Cold-hearted or cool-headed: physical coldness promotes utilitarian moral judgment

Abstract

In the current study, we examine the effect of physical coldness on personal moral dilemma judgment. Previous studies have indicated that utilitarian moral judgment—sacrificing a few people to achieve the greater good for others—was facilitated when: (1) participants suppressed an initial emotional response and deliberately thought about the utility of outcomes; (2) participants had a high-level construal mindset and focused on abstract goals (e.g., save many); or (3) there was a decreasing emotional response to sacrificing a few. In two experiments, we exposed participants to extreme cold or typical room temperature and then asked them to make personal moral dilemma judgments. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that coldness prompted utilitarian judgment, but the effect of coldness was independent from deliberate thought or abstract high-level construal mindset. As Experiment 2 revealed, coldness facilitated utilitarian judgment via reduced empathic feelings. Therefore, physical coldness did not affect the “cool-headed” deliberate process or the abstract high-level construal mindset. Rather, coldness biased people toward being “cold-hearted,” reduced empathetic concern, and facilitated utilitarian moral judgments.

The Role of Temperature in Moral Decision-Making: Limited Reproducibility

“… Nakamura et al (2014) investigated the effect of haptic temperature on moral judgments using the moral dilemma task. In this task, the offered dilemmas reflect situations in which the subject can save a larger number of lives by sacrificing one person’s life.…”

“…It has also been reported that a hot temperature promotes prosocial behavior ( Williams and Bargh, 2008 ) and enhances cooperative behavior in prisoner’s dilemma tasks ( Storey and Workman, 2013 ). On the other hand, research has shown that a cold temperature induces lower investment in trust games ( Kang et al, 2011 ), tougher inferences of suspect guilt ( Gockel et al, 2014 ), and more utilitarian judgments in moral dilemma tasks ( Nakamura et al, 2014 ). These studies suggested that temperature has a considerable impact on real-world behavior beyond simple task performance.…”

“…Researchers have raised the problem of the reproducibility of findings with respect to the effect of temperature on social cognition (e.g., Doyen et al, 2012 ). Previous experimental studies typically did not apply preregistration procedures (except the replication study by Lynott et al, 2014 ); a few studies conducted sample size calculation and power analysis ( Gockel et al, 2014 ; Nakamura et al, 2014 ; Steinmetz and Posten, 2017 ).…”

Assessing Individual Variation in Action Identification: Translation, Validation, and Shortening of the Polish Behavior Identification Form (BIF)

“…Originally developed to measure individual differences in identification level across action domains (i.e., level of personal agency), the BIF (Vallacher & Wegner, 1989) is widely regarded as a useful measure of differences in construal and abstraction level and is frequently employed in research on various aspects of cognition and behavior (e.g., Dar & Katz, 2005; Smith & Trope, 2006). The BIF has so far been translated and adapted into several languages, including Chinese (Gu & Tse, 2018), French (Brown, 2014), Dutch (Smith & Trope, 2006), Japanese (Nakamura, Ito, Honma, Mori, & Kawaguchi, 2014), and Turkish (Yetişer, 2014), but has not yet been validated in Polish. In fact, although action identification theory was introduced over three decades ago (Wegner & Vallacher, 1986), the local literature has largely overlooked it.…”

Precious Property or Magnificent Money? How Money Salience but Not Temperature Priming Affects First-Offer Anchors in Economic Transactions

“…For instance, people primed with coldness are more likely to choose a gift for themselves than for others. Many subsequent studies then focused on the connection of physical and social warmth, and provided hints for its bi-directionality ( IJzerman and Semin, 2009 ; Hu et al, 2016 ), while more recent studies have also taken coldness (rather than warmth) into consideration ( Nakamura et al, 2014 ; Willemse et al, 2015 ; Zhong and Leonardelli, 2015 ). The expressions ‘ keeping it cool’ or ‘ playing it cool’ are used in our everyday life to express self-control and non-emotional behavior.…”