Positive Emotions in Moral Judgment - 1 Running head: Positive Emotions in Moral Judgment What Would Seinfeld Do? Divergent Effects of Different Positive Emotions on Moral Judgment

Positive emotions are often characterized as being relatively indistinct in their cognitive-behavioral effects, and as having unambiguously beneficial consequences. For example, Valdesolo and DeSteno (2006) reported that a humorous video made people more prone to choose a utilitarian solution to a moral dilemma. They attributed this finding to increased positive affect. To determine whether such results actually stem from the general influence of positive affect or from other more specific properties of humor, we conducted an experiment with moral dilemmas presented during an interleaved emotion-induction procedure using mirth and another positive emotion, elevation. Mirth increased but elevation decreased permissiveness for utilitarian solutions to moral dilemmas. Furthermore, positive affective valence had no apparent independent influence on preferences for these solutions. Our results, which support an appraisal-tendency hypothesis, suggest that mirth and elevation have distinct cognitive consequences whose properties reflect their respective social functions and transcend their shared positive valence. Positive Emotions in Moral Judgment 3 Divergent Effects of Different Positive Emotions on Moral Judgment Although positive psychology has advanced our understanding of positive emotions, they are still less well understood than negative emotions. Whereas a rich body of theory emphasizes how negative emotions differ in their cognitive and social functions, neural bases, and physiological correlates, valence still plays the primary role for many theoretical accounts of positive emotion (e.g., Fredrickson, 2004). Accounts of this sort have encouraged experimenters to use diverse types of stimuli for eliciting positive emotion, treating all sources of positive affect as essentially equivalent (e.g., Isen et al., 1985; Hamann et al., 2002). In a study that exemplifies this trend, Valdesolo and DeSteno (2006) used a single humorous video to induce positive affect before having participants resolve a moral dilemma, the footbridge problem (Thomson, 1976). This problem concerns whether it is acceptable to push a stranger off a bridge in order to prevent a trolley from killing several other people underneath. Showing the humorous video increased participants’ tendency to favor the unconventional utilitarian solution (pushing the stranger off the bridge). Explaining these results, Valdesolo and DeSteno claimed that positive affect attenuates the negative affect that would normally accompany this choice. We call this explanation the negativity-diminishment hypothesis (cf. Fredrickson et al., 2000). However, there is another possibility based on the appraisal-tendency hypothesis (Lerner & Keltner, 2000), which posits that the influence of emotions stems from multiple dimensions that include more than just affective valence. Emotions that have the same valence may nevertheless differ in terms of properties associated with their unique cognitive, motivational, and social functions. The appraisal-tendency hypothesis has been tested successfully for negative emotions, and it may conceivably hold for positive emotions, though this possibility remains untested at present (Lerner et al., 2007). Positive Emotions in Moral Judgment 4 According to the appraisal-tendency hypothesis, Valdesolo and DeSteno’s (2006) results may not have stemmed from positive affect, but rather from the distinct properties of mirth, the positive emotion associated with humor (Martin, 2007). Mirth may tend to encourage indifference toward social norms and decrease empathy toward outsiders (Terrion & Ashforth, 2002; Fessler & Haley, 2003). Such tendencies suggest that mirth would increase permissiveness for unconventional utilitarian solutions to moral dilemmas, which involve harming a single person, often an outsider, in order to save the group. If this alternative explanation is correct, then other positive emotions might not have the same effect on moral judgments as mirth does. For example, consider the positive emotion called elevation, which arises from witnessing acts of moral beauty, and establishes a mindset that makes people want to act in a more noble, saint-like way (Haidt, 2003; Silvers & Haidt, 2008). When it comes to moral dilemmas, elevation might therefore make people less likely to endorse the violence or direct harm entailed by the utilitarian solution of a moral dilemma, instead encouraging solutions that seem decent rather than cold and calculating. Given these considerations, our research has two related objectives. First, we investigate the extent to which positive affect necessarily increases preferences for utilitarian solutions to moral dilemmas. Second, we investigate whether particular positive emotions can have consequentially distinct influences on judgment and decision-making. Empirical Approach To achieve our objectives, we have devised a new interleaved emotion-induction and decision priming procedure. It included multiple trials for each participant. On each trial, an emotion-induction stimulus was presented, a participant rated the degree of emotional response to it, and then rated the permissibility of a utilitarian solution to a moral dilemma presented immediately afterwards. Across Positive Emotions in Moral Judgment 5 trials, numerous induction stimuli and moral dilemmas occurred, enabling us to measure the degree of induced emotion and how much it primed permissibility ratings. To avoid confounds between qualitatively different emotional states, we had each participant serve under only one emotioninduction condition. Our procedure has several advantages. It provides repeated measures of the priming effects caused by induced emotions, testing to what extent they occur reliably across individual emotion stimuli and moral dilemmas. This approach has considerably more power and generality than singletrial methods, which involve many fewer (possibly idiosyncratic) stimuli. Such power and generality may be especially important when assessing subtle effects of emotions like mirth and elevation.