Update Seedmoney Grant project #2023.05 – “All self-transcendent but different? The distinctive role of awe in sacrificial moral dilemma”

Xueting Zhang (leiden university), Chenxiao Zhao (leiden university), and Hongyu Sun (VU Amsterdam) received the KLI Seedmoney Grant in 2023 (project #2023.05) for their project on “All self-transcendent but different? The distinctive role of awe in sacrificial moral dilemma”.

We received the grant for the project “All self-transcendent but different? The distinctive role of awe in sacrificial moral dilemma” in December 2023. The project aimed to test the effect of awe and other self-transcendent emotions on moral judgments in sacrificial dilemmas. So far, we have conducted one pilot study and two main studies (all preregistered). We plan to run the last study and write the manuscript by the end of this year.

Study 1 aimed to test the effect of awe on moral judgments in sacrificial dilemmas. We used previously validated videos to induce awe and neutral emotion and then asked participants to judge the appropriateness of utilitarian actions in sacrificial dilemmas. Contrary to our hypothesis, participants in the awe condition judged utilitarian actions as less appropriate (instead of more appropriate) than those in the neutral condition. The results from the Process Disassociation analysis yielded the same finding.

Study 2 attempted to explore whether compassion (as another self-transcendent emotion) had the same effect as awe. We first ran a pilot study to validate a new compassion-inducing video. Study 2 used the same design as Study 1 except that we added a condition for compassion. Inconsistent with Study 1, however, no significant main effects of awe and compassion were found.

We suspect that this might be because induced emotions last relatively short, and the dilemma set we used consisted of 20 scenarios and was emotion-trigerring, which might override the effect of awe and compassion. Thus, in Study 3, we plan to test whether dispositional awe, compassion, and gratitude (another commonly experienced self-transcendent emotion) are associated with moral judgments in sacrificial dilemmas.

It has been a valuable opportunity to collaborate with other fellow PhD candidates across universities. As our main PhD projects are somewhat overlapped but still different, we learned a lot from each other’s expertise and perspectives. Despite some challenges, such as unexpected results and how to allocate the grant effectively across studies, we managed to come up with solutions and make meaningful progress. We are grateful for this experience and look forward to applying what we have learned in our future research.