Religiosity predicts control over emotional influences in moral judgment (2011)

Undergraduates: Corey Cusimano, Danielle Lohman

Faculty Advisor: Jan Boxill
Department: Philosophy

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Theories in moral psychology diverge on whether we have the ability to purposefully ignore our emotional reactions when making moral judgments. Haidt (2001) argues that we do not and that certain factors, like disgust sensitivity, heavily influence our moral appraisals. Greene (2001) argues that we have some ability to cognitively override our emotional reactions. We tested participants to see whether they changed their responses to a number of different moral scenarios after being asked to prevent incorporating their emotional reaction into their decision. We asked them to judge whether a certain action in a moral dilemma was appropriate, to rate their confidence of their answer to the dilemma scenario and to judge the moral wrongness of a number of no-harm (but disgust eliciting) scenarios. We found that disgust sensitivity did predict initial moral reactions (backing up previous literature by Haidt and Greene). However, we also found that only participants who scored highly on religiosity showed a change in their moral judgments once they were asked to prevent emotional influence. We give a tentative hypothesis to explain this phenomenon.