Using a naturalistic stimulus to investigate moral deliberation, moral verdict and their relations with affect

• Grant number: 21/14866-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: July 01, 2022
• End date: October 22, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Experimental Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Paulo Sérgio Boggio
• Grantee: Mateus Silvestrin
• Host Institution: Centro de Ciências Biológicas e da Saúde (CCBS). Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie (UPM). Instituto Presbiteriano Mackenzie. São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 23/06209-0 - Effects of the cardiac cycle on moral judgements of fairness, BE.EP.PD

Abstract

Moral judgement is the decision making process regarding moral subjects. The vast majority of moral judgement studies investigate moral verdicts, the final outputs of decision making. Studies about evidence accumulation during moral decision making, the deliberation stage, are scarce. Our knowledge about the relations between moral judgement and affect rely almost exclusively on studies about instantaneous associations between these processes. Furthermore, most studies investigate the associations between judgement and specific emotions, in spite of more fundamental affective features. In this project, we propose the use of a naturalistic stimulus, a narrative video, to study moral deliberation and verdict, and also their associations with fundamental affective features. Narrative videos allow the progressive and variable unfolding of the processes at hand. Therefore, we will investigate the simultaneous evolution of moral deliberation and positive and negative affect, allowing for a characterization of how much these phenomena vary together. To enrich the affective screening beyond the affective states during stimuli, participants'affective traits will be assessed. Presumably, different affective traits should lead to distinct emotional state trajectories during the naturalistic stimulus and, possibly, to distinct trajectories in the moral deliberation process. The project is composed of three studies: one for the development of the moral deliberation and verdict task; one to validate the translation of an affective trait scale; and one to investigate the associations among moral deliberation, verdict and affective state and traces. (AU)