the effect of incidental emotions.
A pilot study (N = 21) had tested whether the dilemmas (only anger and
not differ in target emotions in the pilot study, the manipulations were strengthened by accompanying each dilemma with a picture showing an angry, contemptuous, or neutral facial expression, according to experimental condition. The pictures were chosen from the still pictures of the ADFES (Van der Schalk et al., 2011). The picture set (n = 20) was chosen to represent an equal number of female/male (10 each) and
North-European/Mediterranean models (10 each) and to show the prototypical facial expressions.
The moral dilemmas by Conway and Gawronski (2013) are constructed in ten pairs; in each pair both dilemmas present a similar scenario with one being constructed in a way that deontological and utilitarian inclinations lead to the same judgment while the other leads to divergent judgments. This is necessary in order to estimate the separate moral inclinations. All dilemmas used in this study as well as additional explanations on the construction can be seen in the can be seen in Appendix B.
After answering all dilemmas participants were asked as a manipulation check: “To what extent have you experienced the following emotions while answering the moral dilemmas? Happiness, Anger, Contempt, Sadness, Disgust, Surprise” (5 point
Likert-scale: 1 – Not at all, 5 – To a great extent).
Lastly, participants were thanked and asked whether they would like to receive a detailed debriefing e-mail, their moral profile, or both when the data collection
concludes. If so, participants were led to a new survey to enter their e-mail address to be stored separate from the other data.
Data processing. The data analysis was carried out using the statistics program R (R Core Team, 2017) with the packages psych (Revelle, 2017), car (Fox & Weisberg, 2011), and pastecs (Grosjean & Ibanez, 2014). Additionally, an exploratory network analysis was carried out, using the package qgraph (Epskamp, Cramer,
Waldorp, Schmittmann, & Borsboom, 2012).
As the data collected on the Qualtrics platform was already well suited for further analysis and missing data was virtually absent, data processing could be kept to a minimum. It was ensured that all participants included in the analysis had answered all 20 dilemmas so that scores for the deontological and utilitarian score could be estimated.
Lastly, the dependent variables were estimated from the answers to the moral dilemmas exactly as described by Conway and Gawronski (2013), where the derivation of these calculations is presented as well. First, the utilitarian inclination (U) was calculated by subtracting the ratio of unacceptable judgments in incongruent dilemmas from the ratio of unacceptable judgments in congruent dilemmas:
U = unacceptable|congruent − unacceptable|incongruent. Then the deontological inclination (D) was estimated by dividing the ratio of unacceptable judgments in
incongruent dilemmas by 1 − U : D = unacceptable|incongruent − (1 − U ). As an example, a person might have judged an action unacceptable in 7 out of 10 congruent and in 5 out of 10 incongruent ones. This person’s scores would therefore be:
U = 0.7 − 0.5 = 0.2 and D = 0.5/(1 − 0.2) = 0.625. Results
Data analysis focused primarily on evaluating the manipulation and testing the hypothesis laid out in the introduction. Here, classical frequentist statistical methods, such as analyses of variance (ANOVA), were used that were corrected for multiple testing using the Bonferroni technique, unless otherwise stated.
For exploratory analyses, a network analysis was conducted. Network analysis is especially suited for exploratory purposes as it is data-driven and can illustrate
relationships between variables while avoiding problems of multiple testing. Confirmatory analyses
Manipulation Check. As the study intended to induce the participants with either a neutral, angry, or contemptuous emotion while answering the moral dilemmas, it was checked whether the manipulation was effective by asking participants at the end of the study to which extent they felt these emotions. However, a one-way ANOVA with the factor Emotion showed no effect of the manipulation on either felt anger or
contempt; anger: F (2, 88) = 0.42, p = 1, contempt: F (2, 88) = 0.49, p = 11.
Additionally, it was checked whether the emotion conditions affected any of the other emotions. This was not the case for happiness, disgust, or sadness (all ps > .5). However, it could be shown that participants in the anger conditions were on average less surprised (mean = 2.1), compared to both the neutral (mean = 2.81, p = .019) and the contempt condition (mean = 2.83, p = .015); F (2, 88) = 5.35, p = .038.
Lastly, it was checked whether the awareness manipulation had an unintended effect on the manipulation, but neither a main effect of Awareness or an Awareness x Emotion interaction was found (all ps > .6).
Hypothesis testing. If incidental emotions influence moral judgment through affect-as-information processes, they should do so only when people are not aware of it. That means there should be an interaction between the factors Emotion and Awareness influencing both the utilitarian and deontological inclination. This was tested using two 2-way Emotion x Awareness ANOVAs. No effect was found for the deontological
inclination (Figure 1, left panel); omnibus F (5, 85) = 0.40, p = 1. For the utilitarian
1All p-values were Bonferroni-corrected for multiple testing, sometimes producing p-values above 1. As this is not possible theoretically, these values were then set to 1 exactly.
inclination (Figure 1, right panel), the omnibus test also revealed a nonsignificant result (F (5, 85) = 2.24, p = .12), although there was an unexpected significant main effect of Awareness (F (1, 85) = 8.937, p = .0073). Participants in the aware conditions were on average less inclined to judge in a utilitarian way compared to participants in the unaware conditions. No other main effects or interactions were found.
Figure 1 . Estimated deontological and utilitarian inclinations separate for each
condition. Please note that the scores are not standardized so that no direct comparison between deontological and utilitarian inclinations should be made. Error bars represent the standard error of the mean.
While these results can give a good overview, more in-depth analyses were needed to specifically test hypotheses H1 and H2. The first hypothesis made predictions about participants in the unaware conditions: Compared to neutral conditions, participants’ deontological inclination was expected to be higher in anger and lower in contempt conditions (H1a), while participants’ utilitarian inclination was expected to be lower in anger and higher in contempt conditions (H1b). Using only participants from the unaware experimental conditions, two one-way ANOVAs comparing the emotion conditions showed no significant results thereby failing to confirm H1;
FU til(2, 41) = 0.95, p = .78, FDeon(2, 41) = 0.49, p = 1.
The second hypothesis stated that there should be no difference in deontological and utilitarian inclinations between participants in the aware conditions and the neutral–unaware condition. In line with H2, two one-way ANOVAs with the factor Emotion did not show a significant difference between emotion conditions in the aware conditions; FU til(2, 44) = 0.36, p = 1, FDeon(2, 44) = 0.50, p = 1. Additionally, no
difference was found comparing the neutral–aware and neutral–unaware conditions on deontological (t(25.29) = 1.36, p = .37 2) and utilitarian inclinations
2As Levene’s test indicated unequal variances (p = .009), degrees of freedom are corrected for this t-test.
(t(29) = 1.40, p = .34). These results are in line with H2, although it should be noted that classic frequentist analyses were used which cannot confirm a hypothesis through absence of significant results.
Exploratory analyses
In order to explore relationships between the tested variables, a network analysis was conducted on all felt emotions (anger, contempt, disgust, sadness, surprise, and happiness) and the moral inclinations (deontological and utilitarian). A correlation matrix was computed for all variables3 before applying a L
1-regularization or Least
Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO). The advantage of using a L1
regularized network is that it can circumvent multiple testing problems and find a good balance between the parsimony of a network and its goodness of fit (see Friedman, Hastie, & Tibshirani, 2008).
Figure 2 . Networks drawn from the correlation matrix and L1-regularized for all
conditions (left panel), aware conditions (topright panel), and unaware conditions (bottomright panel). Green lines represent positive correlations and red lines represent negative correlations. Thick lines represent stronger correlations, thin lines weaker ones.
The network for all participants can be seen in Figure 2 in the left panel. One can see that the negative emotions (anger, contempt, disgust, and contempt) seem to be interconnected well, forming a visual cluster in the network. In contrast, surprise and happiness are less connected to other nodes and even less are the moral inclinations. Interestingly, the utilitarian node is isolated completely in the network. The
deontological node shows two connections to emotions: a positive one to disgust and a negative one to happiness.
3As five out of seven variables were ordinal and not normally distributed, polychoric correlations were computed to correct for that.
After inspection of the overall network, two additional networks were estimated, one for the aware and one for the unaware conditions. Similar structures arise with the negative emotions again being visually closely clustered (although somewhat less compared to the overall network) and the utilitarian node being isolated. However, there are some differences: While the positive relationship between the deontological inclination and disgust remains in the aware network, it disappears in the unaware network. The reverse can be observed for the negative connection between the
deontological and happiness nodes: the connection disappears in the aware, but remains in the unaware network.
Discussion
This project investigated the process by which incidental emotions can interact with the moral judgment process. Specifically, it was tested whether emotions can act as information as in the affect-as-information literature. To this end, an experiment was run online that intended to induce participants with either anger, contempt, or a neutral emotion while additionally manipulating whether participants would be aware of the emotion induction. In order to capture the moral judgment process in more detail, a process-dissociation approach was applied so that the reliance on the intuitive and the reasoning route of moral judgment could be estimated separately. It was hypothesized that (a) induced emotion and awareness would interact to affect both pathways, (b) effects of emotion would only be seen when participants were not made aware of the emotion inductions (H1), and (c) the emotion would not have an effect when
participants were made aware of the emotion induction (H2).
The results of this study that can also be seen in Figure 1 (p. 12) did not support these hypotheses. There was neither an interaction effect of emotion and awareness or a main effect of emotion in the unaware conditions. Even though the results were in line with the second hypothesis (H2; i.e., showing that aware participants in the separate emotion conditions did not), one should interpret this with caution as absence of a significant result in frequentist analysis cannot confirm a hypothesis.
However, it should be noted that any interpretation of the results should bear in mind that the manipulation check showed that the intended emotion manipulation did not work and that participants in the emotion conditions did not differ according to how much anger or contempt they felt while answering the moral dilemmas. A discussion on why this might be the case is further discussed under Limitations (p. 16). What this means is that while this study cannot show results in favor of the hypothesis, it also does not show that moral emotions do not act as information in moral judgment at all and has to remain inconclusive in terms of the initial research questions. Nonetheless, it
is worthwhile reflecting on some of the unexpected and exploratory results, as well as some methodological designs of the research project that can provide interesting information for further projects in moral judgment research.
The first unexpected result emerged already during the manipulation check when participants of the anger condition were shown to feel more surprised compared to participants in the contempt and neutral condition. This effect only emerged when analyzing across both awareness conditions. Interestingly, the exploratory analysis showed similar patterns: Surprise shows positive albeit weak connections to disgust, sadness, and happiness when analyzing the network across all participants. These connections disappear, however, when the sample is split into aware and unaware groups. From this point of view, one could speculate that the interconnectedness of surprise with other emotions might have produced the initial effect but as there is no theoretical argument that could support this, one should remain doubtful. Nonetheless, this result should also not be discarded as a change finding alone as it survived the rather conservative Bonferroni correction of significance.
Another unexpected finding was that the awareness manipulation seems to have affected participants’ utilitarian inclination, so their tendency to rely on reasoning when judging the moral dilemmas. From the feeling-as-information theory (e.g., Schwarz, 2012), one might expect that participants who have been alerted to the fact that their emotions might influence their judgment want to compensate for the emotion induction by relying more on reasoning. The opposite seems to have happened: Participants in the aware conditions actually showed a lower tendency to reason that participants in the unaware conditions.
To explain this effect one might look back at the wording of the awareness manipulation: When designing the instructions of the participants, a clear
recommendation to refrain from using those emotions or suppressing them was avoided as the aim was to stay close to the very simple manipulation in studies on the
affect-as-information literature (e.g., Schwarz & Clore, 1983). When taking the
vagueness of the instructions into account, it is possible that participants simply did not feel the need to correct for emotional influences on their judgment. Yet, this seems unlikely as generally people express the sentiment that moral judgments should be made without emotional influence although that is only an anecdotal observation.
Lastly, the exploratory analysis showed some interesting results regarding the relationships of the moral inclinations with the emotions participants experienced during the experiment. It is noteworthy that in contrast to all other variables utilitarianism does not seem to correlate with any emotion variable. The deontological inclination on the other hand has a positive connection to disgust (Deo–Dis) and a negative, albeit
very weak one to happiness (Deo–Hap). These findings are actually in line with previous research that have found that participants who are induced with disgust decide
deontologically more often (e.g., Ugazio et al., 2012) while happiness decreases
deontological decisions (Strohminger et al., 2011, compare to mirth condition). It should be noted that in a sample split according to awareness condition either the Deo–Dis or the Deo–Hap connections disappear although that might be explained with the small sample sizes of the split samples. Nonetheless, the difference between the deontological and utilitarian inclinations in connections might lead to speculate that emotions might in fact solely interact with the reasoning pathway when affecting the moral judgment process, either strengthening or weakening it. However, such a speculation would need to be researched thoroughly and the current analysis can only deliver a pointer in that direction especially as the current studies has some limitations that should be
considered seriously. Limitations
A first and easily identifiable limitation of this study is the small sample size. Even though it was already acknowledged that the conservative power analysis
recommended a very unrealistic number of 967 participants, a sample size of about 200 participants, so above 30 participants per group, would have been desirable especially given the fact that previous research in the moral judgment literature had found incidental emotion effects with group sizes of 30 to 40 participants (Seidel & Prinz, 2013; Ugazio et al., 2012, e.g.,). The current study fell short of that and the absence of any effect of the emotion induction on moral judgment might be attributed to that. However, it should be noted that typically small studies fail to find effects because variances of the variables of interest are very wide therefore occluding possible effects. As can be seen in Figure 1 (p. 12), this cannot necessarily be said about the current study where standard errors are surprisingly low for such a small sample.
In any case, there are other important limitations to consider. Some design aspects of this study could be altered in future studies in order to achieve the emotion induction that was unsuccessful in this study. First of all, it might be desirable to conduct a study with a comparable design in a lab setting instead of online. While the online setting has the advantage of easy access and quicker data collection, it also goes along with a
certain loss of experimental control that might have contributed to the failure of the emotion manipulation. In a lab setting, participants might generally be more motivated to follow instructions and might be less distracted when doing so. While the online study stressed multiple times that dilemmas should be read carefully and that the main task of the participant was to take the perspective of the protagonists and therefore to
come to feel as the protagonist does, participants in this study might have overlooked or disregarded it due to lower motivation or distraction, thereby bypassing a crucial
element of the study.
Second, one might consider whether a perspective-taking task is strong enough even in lab circumstances to elicit the target emotions. In this study, the
perspective-taking task was complemented with emotional pictures that were also presented under the perspective-taking cover story. The pictures were intended to elicit a form of primitive emotional contagion on top of the perspective-taking task. If some form of emotional contagion took place, it might have been too small to have a
measurable effect or too susceptible to environmental influences that this study was not able to control. Hence, it might be worthwhile to try out this form of manipulation in a pilot lab setting in order find out whether this task can elicit the desired effects under more controlled circumstances.
Third, there are some theoretical considerations that might be considered regarding the emotion induction. Given that participants might have disregarded the perspective-taking instruction, considering the emotion manipulation on the
interpersonal level of analysis might have been appropriate. A participant who does not comply with the perspective taking instruction might actually be affected by the facial expressions he sees next to the moral dilemma in a different way. For example, if the participant is presented with pictures of contemptuous faces for the whole study, he might react by feeling hopeless, distanced, or generally in a bad mood (compare to Fischer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016). Hence, a completely different emotion than the intended one might be induced in the participant that is potentially prone to influences of other individual and context factors. Considering the manipulation on an interpersonal level of analysis certainly seems worthwhile but would require a more controlled design than the current study can provide.
Suggestions for future research
The results of this project have generally been inconclusive regarding the research question that this study tried to answer. Nonetheless, some initial data could be
gathered that might point future research to interesting new problems, cautioning against some methodological decisions and recommending others.
The approach of combining an awareness manipulation with an emotion induction in moral judgment research was a novel one and it merits some further consideration. After all, given the failed emotion manipulation no definite conclusions could be made about the proposed hypotheses.
Moreover, future research should certainly make use of the process-dissociation approach to moral judgment (Conway & Gawronski, 2013). Implementation of the estimation procedure is easy and the resulting data can give a more detailed view on the judgment process. Exploratory analyses showed that there seems to be a difference in the relationships of utilitarian and deontological inclinations to other variables that would warrant more thorough investigations.
Lastly, the design in combination with the online setting posed a number of difficulties to the manipulation that ultimately it was not able to overcome. The emotion manipulation needed to be inconspicuous but also robust against external influences inevitable in online studies. Additionally, it required an at least moderate level of motivation from the participants. All in all, a lab environment might be better suited should a variant of this manipulation be used again.
Conclusion
Incidental emotions influence moral judgment but as of now we do not know how they do so. This study has explored the possibility that emotions can interact with the judgment process by informing how much either an affective or reasoning pathway is used. While no conclusive results could be found concerning the hypothesis, this study might give some recommendations and impetus to other researchers desiring to
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Appendix A General Information Student
Name: Marie Ritter
Student ID number: 11118962
Address Karl-Liebknecht-Platz 2c
Postal code and residence: 14641 Wustermark, Germany
Telephone number +49 176 64748912
Email address marie.ritter@student.uva.nl Supervisor(s)
Within ResMas (obligatory): Professor Agneta Fischer
Specialisation: Social Psychology
Second assessor: Professor Gerben van Kleef
Research center / location: Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam
Number of credits (1 ec = 28 hrs): 31ec
Appendix B Materials Instructions
Thank you very much for participating in this study. Please read the instructions below carefully.
• This study will take about 20 – 25 minutes to complete. Please try to take the study in one sitting and not take breaks in between once you have started answering the questions.
• You will be asked to answer 20 different moral dilemmas. Each dilemma consists of a short text describing the situation and the question whether you think a certain action is appropriate or not in this situation.
• Your main task is to try and take the perspective of the protagonist of each short dilemma. Therefore, it is important that you pay close attention to the details of each situation.
• As an additional aid to help you take the perspective of the protagonist, you will see pictures of what that person’s facial expression could be in the situation. • Even if you think that some dilemmas are very similar, it is still important that
you answer all of them.
• There are no right or wrong answers to any of these dilemmas! Moral dilemmas
The moral dilemmas that are used in the neutral condition of this study are taken directly from the paper by Conway and Gawronski (2013). The set of twenty dilemmas includes ten different dilemma situations that each are represented by two versions of the dilemma: a congruent and an incongruent one.
These two different types are necessary as the answers to them will provide the basis for the estimation of the deontological and utilitarian inclinations as described by Conway and Gawronski (2013). In a congruent dilemma, both a person with a strong utilitarian and a person with a strong utilitarian inclination would respond in the same way. In the incongruent dilemmas, the two positions would diverge.
For example in the dilemma “Torture” the protagonist is a police officer faced with a criminal and has decided whether it is appropriate to use “aggressive interrogation techniques”. The deontologist opposes torture in any situation regardless of the
consequences, so in both congruent and incongruent dilemmas. The utilitarian, however, should respond differently in both dilemmas. In the congruent version, the consequence of not torturing the man would only be some material damage so that the “moral cost” of torture does not outweigh the “moral gain” from it. In the incongruent version however, the consequence of not torturing the criminal would put human lifes at stake. Therefore, a utilitarian might argue that torture is appropriate here.
When altering the moral dilemmas for the anger and contempt manipulations, characteristics that have been specifically connected to the emotion (Fischer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016; Fischer & Roseman, 2007) have been used to include one or two sentences that describe the protagonist to feel either strong contempt or anger (e.g., “You are furious that the construction workers’ carelessness caused this situation.”). In some cases, the dilemmas had to be adapted very slightly so that the experience
emotion would be reasonable in the circumstances. Neutral.
Time Machine.
Incongruent. You find a time machine and travel back to the year 1920. While checking into a hotel, you meet a young Austrian artist and veteran of the First World War. You realize this is Adolf Hitler before his rise to power in Nazi Germany. He is staying in the hotel room next to yours and the doors are not locked. It would be easy to simply smother him with a pillow in his sleep and disappear, stopping the Second World War and the Nazi party before they even start. However, he has not committed any crimes yet and it seems wrong to hurt an innocent person. Is it appropriate for you to kill an innocent young Hitler in order to prevent the Second World War?
Congruent. You find a time machine and travel back to the year 1920. While checking into a hotel, you meet a young petty criminal. You realize this is George Brackman, a man who later on abducted a child and held her for a week until her family paid him some ransom money. He is staying in the hotel room next to yours and the doors are not locked. It would be easy to simply smother him with a pillow in his sleep and disappear, stopping the abduction and ransom demands before they even start. However, he has not committed any crimes yet and it seems wrong to hurt an innocent person. Is it appropriate for you to kill George Brackman in order to prevent him from taking a child hostage?
Car accident.
Incongruent. You are driving through a busy city street when all of a sudden a young mother carrying a child trips and falls into the path of your vehicle. You are going too fast to break in time; your only hope is to swerve out of the way. Unfortunately, the only place you can swerve is currently occupied by a little old lady. If you swerve to
avoid the young mother and baby, you will seriously injure or kill the old lady. Is it appropriate to swerve and hit the old lady in order to avoid the young mother and child?
Congruent. You are driving through a busy city street when all of a sudden a young mother carrying a child trips and falls into the path of your vehicle. You are going too fast to break in time; your only hope is to swerve out of the way.
Unfortunately, the only place you can swerve is currently occupied by a group of
children on their way to elementary school. If you swerve to avoid the young mother and baby, you will seriously injure or kill several of them. Is it appropriate to swerve and hit the school-children in order to avoid the young mother and child?
Hard Times.
Incongruent. You are the head of a poor household in a developing country. Your crops have failed for the second year in a row, and it appears that you have no way to feed your family. Your sons, ages eight and ten, are too young to go off to the city where there are jobs, but your daughter could fare better. You know a man from your village who lives in the city and who makes sexually explicit films featuring girls such as your daughter. In front of your daughter, he tells you that in one year of working in his studio your daughter could earn enough money to keep your family fed for several growing seasons. Is it appropriate for you to employ your daughter in the pornography industry in order to feed your family?
Congruent. You are the head of a poor household in a developing country. Your sons, ages eight and ten, work on the family farm every day in order to teach them the value of hard work and providing for others. Your daughter, however, cannot work on the farm due to the heavy lifting required. You worry that she will not learn the value of money if she does not work. You know a man from your village who lives in the city and who makes sexually explicit films featuring girls such as your daughter. In front of your daughter, he tells you that in one year of working in his studio your daughter could earn enough money to keep your family fed for several growing seasons. Is it appropriate for you to employ your daughter in the pornography industry in order to teach her the value of money?
Crying baby.
Incongruent. It is war time. Enemy soldiers have taken over your village. They have orders to kill all remaining civilians. You and some of your townspeople have sought refuge in the cellar of a large house. Out-side you hear the voices of soldiers who have come to search the house for valuables. A baby with no parents begins to cry loudly. You cover her mouth to block the sound. If you remove your hand from the baby’s mouth her crying will summon the attention of the soldiers who will kill you and the others hiding out in the cellar. To save yourself and the others you must smother
the child to death. Is it appropriate for you to smother the child in order to save yourself and the other townspeople from being killed?
Congruent. It is war time. Enemy soldiers have taken over your village. They have orders to capture all remaining civilians to make them work quarrying stone in a mine. You and some of your townspeople have sought refuge in the cellar of a large house. Outside you hear the voices of soldiers who have come to search the house for valuables. A baby with no parents begins to cry loudly. You cover her mouth to block the sound. If you remove your hand from her mouth the crying will summon the
attention of the soldiers who will capture you and the others hiding out in the cellar. To save yourself and the others from laboring in the mine you must smother the child to death. Is it appropriate for you to smother the child in order to save yourself and the other townspeople from being captured?
Relationship.
Incongruent. You are divorced now and your former spouse lives far away. You don’t expect to see your former spouse for a very long time. However, you have recently started dating a new person that is positively wonderful. Your new partner is head over heals in love for the first time and you feel equally strong about your partner. You want to do everything in your power to keep the relationship progressing smoothly to what you believe will be a second marriage. Unfortunately, your new partner has told you many times that dating someone who is divorced is totally unacceptable. It is expressly forbidden in your partner’s religion. Your partner doesn’t know about your ex-spouse. You consider simply pretending that you have never been divorced so that your current relationship can continue. Is it appropriate for you to leave your new partner in the dark about your previous relationship in or-der to keep her/him happy and the relationship alive?
Congruent. You are divorced now and your former spouse lives far away. You don’t expect to see your former spouse for a very long time. However, you have recently started dating a new person that is positively wonderful. Your new partner is head over heals in love for the first time and you feel equally strong about your partner. You want to do everything in your power to keep the relationship progressing smoothly to what you believe will be a second marriage. Unfortunately, your ex-spouse gave you a very serious and incurable Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD). Your partner does not know about it. You consider simply pretending that you don’t know about the STD so that your cur-rent relationship can continue. Is it appropriate for you to leave your new partner in the dark about your STD in order to keep her/him happy and the relationship alive?
Incongruent. You are a surgeon. A young woman you know becomes pregnant, but her body reacts in an unusual fashion. She develops a severe case of preeclampsia, a dangerous syndrome that leads to rapid increases in blood pressure. The only treatment is to deliver the baby. Unless the baby is delivered soon, the mother will die. However, the baby is too young to survive on its own. If it is delivered, it will die. So, although it is very difficult for her, the mother asks you to abort the baby. Is it appropriate for you to perform an abortion in order to save the mother’s life?
Congruent. You are a surgeon. A young woman you know becomes pregnant, but she is not yet ready for children. She has not finished high school, has no income, and was abandoned by the father. If she has the baby now, she will be stuck as a single mother on welfare for the rest of her life. This will make things very hard on her and the baby. She thinks that it would be smarter to wait and have children later. So, although it is very difficult for her, she asks you to abort the baby. Is it appropriate for you to perform an abortion in order to let the mother live a better life?
Torture.
Incongruent. You are a police officer, and have recently caught a criminal you have been hunting for some time. He is allegedly responsible for rigging a series of explosive devices: some that have already gone off and some that have yet to detonate. He places explosives outside city cafés and sets them to go off at a time when people are drinking coffee on the patios. In this manner, he has injured many people and might injure many more. Now that the criminal is in custody, you want to know where the unexploded bombs are so you can defuse them. He refuses to talk, so you decide to use “aggressive interrogation techniques” like holding his head under water and beating him. Is it appropriate for you to use “aggressive interrogation techniques” in order to find and defuse the unexploded bombs?
Congruent. You are a police officer, and have recently caught a criminal you have been hunting for some time. He is allegedly responsible for rigging a series of explosive devices: some that have already gone off and some that have yet to detonate. He places explosives outside city cafés and sets them to go off at a time when no one is around. His explosives are inside paint cans so that they spray nearby objects with paint. In this manner, he has sprayed many cafés with paint and might spray many more. Now that the criminal is in custody, you want to know where the unexploded bombs are so you can defuse them. He refuses to talk, so you decide to use “aggressive interrogation techniques” like holding his head under water and beating him. Is it appropriate for you to use “aggressive interrogation techniques” in order to find and defuse the unexploded bombs?
Incongruent. You are a doctor in a health clinic overrun by patients with a serious disease. You just received a shipment of drugs that can cure the disease but the drugs have their own severe side-effects. If you administer the drugs to your patients, a small number will die from the side effects but most will live. If you do not, most will die from the disease. Is it appropriate for you to administer the drug to your patients?
Congruent. You are a doctor in a health clinic overrun by patients with the latest flu virus. You just received a shipment of drugs that can cure the flu but the drugs have their own severe side-effects. If you administer the drugs to your patients, a small
number will die from the side effects but most will live. If you do not, most will continue to suffer from the effects of the flu virus for some time. Is it appropriate for you to administer the drug to your patients?
Animal Research.
Incongruent. You have been hired by a pharmaceutical company to conduct research on their products. Since products must be fit for human use, they are first tried out on animals. Your job is to find out the effects various chemicals have on rats,
pigeons, rabbits, and monkeys. Most chemicals have only minor effects on the animals, but some cause them discomfort or even permanent damage. The chemicals you are researching are slated to form part of a new AIDS drug cocktail that will give new hope to millions of AIDS victims around the world. You anticipate saving many lives with the chemicals. Is it appropriate to test these chemicals on animals?
Congruent. You have been hired by a pharmaceutical company to conduct
research on their products. Since products must be fit for human use, they are first tried out on animals. Your job is to find out the effects various chemicals have on rats,
pigeons, rabbits, and monkeys. Most chemicals have only minor effects on the animals, but some cause them discomfort or even permanent damage. The chemicals you are researching are slated to form part of a new acne facial cleanser that will give new hope to people with pimples and greasy skin. You anticipate making many people feel better about their appearance with the chemicals. Is it appropriate to test these chemicals on animals?
Border Crossing.
Incongruent. You are a soldier guarding a border checkpoint between your nation and one troubled by insurgent violence. You notice a young man in a cheap car
approaching the checkpoint with a determined look on his face. You suspect he means to bomb the checkpoint, killing all the soldiers inside. He is rapidly approaching your station. Is it appropriate for you to shoot and kill the approaching man?
Congruent. You are a soldier guarding a border checkpoint between your nation and one troubled by insurgent violence. You notice a young man in a cheap car
approaching the checkpoint with a determined look on his face. You suspect he means to cross the border in order to work illegally inside your country. He is rapidly approaching your station. Is it appropriate for you to shoot and kill the approaching man?
Anger.
Time Machine.
Incongruent. A scientist invents a time machine which you volunteer to test. The scientists sends you back to the year 1920. While checking into a hotel, you meet a young Austrian artist and veteran of the First World War. You realize this is Adolf Hitler before his rise to power in Nazi Germany. He is staying in the hotel room next to yours and the doors are not locked. It would be easy to simply smother him with a pillow in his sleep and disappear, stopping the Second World War and the Nazi party before they even start. However, he has not committed any crimes yet and it seems wrong to hurt an innocent person. You are angry at the scientist for sending you to this difficult time without warning. Is it appropriate for you to kill an innocent young Hitler in order to prevent the Second World War?
Congruent. A scientist invents a time machine which you volunteer to test. The scientists sends you back to the year 1920. While checking into a hotel, you meet a young petty criminal. You realize this is George Brackman, a man who later on
abducted a child and held her for a week until her family paid him some ransom money. He is staying in the hotel room next to yours and the doors are not locked. It would be easy to simply smother him with a pillow in his sleep and disappear, stopping the abduction and ransom demands before they even start. However, he has not committed any crimes yet and it seems wrong to hurt an innocent person. You are angry at the scientist for sending you to this difficult time without warning. Is it appropriate for you to kill George Brackman in order to prevent him from taking a child hostage?
Car accident.
Incongruent. You are driving through a busy city street when all of a sudden a young mother carrying a child trips over the power cable of a nearby construction site and falls into the path of your vehicle. You are going too fast to break in time; your only hope is to swerve out of the way. Unfortunately, the only place you can swerve is currently occupied by a little old lady. If you swerve to avoid the young mother and baby, you will seriously injure or kill the old lady. You are furious that the construction workers’ carelessness caused this situation. Is it appropriate to swerve and hit the old lady in order to avoid the young mother and child?
Congruent. You are driving through a busy city street when all of a sudden a young mother carrying a child trips over the power cable of a nearby construction site and falls into the path of your vehicle. You are going too fast to break in time; your
