Implicit investigation of affect-based intuitions in moral judgement
For many decades, the dominant view has been that consciously controlled reasoning processes mediate moral judgments. More recently, however, it has been discovered that emotional reactions (e.g., disgust) strongly moderate moral judgments. In our project, we aimed at a better understanding of the interplay between emotions and moral judgments. To this aim we manipulated both the emotional and moral content of stimuli and collected behavioral and psychophysiological measures to pinpoint the type and the dynamics of the processes involved. We found that women evaluate scenarios describing helpful behavior more positive than men do, while there were no gender differences in the judgments of harmful actions. Data from EEG recordings indicate that the integration of emotion and morality becomes rapidly evident.