On situated and embodied knowledge regarding moral issues

Abstract

When analyzing people’s moral compass it can be noticed that moral responses often are malleable. People find it difficult to respond to moral issues, because in many moral situations the right course of action is not quite clear. Furthermore, people have to choose between alternative actions with good reasons for each of the actions involved. In addition, complete information about moral issues often is lacking, leading to information uncertainty and ambiguity. Judgments and decisions under uncertainty and ambiguity partly are a product of knowledge representations accessible to the individual at the time of responding. Therefore, the current thesis proposes that moral responses also can be influenced by information that is temporarily cognitively available, activated by different kinds of relevant situational and contextual cues. Three chapters demonstrate that moral responses are influenced by information that is temporarily cognitively available. Building and extending on the social judgment literature, as well as recent insights into morality, Chapter 2 examines the influence of temporarily accessible knowledge on moral judgments. Exposing individuals to an abstract symbol of morality (e.g., Lady Justice) results in interpreting an ambiguous situation in more moral terms, thereby leading to the assimilation of judgments towards the meaning of the symbol. Besides replicating assimilation effects a second study also demonstrated contrasting judgments. After exposure to concrete moral exemplars (e.g., Mother Teresa), individuals compared an ambiguous stimulus person with these moral exemplars and considered the stimulus person to be less moral, as opposed to presenting immoral exemplars (e.g., Bin Laden). This suggests that a difference in contextual information changes how people judge the world in morally-related terms. Chapter 3 shows that temporarily activated knowledge can also influence decisions concerning moral dilemmas, thereby extending current models on morality which only capture the processes of moral judgments. The literature regarding moral dilemmas often contrasts two philosophical frameworks: utilitarianism and deontology. By operationalizing and manipulating the salience of utilitarian and deontological principles, Chapter 3 examines how people solve moral dilemmas in which utilitarian principles (more specifically “Thou shalt save”) or deontological principles (more specifically “Thou shalt not kill”) are in conflict. Based on the idea that this conflict essentially is a goal conflict, it is argued that the most salient principle during the decision making process influences how people solve moral dilemmas. Three studies show that moral principles made accessible by presenting associated symbols as subtle situational cues, subsequently affected the willingness to intervene in certain moral dilemmas. Chapter 4 focuses on the influence of accessible knowledge activated by embodied states, such as embodied power, on decisions within morally dilemmatic situations. People often feel inhibited to intervene when confronted with difficult morally dilemmatic situations. Weakening behavioral inhibition, therefore, should positively affect the willingness to intervene in these situations. Indeed, individuals adopting expanded body postures were more willing to intervene in moral footbridge dilemmas than participants adopting constricted or control postures. A second study found similar effects on helping behavior in bystander dilemmas. This suggests that embodied power can help overcoming intervention inhibition in morally dilemmatic situations.