BEIJING.- Selfother bias can engender disagreement, misunderstanding, and conflict in real-world interactions. Moral perspectives are powerful in shaping thoughts and behaviors. Whether there is a selfother moral bias is poorly understood.
A research team led by Dr. Rao Lilin from the
Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences demonstrated the selfother moral bias at the conceptual level and found that the selfother moral bias was expressed in natural language on the Internet.
In a previous study, using moral dilemmas, Dr. Rao's team demonstrated a selfother bias in moral judgment. When faced with moral dilemmas, people were more deontological (less utilitarian) when they made decisions themselves than when they surmised what a stranger would do.
In this work, the researchers conducted three studies. Study 1 used the Implicit Association Test to examine the implicit association between selfother and deontologyutilitarianism. Study 2 used the evaluative priming task to further confirm the results of Study 1. Study 3 investigated the association between self and other words and deontological and utilitarian words in large bodies of natural-language text (i.e., a standard corpus of English-language text from the Internet).
In Studies 1 and 2, the researchers consistently observed that the association of deontological words (in Chinese) with self words was stronger than with other words and that the association of utilitarian words with other words was stronger than with self words. In Study 3, they further demonstrated that the selfother bias moral could be reflected in natural language. These results suggested that the selfother moral bias were generalized, independent of specific contexts.
The findings of the selfother moral bias have important implications for communication. In many real-life situations, an action can be justified by deontology and utilitarianism at the same time. An awareness of the selfother moral bias may facilitate a better understanding of others' attitudes and behaviors.
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and it was publisged on Personality and Individual Differences on July 8.