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http://dx.doi.org/10.19066/cogsci.2019.30.2.1

Effects of Facial Expression of Others on Moral Judgment  

Lee, WonSeob (Department of Industrial Psychology, Kwangwoon University)
Kim, ShinWoo (Department of Industrial Psychology, Kwangwoon University)
Publication Information
Korean Journal of Cognitive Science / v.30, no.2, 2019 , pp. 85-104 More about this Journal
Abstract
Past research showed that presence of others induces morally desirable behavior and stricter judgments. That is, presence of others makes people become a moral being. On the other hand, little research has been conducted to test what effects facial expression of others have on moral judgments. In this research, we tested the effects of emotion exposed by facial expression on moral judgments. To this end, we presented descriptions of immoral or prosocial behavior along with facial expression of various emotions (in particular, disgust and happiness), and asked participants to make moral judgments on the behavior in the descriptions. In Experiment 1, facial expression did not affect moral judgments, but variability of judgments was increased when descriptions and facial expression were incongruent. In experiment 2, we modified potential reasons of the null effect and conducted the experiment using the same procedure. Subjects in Experiment 2 made stricter judgments with disgust faces than with happy faces for immoral behavior, but the effect did not occur for prosocial behavior. In Experiment 3, we repeated the same experiment after having subjects to consider themselves as the actor in the descriptions. The results replicated the effects of facial expression in Experiment 2 but there was no effect of the actor on moral judgments. This research showed that facial expression of others specifically affects moral judgments on immoral behavior but not on prosocial behavior. In general discussion, we provided further discussion on the results and the limitations of this research.
Keywords
Moral Judgment; Facial Expression; Emotion; Social Tool;
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