Browsing by Subject "audience effect"

It has been previously shown that people express disgust at moral transgressions, with both verbal reports and facial expressions. It is also known that the real or imagined presence of an audience can make people more willing to punish perceived wrongdoers and harsher in their judgments of moral violations. The aim of this thesis was to examine whether other people's emotional communication may affect one's moral judgments of speculative dilemma situations, where the killing or harming of another person is motivated by the greater good. Specifically, this thesis aimed to find out if an audience's facial expression affects judgments of moral violations that break a deontological (duty-based) moral rule but are nevertheless utilitarian, ie. the violation can be said to increase aggregate welfare. The hypothesis was that a disgust-signaling facial expression would lead to less utilitarian judgments than a neutral expression. Four data sets from experiments were collected in Finland and in the Netherlands. 117, 124, 124 and 165 people took part in the experiments Three of the experiments were conducted on a computer, and one on a paper form. An established questionnaire of 12 moral dilemma situations was used. In each dilemma, the utilitarian option was also a deontological violation.The participants indicated on a Likert scale I) how acceptable the found the utilitarian option and II) how likely they thought they themselves would act according to this option. Photographs of faces were used as the audience stimulus. Depending on the experimental condition, these faces were either neutral, or expressed disgust or anger. The order of the dilemmas, the photographs and the placing of participants in different experimental conditions was fully randomized. In the fourth experiment, the possible effect of the audience's gender on moral judgments was also examined. In each of the data sets, a main effect of participant gender was observed: males were slightly more utilitarian than females. An anger-signaling audience had no effect discernible from a neutral audience, whereas a disgust-signaling audience led to changes in utilitarian judgment. Additionally, interactions between the emotional audience manipulation and participant and audience gender were observed. Based on these results, it seems that gender and the expression of disgust may have specific roles in audience effects on moral judgment.