Cognition, Langues, Langage, Ergonomie, Université de Toulouse, France.
Cognition. 2012 Sep;124(3):379-84. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.05.011. Epub 2012 Jun 12.
According to the dual-process model of moral judgment, utilitarian responses to moral conflict draw on limited cognitive resources. Terror Management Theory, in parallel, postulates that mortality salience mobilizes these resources to suppress thoughts of death out of focal attention. Consequently, we predicted that individuals under mortality salience would be less likely to give utilitarian responses to moral conflicts. Two experiments corroborated this hypothesis. Experiment 1 showed that utilitarian responses to non-lethal harm conflicts were less frequent when participants were reminded of their mortality. Experiment 2 showed that the detrimental effect of mortality salience on utilitarian conflict judgments was comparable to that of an extreme concurrent cognitive load. These findings raise the question of whether private judgment and public debate about controversial moral issues might be shaped by mortality salience effects, since these issues (e.g., assisted suicide) often involve matters of life and death.
根据道德判断的双重加工模型，功利主义对道德冲突的反应依赖于有限的认知资源。与之并行的是，死亡凸显理论假设，死亡凸显会调动这些资源，将死亡的想法从焦点注意力中抑制出去。因此，我们预测，在死亡凸显的情况下，个体不太可能对道德冲突做出功利主义的反应。两个实验验证了这一假设。实验 1 表明，当参与者被提醒注意自己的死亡时，他们对非致命性伤害冲突做出功利主义反应的频率会降低。实验 2 表明，死亡凸显对功利主义冲突判断的不利影响与极端的并发认知负荷相当。这些发现提出了一个问题，即关于有争议的道德问题的私人判断和公共辩论是否可能受到死亡凸显效应的影响，因为这些问题（例如，协助自杀）通常涉及生死问题。
