Abstract
Elevation is an uplifting feeling evoked by witnessing other’s moral beauty. Prior studies explored the impact of different aspects of completed moral acts on elevation. However, whether intended or completed moral acts have a greater impact on observers’ elevation remains unclear. We hypothesize that intended moral acts evoke greater elevation in observers than completed ones. A total of 437 Chinese participants rated their elevation after reading manipulated descriptions about actors’ moral acts in three online experiments. The results consistently supported our hypothesis. Moreover, the results of moderated mediation models showed that actors’ moral potential mediated the effect of moral acts on elevation. Female observers exhibited stronger responses to intended moral acts than male observers. In addition, observers’ elevation influenced their willingness to cooperate with the actors. Implications for elevation elicitation and future directions are discussed.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
The data is available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.23938500.
Notes
In 2021, the average monthly salary of Chinese urban employees was 8,903 yuan (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2022).
References
Agamben, G. (2012). La potenza del pensiero. Saggi e conferenze. Neri Pozza Editore.
Algoe, S. B., & Haidt, J. (2009). Witnessing excellence in action: The ‘other-praising’ emotions of elevation, gratitude, and admiration. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 4(2), 105–127. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760802650519
Aquino, K., McFerran, B., & Laven, M. (2011). Moral identity and the experience of moral elevation in response to acts of uncommon goodness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(4), 703–718. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022540
Auyeung, B., Allison, C., Wheelwright, S., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2012). Brief report: Development of the adolescent empathy and systemizing quotients. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 42(10), 2225–2235. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-012-1454-7
Baron-Cohen, S., & Wheelwright, S. (2004). The empathy quotient: An investigation of adults with Asperger syndrome or high functioning autism, and normal sex differences. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 34(2), 163–175. https://doi.org/10.1023/b:jadd.0000022607.19833.00
Bartos, S. E., Russell, S., P., & Hegarty, P. (2020). Heroes against homophobia: Does elevation uniquely block homophobia by inhibiting disgust? Cognition and Emotion, 34(6), 1123–1142. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2020.1726292
Calero, C. I., Salles, A., Semelman, M., & Sigman, M. (2013). Age and gender dependent development of theory of mind in 6- to 8-years old children. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 281. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00281
Caruso, E. M. (2010). When the future feels worse than the past: A temporal inconsistency in moral judgment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 139(4), 610–624. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020757
Cox, K. S. (2010). Elevation predicts domain-specific volunteerism 3 months later. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 5(5), 333–341. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2010.507468
Cushman, F. (2008). Crime and punishment: Distinguishing the roles of causal and intentional analyses in moral judgment. Cognition, 108(2), 353–380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2008.03.006
Cushman, F., Sheketoff, R., Wharton, S., & Carey, S. (2013). The development of intent-based moral judgment. Cognition, 127(1), 6–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2012.11.008
D’Argembeau, A., & Van der Linden, M. (2004). Phenomenal characteristics associated with projecting oneself back into the past and forward into the future: Influence of valence and temporal distance. Consciousness and Cognition, 13(4), 844–858. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2004.07.007
Devine, R. T., & Hughes, C. (2013). Silent films and strange stories: Theory of mind, gender, and social experiences in middle childhood. Child Development, 84(3), 989–1003. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12017
Ding, W., Shao, Y., Sun, B., Xie, R., Li, W., & Wang, X. (2018). How can prosocial behavior be motivated? The different roles of moral judgment, moral elevation, and moral identity among the young Chinese. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 814. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00814
Faul, F., Erdfelder, E., Lang, A. G., & Buchner, A. (2007). G*Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 39(2), 175–191. https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03193146
Feingold, A. (1992). Gender differences in mate selection preferences: A test of the parental investment model. Psychological Bulletin, 112(1), 125–139. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.112.1.125
Fessler, D. M. T., Sparks, A. M., Samore, T., & Holbrook, C. (2019). Does observing reciprocity or exploitation affect elevation, a mechanism driving prosociality? Evolutionary Human Sciences, 1(e3), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2019.3
Frank, C. K., Baron-Cohen, S., & Ganzel, B. L. (2015). Sex differences in the neural basis of false-belief and pragmatic language comprehension. Neuroimage, 105, 300–311. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.09.041
Freeman, D., Aquino, K., & McFerran, B. (2009). Overcoming beneficiary race as an impediment to charitable donations: Social dominance orientation, the experience of moral elevation, and donation behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35(1), 72–84. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167208325415
Garcia, D., Drejing, K., Amato, C., Kosinski, M., & Sikström, S. (2018). The promotion of a bright future and the prevention of a dark future: Time anchored incitements in news articles and facebook’s status updates. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1623. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01623
Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2011). Dimensions of moral emotions. Emotion Review, 3(3), 258–260. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073911402388
Gray, K., Young, L., & Waytz, A. (2012). Mind perception is the essence of morality. Psychological Inquiry, 23(2), 101–124. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2012.651387
Guo, T., Ji, L. J., Spina, R., & Zhang, Z. (2012). Culture, temporal focus, and values of the past and the future. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(8), 1030–1040. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167212443895
Haidt, J. (2000). The positive emotion of elevation. Prevention and Treatment, 3(2), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1037/1522-3736.3.1.33c
Haidt, J. (2003). The moral emotions. In R. J. Davidson, K. R. Scherer, & H. H. Goldsmith (Eds.), Handbook of affective sciences (pp. 852–870). Oxford University Press.
Han, H., & Dawson, K. J. (2023). Relatable and attainable moral exemplars as sources for moral elevation and pleasantness. Journal of Moral Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2023.2173158
Hannah, S. T., & Avolio, B. J. (2010). Moral potency: Building the capacity for character-based leadership. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 62(4), 291–310. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022283
Jones, E. E., & Harris, V. A. (1967). The attribution of attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 3(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(67)90034-0
Kakkar, H., Sivanathan, N., & Pettit, N. C. (2019). The impact of dynamic status changes within competitive rank-ordered hierarchies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116(46), 23011–23020. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1908320116
Keough, K. A., Zimbardo, P. G., & Boyd, J. N. (1999). Who’s smoking, drinking, and using drugs? Time perspective as a predictor of substance use. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 21(2), 149–164. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15324834ba210207
Klein, N., & O’Brien, E. (2017). The power and limits of personal change: When a bad past does (and does not) inspire in the present. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(2), 210–229. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000088
Maglio, S. J., & Polman, E. (2016). Revising probability estimates: Why increasing likelihood means increasing impact. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(2), 141–158. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000058
Mencius. (2009). Mencius (I. Bloom, Trans). Columbia University.
Miller, J. G. (1984). Culture and the development of everyday social explanation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 961–978. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.46.5.961
Nurmi, J. E., Poole, M. E., & Kalakoski, V. (1994). Age differences in adolescent future-oriented goals, concerns, and related temporal extension in different sociocultural contexts. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 23(4), 471–487. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01538040
O’brien, E., Konrath, S. H., Grühn, D., & Hagen, A. L. (2013). Empathic concern and perspective taking: Linear and quadratic effects of age across the adult life span. Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 68(2), 168–175. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbs055
Park, G., Schwartz, H. A., Sap, M., Kern, M. L., Weingarten, E., Eichstaedt, J. C., & Seligman, M. E. (2016). Living in the past, present, and future: Measuring temporal orientation with language. Journal of Personality, 85(2), 270–280. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12239
Pettit, N. C., Sivanathan, N., Gladstone, E., & Marr, J. C. (2013). Rising stars and sinking ships. Psychological Science, 24(8), 1579–1584. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612473120
Poehlman, T. A., & Newman, G. E. (2014). Potential: The valuation of imagined future achievement. Cognition, 130(1), 134–139. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.10.003
Pohling, R., Diessner, R., Stacy, S., Woodward, D., & Strobel, A. (2019). Moral elevation and economic games: The moderating role of personality. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1381. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01381
Romani, S., Grappi, S., & Bagozzi, R. P. (2016). Corporate socially responsible initiatives and their effects on consumption of green products. Journal of Business Ethics, 135(2), 253–264. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2485-0
Rullo, M., Lalot, F., & Heering, M. S. (2022). Moral identity, moral self-efficacy, and moral elevation: A sequential mediation model predicting moral intentions and behaviour. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 17(4), 545–560. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2021.1871942
Schein, C., & Gray, K. (2018). The theory of dyadic morality: Reinventing moral judgment by redefining harm. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 22(1), 32–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868317698288
Schnall, S., & Roper, J. (2011). Elevation puts moral values into action. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3(3), 373–378. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550611423595
Schnall, S., Roper, J., & Fessler, D. M. T. (2010). Elevation leads to altruistic behavior. Psychological Science, 21(3), 315–320. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797609359882
Shulman, D., Halperin, E., Elron, Z., & Reifen Tagar, M. (2021). Moral elevation increases support for humanitarian policies, but not political concessions, in intractable conflict. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104113
Silvers, J. A., & Haidt, J. (2008). Moral elevation can induce nursing. Emotion, 8(2), 291–295. https://doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.8.2.291
Soliman, M., & Buehler, R. (2018a). Evaluating performance over time: Is improving better than being consistently good? The Journal of Social Psychology, 158(3), 271–284. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2017.1341373
Soliman, M., & Buehler, R. (2018b). Why improvement can trump consistent strong performance: The role of effort perceptions. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 31, 52–64. https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.2039
Steinberg, L., Graham, S., O’brien, L., Woolard, J., Cauffman, E., & Banich, M. (2009). Age differences in future orientation and delay discounting. Child Development, 80(1), 28–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2008.01244.x
Sun, X., Xu, D., Luo, F., Wei, Z., Wei, C., & Xue, G. (2015). A cross-cultural perspective on the preference for potential effect: An individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis approach. PLoS One, 10(3), e0124170. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0124170
Thomson, A. L., & Siegel, J. T. (2013). A moral act, elevation, and prosocial behavior: Moderators of morality. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 8(1), 50–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2012.754926
Tormala, Z. L., Jia, J. S., & Norton, M. I. (2012). The preference for potential. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(4), 567–583. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029227
Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2000). Temporal construal and time-dependent changes in preference. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 876–889. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.6.876
Van Boven, L., & Ashworth, L. (2007). Looking forward, looking back: Anticipation is more evocative than retrospection. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136(2), 289–300. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.136.2.289
van de Ven, N., Archer, A. T., & Engelen, B. (2019). More important and surprising actions of a moral exemplar trigger stronger admiration and inspiration. The Journal of Social Psychology, 159(4), 383–397. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2018.1498317
Van de Vyver, J., & Abrams, D. (2015). Testing the prosocial effectiveness of the prototypical moral emotions: Elevation increases benevolent behaviors and outrage increases justice behaviors. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 58, 23–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2014.12.005
Van de Vyver, J., & Abrams, D. (2017). Is moral elevation an approach-oriented emotion? The Journal of Positive Psychology, 12(2), 178–185. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2016.1163410
Wedel, M., & Dong, C. (2020). BANOVA: Bayesian analysis of experiments in consumer psychology. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 30(1), 3–23. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3388203
Xie, Z., Wen, F., Tan, X., Wei, J., & Zuo, B. (2020). The preference for potential in competence, not in morality: Asymmetric biases regarding a group’s potential for moral improvement and decline. PLoS One, 15(8), e0236748. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236748
Xie, Z., Wen, F., Tan, X., Wei, J., & Zuo, B. (2022). The attractiveness of group potential: The mediating role of anticipated future achievements in willingness to join. Current Psychology, 41, 6744–6754. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-01184-3
Yao, Z., & Enright, R. (2018). The role of consequences of moral action in maximizing moral elevation. Journal of Moral Education, 47(4), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2018.1428540
Acknowledgements
The authors sincerely thank the reviewers and editors for many productive suggestions during the interactive review. We would like to thank Editage (www.editage.cn) for English language editing.
Funding
This work was supported by General Program (No. 2023-ZZJH-314) from the Humanities and Social Sciences Projects of Education Department of Henan Province of China and Key Program (No. 18ZDA331) from the National Social Science Fund of China.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
ZX conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed and interpreted the data, wrote the report. CL and XT revised the manuscript. BZ had a role in the study design.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Xie, Z., Zuo, B., Tan, X. et al. Facing the future: intended moral acts evoke greater elevation than completed ones. Curr Psychol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-05994-7
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-05994-7