Does Environmental Disorder Impact Our Moral Judgment And Behavior?A Pilot Study

As the conflict between situationism and virtue ethics in 30 years, a new research area is fascinated by many researchers. This is the psychophysics of morality, which aims to study the relationship between physical variables and our moral judgment or behavior. In details, the psychophysics of morality reveals that changes in physical variables can induce noticeable changes in human’s moral judgment and behavior. However, order and disorder is not included in the psychophysics of morality. Order and disorder is functional no matter it is social or physical. Both socialist and anthropologist have concluded order and disorder always represent moral things and immoral things. But the perspectives from sociology and anthropology are lack of experimental evidence.This research aims to proof these perspectives through social psychology experiments. This research use 2 field experiments to prove that physical disorder/order can impact human’s moral judgment and behavior. Experiment 1 showed that participants in order room would make more harsh moral judgment, and participants in disorder room would make less harsh moral judgment. Experiment 2 showed that participants in order room would perform less immoral behavior, participants in disorder room would perform more immoral behavior. The world is random model could explain this interesting phenomenon. Perceived disorder could make people feel more randomness, thus the level of self-control would be in a low situation. People would do more immoral matter due to the poor self- control level. The results of this research benefits the situationism and the psychophysics of morality.