Browsing by Author "Peng, Shanyi"

This study aimed to find out the effects of moral inclusion/exclusion, empathy, and perspective-taking on moral judgment. Starting from a study by Passini (2014) who found that the group membership of the protagonists in moral dilemmas influenced the moral reasoning scores of those participants who tended to morally exclude out-group members, an attempt was made to experimentally examine the mechanism behind this finding. It was hypothesized that exposure to a dilemma with an out-group protagonist leads to switching off empathy and social perspective-taking. Experimental conditions involved dilemmas with either an out-group or an in-group protagonist; in the control condition the protagonists had the original English names. A total of 37 Finnish and 56 Chinese university students served as participants. They were given measures of moral judgment (the Defining Issues Test DIT), of moral inclusion/exclusion (the Moral Inclusion/Exclusion Questionnaire MIEG), and of empathy (the Interpersonal Reactivity Index IRI). The results showed that dilemmas with an in-group protagonist tended to elicit higher empathy both among Chinese and Finnish participants but no differences were found for moral judgment scores. Those with moral inclusion orientation scored higher on post-conventional moral schema. Finnish participants scored significantly higher in post-conventional moral schema while Chinese participants scored significantly higher in maintaining norms moral schema. Chinese participants also showed significantly stronger moral inclusion orientation than Finnish participants. The relationship among and the interaction between individual variables (empathy-related variables) and intergroup level variables (group membership and moral inclusion/exclusion) are discussed; some limitations of cross-cultural moral judgment studies (e.g. the differentiation of moral domains in different culture) are also discussed.