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Location:Home>Research>Research Progress
 
Scientists Uncover Self–other Moral Bias at the Conceptual Level
 
Author: Dr. Li-Lin RAO , Minghui LI      Update time: 2021/07/29
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Self–other bias can engender disagreement, misunderstanding, and conflict in real-world interactions. Moral perspectives are powerful in shaping thoughts and behaviors. Whether there is a self–other moral bias is poorly understood.

A research team led by Dr. Li-Lin RAO from the CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences demonstrated the self–other moral bias at the conceptual level and found that the self–other moral bias was expressed in natural language on the Internet.
In a previous study, using moral dilemmas, Dr. Rao’s team demonstrated a self–other bias in moral judgment. When faced with moral dilemmas, people were more deontological (less utilitarian) when they made decisions themselves than when they surmised what a stranger would do.

In this work, the researchers conducted three studies. Study 1 used the Implicit Association Test to examine the implicit association between self–other and deontology–utilitarianism. Study 2 used the evaluative priming task to further confirm the results of Study 1. Study 3 investigated the association between self and other words and deontological and utilitarian words in large bodies of natural-language text (i.e., a standard corpus of English-language text from the Internet).

In Studies 1 and 2, the researchers consistently observed that the association of deontological words (in Chinese) with self words was stronger than with other words and that the association of utilitarian words with other words was stronger than with self words. In Study 3, the researchers further demonstrated that the self–other bias moral could be reflected in natural language. These results suggested that the self–other moral bias were generalized, independent of specific contexts.

The findings of the self–other moral bias have important implications for communication. In many real-life situations, an action can be justified by deontology and utilitarianism at the same time. An awareness of the self–other moral bias may facilitate a better understanding of others' attitudes and behaviors. 

People showed a stronger association between self and deontology (other and utilitarianism) than between other and deontology (self and utilitarianism). Image by Ming-Hui Li.

 This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Li, M. H., Li, P. W., & Rao, L. L. (2021). Self–other moral bias: Evidence from implicit measures and the Word-Embedding Association Test. Personality and Individual Differences, 183, 111107 (Pulished on July 8, 2021).

LIU Chen
Institute of Psychology
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Beijing 100101, China.
E-mail: liuc@psych.ac.cn

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