Rationality and experientiality as moderators of moral judgment.

• author: Björklund, Fredrik
• organization: Department of Psychology
• publishing date: 2006
• type: Contribution to conference
• publication status: published
• subject: Psychology
• conference name: 13th European Conference on Personality, European Association of Personality Psychology (EAPP),
• conference location: Athens, Greece
• conference dates: 2006-07-22 - 2006-07-26
• language: English
• LU publication?: yes
• additional info: In a series of studies of the impact of affect on moral judgment participants read stories describing morally questionable actions and made judgments of wrongness. The actions were described either in a vividly disgusting way or in a less disgusting way, to investigate the effects on moral judgment of irrelevant disgust. Wrongness ratings were higher in the vivid disgust condition, suggesting that moral judgment can be based on intuition and that reasoning under certain conditions may simply serve as ex-post facto justification of the judgment. The effect that the morally irrelevant disgust had on the judgments was moderated by individual differences in disgust sensitivity and preferred processing mode (as measured by Epstein et al’s Rational-Experiential Inventory). More specifically, the effect was stronger for participants high in disgust sensitivity, particularly when low in self-reported use of systematic reasoning. Furthermore, the effect was stronger for participants high in use of intuition (experientiality in Epstein’s terminology). As opposed to the traditional focus in moral psychology on rational processing (moral reasoning) and its causal role in moral judgment, the findings are interpreted in terms of a dual process framework (the Social Intuitionist Model) and the importance of individual difference variables in moral judgment research is emphasized.
• id: 3f815ed4-6261-42cb-9ea4-3cc95d4afc7e (old id 934354)
• date added to LUP: 2016-04-04 13:44:44
• date last changed: 2018-11-21 21:16:00