Moral psychology
Do people who struggle to manage emotions judge moral dilemmas differently?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
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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Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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