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Living Slow and Being Moral

Life History Predicts the Dual Process of Other-Centered Reasoning and Judgments

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Abstract

Drawing from the dual process model of morality and life history theory, the present research examined the role of cognitive and emotional processes as bridges between basic environmental challenges (i.e., unpredictability and competition) and other-centered moral orientation (i.e., prioritizing the welfare of others). In two survey studies, cognitive and emotional processes represented by future-oriented planning and emotional attachment, respectively (Study 1, N = 405), or by perspective taking and empathic concern, respectively (Study 2, N = 424), positively predicted other-centeredness in prosocial moral reasoning (Study 1) and moral judgment dilemmas based on rationality or intuition (Study 2). Cognitive processes were more closely related to rational aspects of other-centeredness, whereas the emotional processes were more closely related to the intuitive aspects of other-centeredness (Study 2). Finally, the cognitive and emotional processes also mediated negative effects of unpredictability (i.e., negative life events and childhood financial insecurity), as well as positive effects of individual-level, contest competition (i.e., educational and occupational competition) on other-centeredness. Overall, these findings support the view that cognitive and emotional processes do not necessarily contradict each other. Rather, they might work in concert to promote other-centeredness in various circumstances and might be attributed to humans’ developmental flexibility in the face of environmental challenges.

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Notes

  1. The wording of several stories was slightly changed to fit the Chinese cultural background and to sound more mature for adult participants. These changes did not affect the structure of the story.

  2. Consistent with Carlo et al. (1992), the alpha coefficient was not calculated for the composite score because the scores for different types of justifications reflect different directions in prosocial moral reasoning and, thus, cannot be combined.

  3. To avoid an artificial correlation between our measure of LH strategy and morality, none of these items were selected from the religiosity or altruism-related subscales of ALHB (Figueredo 2007).

  4. The path models did not include direct links between environmental challenges and PROM scores because (1) we theoretically suggested that cognitive and emotional processes should account for a major proportion of the relationship between environmental challenges and moral judgments; (2) we examined alternative models that additionally included direct links between environmental challenges and moral judgment scores and found mostly nonsignificant or weak direct effects on moral judgment scores; (3) the models without direct links fit reasonably well, thus justifying dropping the direct links for parsimony considerations.

  5. This indicates a potential confounding effect of religiosity. However, the results of the present research were unlikely to be affected by participants’ religiosity since our samples consisted solely of educated adults in China. The Chinese population is among the least religious according to the World Values Survey—only 3% of Chinese respondents consider religion to be very important in their lives (Inglehart et al. 2004). Given this, we did not take extra measures to statistically assess and control religiosity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Educational Psychology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong, China

    Nan Zhu & Skyler T. Hawk

  2. Department of Psychology, Humanities and Social Sciences Building, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau, E21-3045, China

    Lei Chang

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  1. Nan Zhu
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Correspondence to Lei Chang.

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Nan Zhu, Skyler T. Hawk, and Lei Chang declare they have no conflict of interest.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Zhu, N., Hawk, S.T. & Chang, L. Living Slow and Being Moral. Hum Nat 29, 186–209 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-018-9313-7

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