Moral flexibility: defensive attitudes make us more severe

    Moral flexibility: defensive attitudes make us more severe

    There are many proofs
    which offer us the various scientific studies in the area of ​​psychology that we
    they confirm that we do not always act or decide in a completely conscious way.
    Lately Travis Proulx and Steven Heine, researchers at British Columbia University, have
    developed a very peculiar study with which they demonstrate how they can vary
    la moral flexibility of a
    person and his aggressive attitude with respect to the explicit threat level
    or implied that this experiences.



    To prove
    this involved 81 students who had to fill out a
    questionnaire in which they expressed their preferences regarding entertainment
    and free time. But for a subset of students, the researchers have
    organized a joke: while the experimenter tried to take the
    second part of the questionnaire by a cupboard was replaced, without it
    students realized it, by another girl dressed in the same way. As well as
    the researchers assumed, only five participants realized
    joke while the rest fell victim to blindness
    to change
    . Change blindness is a second perceptual phenomenon
    which people don't notice that something has changed within a
    context, even when the change is relevant. Why have
    place this phenomenon it is enough that the scene undergoes a transition
    temporal (just blink or move your eyes). It all depends on the
    the fact that we observe the context with an all-encompassing gaze and with one
    widespread attention, and if the scenes change in some details (as for
    example in the girl's face), our memory is unable to
    record the before and after so that we will not be aware of the
    differences. But back to the essence
    of the study, the researchers used another subgroup to which
    participants were asked to answer questions related to their own death,
    thus increasing the feeling of vulnerability and mortality of each of them. To a third
    subgroup (chosen as the control group), was only asked to
    complete a leisure time questionnaire. Finally, everyone
    a story about the arrest of a prostitute was told and he came
    asked them to judge her and determine what sum this would have to pay
    as a deposit (between 0 and 1000 dollars). Curiously i
    results showed that both the participants subjected to the phenomenon of
    change blindness as those who underwent the priming of death, were more severe and increased
    significantly the amount of the deposit. On the contrary, those who do
    they limited to answering questions related to free time showed themselves more
    condescending. The authors of the
    study suggest that the activation of personal, evoked threat patterns
    either consciously (with questions about death) or unconscious (with the
    replacement of the experimenter) help to create an attitude
    defensive that ends by affecting our judgments. Following the logic
    of experimenters, many small changes occurring in our environment,
    which we do not realize on a conscious level, could trigger in
    us a defensive attitude, making us less flexible and more people
    criticisms in our judgments. In short: when we are afraid of ours
    moral flexibility varies and we become more severe judges.
    I personally don't accept this idea, but if so, at least know how
    we work allows us to be more aware of our prejudices, and
    this is a step forward that will help us eliminate them.
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