dynamic construction of moral judgment

The time dynamics of moral judgments were investigated in two studies. In the first, participants recorded verbal recollections of an event in which they had been treated unjustly by another. Listening to their own recordings, participants used a relatively new instrument (the mouse paradigm) to express their moment to moment feelings, attributing "responsibility," "justification" and "intent" to their antagonist. In a second experiment, a different group of participants recorded their feelings about a scripted academic honor code violation. While listening to their recordings, participants used the computer mouse to indicate their moment to moment feelings about the "actor," "transgression," and "punishment" described in the story. Results from both studies suggest that at any one moment, participants made judgments that uniformly characterized the transgressor in either positive or negative terms. Expressions of moral judgments, however, often changed dramatically from moment to moment between positive or negative modal values. Moreover, the flow of moral judgment resembled the temporal patterns observed in many formal and natural dynamical systems. Despite these changes, moral judgments became more stable over time; demonstrated coherence among the separately measured dimensions; and showed sensitivity to an importance manipulation. By replicating these classic findings in the attitude literature, this research helps validate the utility of the mouse paradigm in measuring moral judgments. The results further suggest that moral judgments are multi modal over time---casting doubt on the usefulness of the (averaged) judgments that are computed with traditional questionnaire instruments.