Interpretaciones de la ciudad

Experiment 3 yielded support for the role of agent perspective-taking in the condemnation of violations of the purity domain. In this experiment, we employ the same perspective manipulation to examine the effect of perspective-taking on moral judgments of personal harm dilemmas. If agent perspective-taking drives the condemnation of personal harm, we should expect moral judgments to be more deontological from the agent‘s perspective than from a bystander‘s perspective.

The design of Experiment 4 allows us to address an additional important issue not resolved by Experiment 2. In Experiment 2, we found no relationship between moral judgment and the tendency to adopt the victim‘s perspective in third-party moral evaluation. We proposed that this may have been due to the presence of multiple

potential victims in a typical moral dilemma. So, in this experiment we isolate the effects of proximal victim perspective-taking in order to ask whether, and to what extent, empathizing with the proximal victim influences condemnation of the welfare trade-off in personal dilemma contexts. If considerations of victim pain and suffering drive condemnation of personal harm, then participants who read a scenario narrated from the proximal victim‘s point of view should condemn harm directed toward that victim particularly strongly.

In summary, Experiment 5 assesses the roles of agent and victim perspective- taking in the condemnation of personal harm. In simple terms, when we ponder the footbridge dilemma, what is the basis of our condemnation? Are we imagining what it would be like to be run over a train, or instead what it would be like to push a person off a footbridge? 16

4.8.1. Methods

Participants voluntarily logged on to the Moral Sense Test website and were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: Agent, Victim or Bystander. In an incomplete repeated-measures design, participants viewed four personal moral dilemmas drawn from a total set of six (see Appendix D). In each condition, the vignettes were furnished with extended introductions that served to induce the perspective of the agent, victim, or bystander. After the perspective-manipulation, the dilemma was presented and participants were asked to make moral judgments (e.g., ―For Brooke to throw the old man overboard would be…‖) by selecting a response on a 7-point Likert scale from 1: ―Not morally wrong at all‖, to 4: ―Somewhat morally wrong‖, to 7: ―Very morally wrong‖. After the moral dilemmas section, participants completed an adapted version of the ―Linguistic Implications Form‖, a pronoun

16

This experiment included a pronoun completion task (Wegner & Giuliano, 1980) in order to measure self-focused attention. Participants completed this task immediately following the moral judgment task. However, this task did not generate noteworthy results, so it is excluded from further discussion.

completion task developed by Wegner and Giuliano (1980) measuring self-focused attention. Lastly, participants completed the assessment of evaluative focus and provided optional demographic information.

4.8.2. Results

1002 participants (467 female) completed the experiment. Data were discarded from 24 participants who (i) completed the experiment in under 6 minutes (deemed the minimum completion time), and (ii) whose responses deviated by over three standard deviations from the group mean. After applying this filter, we had 326 participants in the Agent condition, 317 in the Victim condition, and 335 in the Bystander condition, roughly matching the sample sizes employed in Experiment 3.

A multilevel mixed-effects linear regression on moral judgment with Agent condition (1: Agent, 0: Victim, Bystander) and Victim condition (1: Victim, 0: Agent, Bystander) as the independent variables (and scenario context and subject as random- effects) revealed a significant effect of Agent condition, z = 2.98, p = .003, but no effect of Victim condition, z = 1.20, p = .23. This result indicates that participants in the Agent condition condemned personal harm more harshly than did participants in the Bystander condition, whereas the difference between the Victim and Bystander conditions was not statistically significant. This is reflected by looking at means across scenarios: of the six total scenarios, moral condemnation was greater on five scenarios in the Agent condition, but greater only on three scenarios in the Victim condition, as compared to the Bystander condition (see Table 8). Moreover, the difference between the Agent and Victim conditions was marginally significant, z = 1.72, p = .086, indicating that participants in the Agent condition condemned personal harm more than did participants in the Victim condition.

Table 8. Moral judgment by condition and scenario.

Scenarios

Agent Victim Bystander

N Mean SD N Mean SD N Mean SD

Military submarine 183 4.17 2.04 178 4.02 1.95 183 3.62 1.98 Lab scientist 182 5.47 1.93 189 5.57 1.74 201 5.49 1.88 Jungle research 187 4.83 1.99 164 5.13 1.78 190 4.23 2.00 Lifeboat 191 5.18 1.78 173 4.68 1.89 203 5.10 1.99 Climbing group 190 5.82 1.61 185 5.74 1.67 188 5.76 1.57 Enemy doctor 184 4.47 2.07 186 3.92 2.02 190 4.21 2.19

As in Experiment 2, the effects of our perspective manipulation were small. In order to contextualize these results, it is helpful to visualize them in comparison to other effects known in the literature. In Figure 14, we display the regression equation coefficients of our perspective manipulations (employing the dummy coding scheme, 1: Agent/Victim, 0: Bystander) as well as those of the relevant z-scored demographic variables (i.e., political orientation and religiosity). This reveals that the effect of agent perspective-taking on judgments in the purity domain is about half the size of a standard deviation shift in political orientation or religiosity. And, the effect of agent perspective-taking on the judgment of moral dilemmas is roughly equivalent to its effect in the purity domain.

Figure 14. Effect sizes on moral judgment: politics, religiosity and perspective

manipulation.

Collapsing across conditions, we replicated the correlation between action focus and moral judgment, z = 11.90, p < .001. In addition we found a statistically significant but smaller relationship between outcome focus and moral judgment, z = 5.43, p < .001, indicating that participants who tended to make deontological judgments exhibited greater outcome focus. However, entering both action and outcome foci into the regression model on moral judgment, the effect of outcome focus did not hold, action z = 10.64, p = .001; outcome z = 1.41, p = .16. With a larger sample size than Experiment 2 we also observed a modest relationship between deontological moral judgment and ratings of agent perspective-taking, z = 5.44, p < .001, but not victim perspective-taking,

z = .71, p = .48.

Finally, Experiment 4 replicated the finding that conservatives and religious participants were more agent-focused while liberals were more victim-focused. Participants who adopted the agent‘s perspective were more conservative (n = 382, M = 3.62, SD = 1.52) than participants who adopted the victim‘s perspective (n = 522, M = 3.01, SD = 1.48), t(928) = 6.17, p < .0001. Correlations with ratings of agent and victim perspective-taking and action and outcome foci were replicated (see Table 9).

Table 9. Political orientation, religiosity and evaluative focus: correlations.

Focus Perspective-taking

Action Outcome Agent Victim Relative Political conservatism .21 *** -.08 ** .20 *** -.13 *** -.18 *** Religiosity .26 *** .14 *** .11 *** .02 -.03 *: p < .05; **: p < .005; ***: p < .0005 4.9. Discussion

Our perspective manipulation yielded effects on the condemnation of moral violations consistent with the agent focus model. When actions were narrated from the perspective of the agent, participants made harsher moral judgments than when they were narrated from a bystander‘s perspective, suggesting a role for perspective-taking and simulation in moral judgment. This difference held for both harmful actions – like pushing someone to their death in order to save five people – and impure behaviors – like eating one‘s dead dog. In conjunction with the results of Experiments 1 and 2, these results derive support for the role of unconscious processes of mental simulation in the condemnation of third-party moral violations. If moral judgment were accomplished by categorizing actions according to their causal, intentional and normative properties, but without a role for perspective-taking, we should not have observed a difference between conditions since the action description was matched across conditions. By contrast, the simulation view (as articulated in Chapter 3) can explain the observed difference: the narrative manipulation promoted the adoption of the protagonist‘s perspective in interpreting the narrated events. Specifically the agent‘s perspective rendered the evaluator‘s own aversion to performing harmful actions salient, and this action aversion influenced moral condemnation.

Lastly, Experiment 5 did not draw support for the victim focus model: we found no significant difference between the Victim and Bystander conditions, although there was a trend towards greater condemnation of harm from the victim‘s perspective. This result suggests that increased empathic concern for the proximal victim drives the condemnation of personal harms weakly at best, and likely contributes less than the alternative mechanism based on action aversion.