Immediate affect as a basis for intuitive moral judgement: An adaptation of the affect misattribution procedure

Abstract

Recent intuitionist accounts have emphasised the role of immediate affective reactions in shaping moral judgement. In two studies, we adopted the affect misattribution procedure (Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005; JPSP) to assess immediate affective reactions toward moral stimuli. We investigated how immediate moral affect influences guilt experiences in a moral dilemma (Study 1) and emotional reactions and the rejection decision with regard to an unfair monetary offer in the ultimatum game (Study 2). In Study 1, immediate moral affect had a significant effect on anticipated guilt. In Study 2, immediate moral affect had a direct effect on emotional reactions to the unfair offer and an indirect effect on the rejection decision. Moreover, evidence for a moderator effect of preference for intuition was obtained in both studies. Taken together, these results indicate that immediate moral affect can colour people's moral inferences and decisions, especially if they trust their intuitions.

Keywords:

• Immediate affect
• Moral judgement
• Moral intuition
• Affect misattribution
• Ultimatum game

Acknowledgements

Portions of this article were completed while the first author was a visiting researcher at Harvard University, USA.

We thank Cornelia Betsch, Bertram Gawronski, Mario Gollwitzer, Joshua Greene, Jane Thompson, and Sascha Topolinski for valuable comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

¹The picture set is available from the authors upon request.

²In their meta-analysis, Fehr and Schmitt (1999) showed that response behaviour does not depend on whether each participant is actually paid or whether participants enter a lottery as a result of which only some participants will receive the actual amount of money that is supposed to be distributed between themselves and the other player.

³According to modern conceptions of mediation, establishing a significant link between the independent variable and the dependent variable is not necessary for mediation to occur (e.g., Collins, Graham, & Flaherty, 1998; Shrout & Bolger, 2002). Rather, the essential test is the evaluation of the joint product of the two effects comprising the intervening variable effect (MacKinnon, Lockwood, Hoffman, West, & Sheets, 2002).

⁴In order to further explore whether this moderator effect may be mediated by emotional reactions (Muller, Judd, & Yzerbyt, 2005), we conducted an additional moderated regression analysis on emotional reactions as criterion including the interaction term between immediate moral affect and preference for intuition. This analysis yielded a positive but non-significant interaction effect, β=.10, p=.23, indicating that the above overall moderator effect of IAMS on the ultimatum game decision is only partially mediated by emotional reactions. We suspect that a more elaborate self-report measure of emotional reactions (including more specific justice-related emotional reactions) may be better able to fully capture the variance attributable to the interaction between immediate moral affect and preference in intuition.