Effect of mindfulness training on moral judgment
REGRESSION, SESSION
We next investigated the manifestations of the moral slippery slope effect in moral judgment. Previous studies using the harm aversion task (only the Other condition is used in these studies) to study moral judgment have consistently demonstrated that when an observer evaluate the moral wrongness or blameworthiness of a harmful choice in the task, their judgments are strongly influenced by the two choice attributes, ∆m and ∆s. Not surprisingly, the more harm a decider causes (i.e., larger ∆s), the more blameworthy or wrong their choice is judged. ∆m, in contrast, plays an opposite role compared to ∆s, in that the more money the decider can obtain by choosing the harmful option, the less blameworthy or wrong their choice is judged, suggesting that profit to some extent justifies harmful choicesHere, we ran two linear mixed effect model to explain trial-by-trial moral judgment rating in terms of choice attributes (∆m and ∆s), Group (Training vs. Control), Session (Pre- vs. Post-training), and their joint effects. First, we examined whether moral judgments varied across groups and experimental sessions. In this regression, we included the main effects of group and experimental sessions, and their interaction. Participants’ harm aversion in the decision-making task (i.e., κWe next included the choice attributes (∆m and ∆s) in the regression model. We were specifically interested in whether the weights of ∆m and ∆s changed overtime and if so, whether mindfulness training had an impact on such changes. To this end, in the regression, we included the main effects of choice attributes, and all two-way and three-way interactions with Group and Session. Covariates were the same as the first model. We found that the weights of ∆m and ∆s significantly changed overtime, as indicated by significant interactions with Session (session-by-∆m: Did the two groups exhibited the same degree of changes? The three-way interaction of group-by-session-by-∆s was not significant (To illustrate this, we used heatmap to display how group average blameworthiness judgment varied as a function of ∆m and ∆s, separately for each group (Fig. Effects of mindfulness training on the cognitive components of moral judgments. Compared with the Pre-training session (dotted line), the same amount of monetary gain (Δ