Center for Studies of Psychological Application, Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China.
Sci Rep. 2019 Aug 21;9(1):12152. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-48649-5.
Are beauty and goodness the same? The relationship between beauty and goodness has long been a controversial issue in the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, ethics and psychology. Although many empirical studies have explored moral judgment and aesthetic judgment separately, only a few studies have compared the two. Whether these two judgments are two different processes or the same process with two different labels remains unclear. To answer this question, the present study directly compared the influence of facial attractiveness on judgments of moral goodness and moral beauty and revealed distinct contributions of imaging perceptions to these two judgments. The results showed that in the moral beauty judgment task, participants gave higher scores to characters with attractive faces compared with characters with unattractive faces, and larger P200 and LPP were elicited in the unattractive-face condition compared with the attractive-face condition; while in the moral goodness judgment task, there was no significant difference between the two conditions of either behaviour or ERP data. These findings offer important insights into the understanding and comparison of the processes of moral judgment and aesthetic judgment.
美和善是否相同？美和善的关系一直是哲学、美学、伦理学和心理学领域的一个有争议的问题。尽管许多实证研究分别探讨了道德判断和审美判断，但只有少数研究比较了这两者。这两种判断是两个不同的过程还是同一个过程，只是有两个不同的标签，目前还不清楚。为了回答这个问题，本研究直接比较了面部吸引力对道德善和美判断的影响，揭示了意象知觉对这两种判断的不同贡献。结果表明，在道德美判断任务中，与不吸引人的面孔相比，参与者给有吸引力的面孔的人物更高的分数，并且在不吸引人的面孔条件下比在吸引人的面孔条件下诱发更大的 P200 和 LPP；而在道德善判断任务中，两种条件下的行为或 ERP 数据均无显著差异。这些发现为理解和比较道德判断和审美判断的过程提供了重要的见解。
