Abstract:

Some early cognitive development psychologists such as Kohlberg put much emphasis on the role of moral cognition in moral decision-making. But recent studies have turned over this opinion, and the relationship between moral emotion to moral decision-making have been paid much attention, with some studies having found that the anticipation of moral emotion could significantly predict individuals’ moral behavior. There were two explanations coexisting about the relationship between moral emotion and moral behavior. One deemed that moral emotion was followed by moral behavior, that is, one felt some moral emotion after they did moral behavior and moral emotion was produced after moral behavior. The other opinion insisted that moral emotion could be produced before some moral behavior, and this moral emotion could induce moral behavior. This study was mainly designed to examine the latter hypothesis. The experiment chose totally 123 thirteen-year-old and sixteen-year-old adolescents as subjects, and adopted a 2(age: 13 years old vs. 16 years old)×2(types of context: prosocial vs. antisocial)×2(emotion expectancy: morality-oriented vs. self-oriented) mixed experiment design, to inspect the impact of different oriented emotion expectancy on adolescents’ moral decision-making in two different contexts. The results revealed that there was a significant interaction of age and types of context, F(1, 121)=4.07, p<.05, η2=.033. Sixteen-year-old adolescents judged that they would be more likely to conduct moral behavior in the antisocial context than those thirteen-year-old adolescents, F(1, 121)=10.68, p<.01, η2=.081, while there was no significant difference between two groups in the likeliness judgment of moral behavior under prosocial context. The interaction of types of context and emotion expectancy was also significant, F(1, 121)=9.14, p<.01, η2=.071. In antisocial context, adolescents judged that they would more likely to display moral behavior in the condition of morality-oriented emotion expectancy than that in the condition of morality-oriented emotion expectancy, F(1, 121)=10.63, p<.01, η2=.080, whereas there was no significant difference between two conditions in prosocial context. This indicated that emotion expectancy could indeed influence adolescents’ moral decision-making, and the influence was different for different behavioral contexts. The results also revealed that adolescents’ score in moral cognition judgment was higher than that in guess probability condition, and they judged that the extent of prohibition for antisocial behavior was more serious than that of permission for prosocial behavior. This outcome indicated that adolescents could not only grasp moral rules properly, but also seemed to be more sensitive to antisocial context. This could offer some explanation for afore-mentioned significant interaction of types of context and emotion expectancy. Furthermore, different cultures and values might lead this different outcome with that in Krettenauer et al.(2011). As China is a collectivism country, and antisocial behavior was seen more serious and strictly prohibited in such culture. For the significant interaction of age and types of context, sixteen-year-old adolescents judged that they would be more likely to conduct moral behavior in the antisocial context than those thirteen-year-old adolescents. This indicated that the high school students’ moral behavior further developed in contrast with that in junior school stage. All in all, this study replicated previous research outcome that moral emotion could impact on adolescent’s moral decision-making, and this impact was different in different context, with some difference existing between Chinese youth and that in America. However, there were also some limitations in this study. For one hand, we asked adolescents to suppose that ‘what would you do in that condition’, thus this first-person questioning method might produce the social desirable effect to some extent. For another hand, though in the design we asked participants to answer the moral decision-making question immediately after presenting them moral emotion expectancy, but this way can not fully exclude the impact of moral cognition on adolescents’ moral decision-making. Future study should notice these problems and apply some better methods to examine our results.