Effects of Suboptimally Presented Erotic Pictures on Moral Judgments: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

Abstract

Previous research has identified a set of core factors that influence moral judgments. The present study addresses the interplay between moral judgments and four factors: (a) incidental affects, (b) sociocultural context, (c) type of dilemma, and (d) participant’s sex. We asked participants in two different countries (Colombia and Spain) to judge the acceptability of actions in response to personal and impersonal moral dilemmas. Before each dilemma an affective prime (erotic, pleasant or neutral pictures) was presented suboptimally. Our results show that: a) relative to neutral priming, erotic primes increase the acceptance of harm for a greater good (i.e., more utilitarian judgments), b) relative to Colombians, Spanish participants rated causing harm as less acceptable, c) relative to impersonal dilemmas, personal dilemmas reduced the acceptance of harm, and d) relative to men, women were less likely to consider harm acceptable. Our results are congruent with findings showing that sex is a crucial factor in moral cognition, and they extend previous research by showing the interaction between culture and incidental factors in the making of moral judgments.

Age and moral disgust: An experimental priming effects vignette study

“…Although affective priming has been effectively applied to a vast number of studies [ 53 ], this technique has scarcely been applied to moral research. There is evidence that erotic pictures presented in a suboptimal manner (but not other types of pleasant pictures) increase utilitarian moral judgments, which might be due to the erotic stimuli being more arousing [ 54 ]. Affective priming through disgusting pictures (depicting human mutilation) exclusively reduced the severity of moral judgments (with no effect on non-moral judgments [ 55 ]).…”

“…We manipulated the type of affective priming by means of briefly presented pictures following the procedure described in Olivera-La Rosa et al [ 54 ]. There are three levels of this categorical variable: Disgust Priming, Sad Priming, and Control (neutral) priming.…”