The Influence Of Regulatory Focus And Psychological Distance On Moral Judgment

The debate about the "emotion and reason" of moral judgement has been long-standing,from the debate between utilitarianism and deontology in philosophy field to the debate about cognitive reasoning and emotional intuition in psychology field.However,we believe that moral judgment is not only about the judgment of the result of the behavior,but also about the judgment of the so-called "moral value".Therefore,no matter whether moral judgment is cognitive or emotional,we can not deny the fact that it is a kind of judgment with the nature of motivation.As a newly developed motivation theory,Regulatory Focus Theory beyond the classic motivation principle from the aspects of individual needs and individual expectations of the target type and individual goal approach,provides a new perspective for the study of moral judgment.However,the study of moral judgment based on the theory of regulatory focus is still limited.In addition,the existing research has found that the individual's moral judgment is influenced by the distance between the individual and the psychological distance of the event.The concept of "psychological distance" derives from the most rapid development of social representation theory in the past 20 years.The Construal Level Theory holds that people's representation of things is influenced by the individual's perceived psychological distance from events.People tend to use abstract,overall characteristics to characterize distant psychological distance events;specific,partial characteristics are used to characterize the events in the near psychological distance.The individual's representation of the events will affect the individual's moral judgments.The individual will make moral judgments on the immoral events far from the psychological distance based on the abstract moral principles and will be more severe;For unethical events that are close to psychological distance,more consideration will be given to contextual factors,somoral judgments will be more moderate.Although there have been many studies on psychological distance and moral judgment,the existing research results on the relationship between the two are not stable,and there are contradictions between many research results.At present,there are no scholars who has simultaneously examined motivation and cognitive characterization.The influence of moral judgments is based on the complexity of moral judgments.This paper attempts to examine motives and cognitive characterizations under the framework of regulatory focus theory and construal level theory.It is used as �action(doing bad things)� and�inaction(not doing good things)." The common influence of two different types of moral judgments in unethical behavior.This study comprised three experiments and reached the following conclusions:(1)Regulatory focus influences individuals' moral judgments on different types of unethical behavior.In other words,compared with the inaction unethical behaviors,the promotion focus subjects are even more intolerant of action unethical behaviors,and their moral judgments on such behaviors are more severe;There is no difference in the moral judgments of the two types of unethical behavior in prevention focus.(2)There are significant differences in cognitive representation of two different types of unethical behavior among individuals.Specifically,individuals tend to be characterized by a high level of interpretation of an action of immoral behavior,and a low level of interpretation of an inaction of immoral behavior.(3)Time distance has no effect on the cognitive representation of two different types of unethical behavior,and it has no effect on the moral judgment of two different types of unethical behavior.(4)Social distance has no effect on the cognitive representation of two different types of unethical behavior,but there are differences in moral judgments on the two different types of unethical behavior.Specifically,when compared to other types of unethical behaviors that occur in good friends and strangers,when such unethical behaviors happen to oneself,individuals are more tolerant and moral judgments are more severe;There are no significant differences in the moral judgments of inaction-type unethical behaviors under different social distance conditions.(5)Individuals show a clear "omission bias" effect in moral judgments.In other words,regardless of the individual's dominant regulatory orientation,individuals have shown a tendency to be unethical as action behaviors,with less tolerance for such unethical behaviors and more stringent moral judgments.