Lecture 13: Emotions and Morality
What percent of Americans attend church once a month?
60%
What does not make sense about US?
According to our wealth and development level, 5% of us should see religion as important to life but 50% of us believe in God and devil We have a patriotic and conservative government due to founding Puritan values
Physical Body temperature and social warmth
Actual body temperature decreases after rejection experience and increases after inclusion experience recorded body temperature hourly and had patients rate how close they were feeling to family and friends correlation between body temperature and feeling close to others at the same time
Rejection and food preference
After rejection experience, greater preference for warm foods for lunch compared to cold foods
Founding ideologies on morality
Americans have a Puritan and Protestant work ethic from 400 years ago We were founded on Christian religion and patriotism in the 1600s We have the ideas that the harder you work, the better you are in the eyes of God People who work hard are good people
Scaffolding and metaphorical structures
Analogical reasoning Psychological concepts based on physical analogies We build abstract ideas upon physical concepts
Trolley Car Dilemma Greene and Cohen Study
Brain imaging while making moral decisions regarding the "trolley problem" discovered there are 2 different sources of moral judgments (moral and cognitive) People say pushing the fat man is morally wrong but that pulling the trigger is morally ok. Different brain regions are recruited when considering the two scenarios
Cultural differences in morality in terms of sports
Different sports and cultures have different standards about what is moral English commentators say that it is wrong to fake an injury in soccer Spanish commentators say "fake away!" because the ends justify the means. You are helping your team. Hockey: you just act like nothing happened when you are hit
Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail
Disgusting scenarios with all rational reasons for disgust removed Instead of moral reasoning producing the emotion, the emotion is experienced immediately and causes the reasoning The reasoning tends to support the immediate emotional reaction
Scaffolding and more abstract higher order concepts
Early formed original concepts based on physical experience and higher order goals and motives
Hard-wired connections and embodied cognition and emotions
hard-wired connections have developed, over time, between physical states and social concepts and motives
Physical priming of goals
Evolved goals for the survival and physical safety serve as the basis of goals that develop later in the person's life for psychological and social safety Satisfying the goals for survival turns off social safety needs
Mandler infant scaffolding
Infants can analyze and compare externally available information Formation of spatial concepts but no access to internal states Later internal psychological states are understood using physical concepts in analogical fashion
Metaphorical thought
Lakoff and Johnson: we think and communicate easily in terms of analogies Abstract terms are metaphorically related to basic physical terms Hot-headed, close-relationship, soft crime
Emotional reactions drive?
Moral judgments
Schnall clean room study
Moral judgments are more negative and severe when made in a dirty vs. clean room or after exposure to unclean vs. clean objects Relation between disgust and moral condemnation and cleanliness and moral purity or goodness
Social neuroscience replications and extensions of social priming studies
Replicated the jigsaw study but scenarios with rough primes caused judgments were less smooth and coordinated correlation between primary somatosensory cortex activation and the extremity of not-smooth judgments of interaction coordination
US compared to other countries
Other industrialized Protestant countries have become much less religious and traditional but US is still just as religious as it was 70 years ago In 2003, 40% of US attended church once a week like they did before WWII 7/10 Americans believe in devil
Room temperature study
People estimate room temperature to be colder after rejection experience and warmer after inclusion experience
Your highness study by Schubert
People react as fast as they can to words on the screen If you see a word denoting power that is presented on top of screen, you are faster works with lower words as well
Picture and power
People think those in higher positions in picture are more powerful
Paul Rozen power of disgust
People were unwilling to drink a favorite beverage into which a fully sterilized cockroach had been dipped They knew the drink was safe but couldnt get over disgust Cultures vary as to what they find disgusting Disgust is not based on taste but on knowledge of nature or origin of food in question
Bowlby and physical warmth
Physical warmth is naturally conflated with social warmth in early experience dictates attachment and ability to trust others
Activated brain regions and trolley problem
Pushing the fat man activates the more emotional centers like the amygdala
Earliest direct concepts about scaffolding
Spatial and other directly-experienced physical concepts are the earliest concepts formed by the infant As such they provide the foundational structure for later abstract concepts
Connection between temperature and social warmth
There is a common neural mechanism underlying the physical and social warmth evolved connections like Bowlby said
Physical and social pain connection
Tylenol The same brain region is activated for physical and social pain Like physical and moral connection between cleaniless
Social neuroscience and role of insula in social warmth
Warm/cold therapeutic pack and economics trust game People were betrayed in the economics game fMRI investigation of the insula found that the left anterior insula was more activated following cold vs. warm temperature and also more activated after betrayals of trust in economics game
Chapman disgust study about physically disgusting stimuli
We get the same reaction of facial disgust muscles when we see something physically digusting as we do when we hear about morally disgusting behavior Same EMG facial muscle response to physical and morally disgusting things
Changing Moral Standards
We have different moral standards for different social identities Depending on what is active, we change our moral standards The bankers had fewer morals in the coin reporting study when they had their banker identity activated
Emotional moral judgment
What you feel is right
Outgroup attitudes as disease prevention
When threatened with disease, vaccinated people exhibit less prejudice toward immigrants than unvaccinated people framing vaccination message in terms of immunity eliminates the relationship between chronic germ aversion and prejudice a disease protection manipulation (hand washing) is particulary effective for changing perceptions of outgroup members
Harry Harlow
Wire vs. cloth mothers the warm cloth mother enabled a successful transition of monkey into adulthood
Spatial map study
You can go to different stores but people would rather travel South because it is easier to follow gravity
Uhlmann and Bargh Religion and Country Study
Young potato peeler wins the lottery-- he either quits or keeps job How much do you like him? US likes him more if he keeps job and non-US likes him more if he quits job Puritans judge people by how hard they work
Physical and social sweetness
eating sweet foods related to prosocial behaviors (helpfulness) other people who like sweet food are more pleasant people who prefer sweet foods have more prosocial personalities tasting something sweet increased self reports of agreeableness daily diary studies show people do more helpful and prosocial things on days that they have eaten more sweet foods
Shared neural mechanisms underlying warmth and physical warmth
fMRI showed that reading of socially warm and neutral messages from friends and family and holding physically warm and neutral-temperature objects social warmth made people feel physically warmer and physical warmth made people feel socially warmer
Prejudice toward immigrants
function of disease threat and vaccination status if you are vaccinated, you have less prejudice
Hard vs. soft chair study
hard = less compromise in negotiations about price they were less likely to compromise if sitting in hard chair
General consumption goal has its roots in evolved need for food
hunger is underlying need state generalizes to broad, more abstract acquisition motive hunger makes you more likely to buy even more non-food products When you are hungry, you want to acquire more!
Hunger study
hunger makes you buy more at the supermarket unless you eat a test muffin first but hunger also makes you buy more at Target (self-reported hunger correlates with amount of money spent) hungry people also take more binder clips when given the opportunity, compared to non-hungry people
Heavy vs. light clipboard
in heavy condition, job candidate is rated as more serious about work and takes longer to complete evaluation (takes it more serious)
We share the same physical experiences so?
it is easy to talk to each other and understand each other we make analogies to physical experience and we understand them
Memory cause of embodied cognition and emotion
memory encodes bodily states associated with experiences arousal, low-energy can be associated with emotional experiences You remember how you felt in an instance and do it again
Physical priming of haptic sensations
metaphorical effects of physical touch on social judgment heavy=serious hard=difficult rough=effortful smooth=easy
Basic evolved goals
physical safety relates to disease avoidance hunger needs to be satisfied
Your Highness
power and verticality share metaphors looking up to someone high vs. low status
Scaffolding theory
psychological concepts are based on physical concepts
Spatial concepts
psychological distance emotional, relationships, temporal close relationship
Cognitive moral judgment
ration and focused on relative consequences
MacBeth Effect
recall a time when you did something immoral -> guilt People allowed to wash hands or not Would you help a grad student study? 74% if had not "washed away their sins" in sink vs. 41% if had
Underlying mechanisms of the physical priming
semantic priming (sweet, hard, smooth) innate structure (hard-wired) very early learning we could be having these effects because combination of verbal priming, evolved behavior, and early learning
Survival goals
shelter, food, water are basis for more abstract social goals more complex goals are actually driven by emotion and morality basics
4 Physical priming of social-psychological states
spatial (vertically, distance) temperature haptic sensations (rough/smooth) goals (survival, safety)
Jigsaw study
the jigsaw was either rough or smooth in texture The interactions went more smoothly if smooth texture
Temperature priming
there is a connection between physical and social warmth
Bargh and temperature study
took out warm/cold words in Asch study and replaced with an ice/warm beverage people saw the persona as warmer or colder depending on the drink people were influenced by the physical warmth
Asch
warm and cold are central traits we form impressions based on this trait
Fiske, Glick, Cuddy and warmth
warm-cold as one of 2 universal dimensions of outgroup stereotypes