The Everyday Moral Judge – Autobiographical Recollections of Moral Emotions

Abstract

Moral emotions are typically elicited in everyday social interactions and regulate social behavior. Previous research in the field of attribution theory identified ought (the moral standard of a given situation or intended goal), goal-attainment (a goal can be attained vs. not attained) and effort (high vs. low effort expenditure) as cognitive antecedents of moral emotions. In contrast to earlier studies, mainly relying on thought experiments, we investigated autobiographical recollections of N = 312 participants by means of an online study. We analyzed a diverse range of moral emotions, i.e., admiration, anger, contempt, indignation, pride, respect, schadenfreude, and sympathy, by using a mixed-method approach. Qualitative and quantitative methods clearly corroborate the important role of ought, goal-attainment, and effort as eliciting conditions of moral emotions. Furthermore, we built categorical systems based on our participants’ descriptions of real-life situations, allowing for more fine-grained distinctions between seemingly similar moral emotions. We thus identify additional prerequisites explaining more subtle differences between moral emotion clusters as they emerge from our analyses (i.e., cluster 1: admiration, pride, and respect; cluster 2: anger, contempt, and indignation; cluster 3: schadenfreude and sympathy). Results are discussed in the light of attributional theories of moral emotions, and implications for future research are derived.

Guilt as a Motivator for Moral Judgment: An Autobiographical Memory Study

“…In that sense, guilt is part of the morality of the self, the autobiographical memory ( Körner et al, 2016 ), due to its psychological role of blaming one’s behavior: “I did that horrible thing ” ( Tangney and Tracy, 2012 , p. 448). Several previous findings in emotion research have also indicated that one of the roles of negative emotions is to regulate behavior ( Frijda et al, 1989 ; Scherer and Wallbott, 1994 ).…”

Moral emotions when reading quotidian circumstances in contexts of violence: an fMRI study

“…Further, these results suggest two reasons for compassion. This emotion may involve not only negative feelings when perceiving others' suffering but also positive feelings, such as gratitude, altruism, and love, which may motivate the observer to help the others and alleviate their suffering (Dı´az & Flores, 2001;Goetz et al, 2010;Haidt, 2003;Ko¨rner et al, 2016;Mercadillo et al, 2007a;Singer & Klimecki, 2014). For the Mexican collectivistic culture, it has been proposed that when facing others' suffering, expressions of happiness and love are linked to sharing, helping, and alleviating others, while sadness and anger considered as negative feelings are experienced to compensate hopelessness or impossibility to help or to seek for alleviation (Sa´nchez-Arago´n & Dı´az-Loving, 2009).…”

“…Nevertheless, intensity for happiness and pleasantness was equivalent to other negative feelings not expected, that is, unpleasantness, sadness, anger, and hate; for these cases, fairness was positively correlated with anger and hate, but negatively correlated with unpleasantness and sadness. Therefore, Schadenfreude may involve asymmetric feelings because a person can be perceived as both a victim and a wrongdoer, and this double attribution may elicit affliction or sadness even if the misfortune is considered as deserved (Ko¨rner et al, 2016). Nevertheless, the associated feelings of unpleasantness and sadness may not influence neither other emotions nor the moral judgments because scores for compassion represented the lowest intensity and the fairness judgment was clearly higher than unfairness.…”

“…Kédia et al, 2008; Moll et al, 2005; Takahashi et al, 2004); differences have been related to particular or collective notions of justice, but also to a variety of feelings associated with and representing negative–positive asymmetries when facing affective stimuli (Cacioppo et al, 1999; Javela et al, 2008). In this sense, compassion has been associated with various asymmetric feelings, such as happiness and kindness, but also sadness, fear, or concern (Falconer et al, 2019); indignation has been proposed as dominated by negative experiences, such as anger, (Körner et al, 2016), and it has been suggested that schadenfreude is guided by envy or pleasure (Takahashi et al, 2009; Wake & Izuma, 2017).…”

“…In addition, as suggested in some studies (e.g. Fourie et al, 2017; Körner et al, 2016), research on moral emotions should apply ecological approaches and use historically and culturally relevant stimuli to mimic real-life social situations.…”