The Effect Of Cognitive Inhibition On Moral Decision Making:The Moderating Role Of Pride And Shame

Moral decision making is the process(involving the self)of making a choice between certain moral dilemmas or whether to accept a moral solution.In social life,people are always faced with some moral decisions,often caught in a dilemma,unable to choose.In this case,decision makers’ ability to eliminate interference and self-conscious emotion will be important interfering factors in moral decision making.Based on previous studies,there are two tendencies of moral decision making(outcome tendency--utilitarianism;There are two modes of rule orientation:cognitive driven process and emotional driven process.Therefore,this study mainly studies and discusses the relationship between two independent variables(cognitive inhibition,self-conscious emotion)and moral decision making.Cognitive inhibition is the brain’s ability to eliminate distracting cognitive content when completing a task,while preventing irrelevant content from interfering when completing the current task.Pride and shame are a pair of self-conscious emotions,namely moral emotions,which refer to the emotional experience and behavior of an individual caused by certain moral related events in daily life and shown in a specific time and situation.Therefore,this study focuses on cognitive inhibition level and self-conscious emotion to understand the influence of different cognitive inhibition level and self-conscious emotion induction on moral decision-making.To understand how people are influenced by moral decisions and the differences between different influences.This study examined the differences between high and low cognitive inhibition and pride and shame in moral decision-making in three experiments,and explored the moderating effects of pride and shame on the influence of cognitive inhibition on moral decision-making.In experiment 1,70 subjects were divided into high and low groups by Stroop paradigm,and then took the task of moral decision making.The results showed that in high cognitive inhibition,subjects were more inclined to utilitarian moral decision making,while in low cognitive inhibition,subjects were more inclined to deontological moral decision making.In experiment 2,70 subjects were induced with pride and shame to confirm the effectiveness of emotion induction and then performed the task of moral decision making.The results showed that the utilitarian moral decision was more likely to be made under pride,while the deontological moral decision was more likely to be made under shame.In experiment3,2(high and low cognitive inhibition)×3(pride,neutral and shame)was used as a completely random analysis of variance to show that the interaction was significant,and the hypothesis that pride and shame played a moderating role in the experiment of cognitive inhibition affecting moral decision-making was verified.Through three experiments,it is proved that(1)there is a significant difference between high cognitive inhibition and low cognitive inhibition in moral decisions,and high cognitive inhibition is easy to make utilitarian moral decisions,while low cognitive inhibition is easy to make deontological moral decisions;(2)There is a significant difference between pride,neutrality and shame in moral decisions.Pride is more inclined to utilitarian moral decisions,while shame is more inclined to deontological moral decisions.(3)The influence of cognitive inhibition on moral decision making is moderated by pride and shame.Pride makes moral decision making more utilitarian,while shame makes moral decision making more deontological.