Do people who struggle to manage emotions judge moral dilemmas differently?
Students who reported more trouble regulating emotions were less willing to endorse harming one person to save many, and this was explained by stronger rule-based (deontological) inclinations rather than weaker cost-benefit reasoning.
Source
Why People with More Emotion Regulation Difficulties Made a More Deontological Judgment: The Role of Deontological Inclinations
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Study 1: survey regression of trait emotion-regulation difficulties on dilemma ratings; Study 2: extreme-groups comparison using congruent/incongruent dilemmas and process dissociation.
- N
- N=156 · 156 undergraduates analysed in Study 1 after 13 abnormal responders were removed; Study 2 re-invited 60 of them (30 highest and 30 lowest DERS scorers).
- Population
- Chinese undergraduates aged 18-22 at one university in East China
- Outcome
- Rated appropriateness of utilitarian harm in moral dilemmas; process-dissociation deontological (D) and utilitarian (U) parameters
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What they did
In Study 1, 156 Chinese undergraduates completed the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale and rated how appropriate it was to kill or injure one person to save several others in four sacrificial dilemmas. In Study 2, the 30 highest and 30 lowest scorers were brought back and judged pairs of dilemmas: incongruent versions where harm produces a better outcome, and congruent versions where harm is wrong on both principles. A process-dissociation analysis then separated each person's deontological and utilitarian inclinations.
What they found
In Study 1, more emotion regulation difficulty predicted lower acceptance of utilitarian harm even after controlling for gender (standardised beta about -0.28), and women rated the harmful action as less appropriate than men. In Study 2 the same pattern held for incongruent dilemmas, and the high-difficulty group had a higher deontological parameter than the low-difficulty group, while the utilitarian parameter did not differ between groups. The authors conclude that emotion dysregulation raises emotion-driven aversion to harm without changing cost-benefit reasoning.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Both studies are correlational, so they cannot show that emotion regulation difficulties cause more deontological judgments; the authors themselves call for experimental manipulation. The sample was Chinese college students, only harm-domain hypothetical dilemmas were used, and Study 2 relied on only four dilemma pairs with 60 people split into extreme groups. The explanation that unregulated negative emotion drives the effect is inferred rather than measured, since emotion during the dilemmas was not recorded.
Key terms
- Deontological judgment
- Rejecting a harmful action because it breaks a moral rule, regardless of how good its consequences would be.
- Utilitarian judgment
- Accepting a harmful action when it produces the best overall outcome, such as saving more lives.
- Dual-process model of moral judgment
- Greene's idea that fast emotional reactions push toward deontological answers while slower cost-benefit reasoning pushes toward utilitarian answers.
- Process dissociation
- An analysis that uses responses to congruent and incongruent dilemmas to estimate separate strengths of deontological and utilitarian inclinations instead of treating them as opposite ends of one scale.
- Emotion regulation difficulties
- Trait problems in noticing, accepting and controlling negative emotions, measured here with the DERS questionnaire.
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Quiz yourself
In Study 2, how did the high emotion-regulation-difficulty group differ from the low group?
Common questions
Why not just count how often people choose the utilitarian option?
A low utilitarian rate could come from stronger aversion to harm or from weaker outcome-based reasoning; process dissociation lets researchers tell which of the two changed.
Does this mean emotional people are more moral?
No. It only shows they more often reject sacrificial harm in hypothetical dilemmas; neither answer is treated as more moral by the researchers.
Why does the congruent version matter?
In congruent dilemmas the harm does not produce a better outcome, so both principles reject it; comparing responses across versions is what makes it possible to estimate each inclination separately.
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