The Study of Moral Judgements

Moral judgments comprise a substantial portion of everyday interactions, and as such, it is crucial to understand the mechanism by which they form. While moral judgments have long been a subject of interest in social psychology, only recently has the mechanism of such judgments been studied. Current research has shown that the specific context of a moral judgment has a substantial impact on the outcome of that judgment (Van Bavel, Packer, Johnsen Haas, & Cunningham, 2012). Further research on moral judgments suggests that attention may play a key role in the formation of these judgments (Kastner, 2010). However, earlier research did not attempt to alter attention by manipulating contextual information. We proposed that early attention is driven by existing prejudices and schemas, what we call an interpretive stance, and that these early shifts in attention would in turn drive explicit moral judgments of targets. We hypothesized that individuals assessing the guilt of different target criminals would attend longer and more frequently to mitigating cues for White targets and longer and more frequently to aggravating cues for Black targets. We further hypothesized that individuals would rate White targets as less guilty than black targets, and that these guilt ratings would be increasingly polarized with more polarized initial shifts in attention. We also hypothesized that liberal participants would look more at mitigating cues, while conservative participants would look more at aggravating cues.

We found that for the entire eye-tracking period, while there was a main effect for preference of mitigating cues over aggravating cues across all trials, there were no significant differences in the amount of time spent looking at mitigat...

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...Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(5), 1073.

Kastner, R. M. (2010). Moral judgments and visual attention : An eye-tracking investigation. Chrestomathy: Annual Review of Undergraduate Research, 9, 114-128.

Lowery, B. S., Hardin, C. D., & Sinclair, S. (2001). Social influence effects on automatic racial prejudice. Journal of personality and social psychology, 81(5), 842.

Van Bavel, J. J., Packer, D. J., Johnsen Haas, I., & Cunningham, W. A. (2012). The importance of moral construal: Moral versus non-moral construal elicits faster, more extreme, universal evaluations of the same actions. PLoS ONE, 7, 1-14. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0048693

Van Bavel, J. J., Xiao, Y. J., & Cunningham, W. A. (2012). Evaluation is a dynamic process: Moving beyond dual system models. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 6, 438-454. doi: 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2012.00438.x