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In some situations, a person’s tendency to trust his intuition or “gut” can keep him from committing immoral acts, researchers from the University of Missouri (USA) proved after a series of psychological experiments.
“Some of us trust our “gut” when they are required to make an immediate decision, while others tend to ignore such intuitive ideas, even if they have them. We were interested in how such individual differences in attitudes towards one’s own intuition affect behavior in a situation of moral choice, ”explains lead author Sarah Ward, a graduate student in the department of psychology at the College of Sciences and Arts at the University of Missouri.
Pass the tests
- What is the “guide” of your intuition?
The researchers conducted two experiments involving more than 100 volunteers (about 75% women). To start, the participants filled out a series of questionnaires that measured the extent to which they were accustomed to relying on their intuition. In the first experiment, volunteers from the experimental group were asked to imagine that they had committed an immoral act at work – having made a mistake, they shifted responsibility to a colleague (or colleagues). Participants in the control group were required to recall a similar situation with the only difference: having made a mistake, they had to take full responsibility for themselves.
Sarah Ward suggested that the thought of committing an imaginary immoral act can cause subjects to experience feelings of guilt and shame. Previous studies have shown that in such situations, people often feel “dirty”, “dirty”. Her assumptions were confirmed: it turned out that those participants in the experiment who were accustomed to relying on intuition, after an imaginary misconduct, so wanted to “cleanse themselves” of their deeds that they were ready to buy hand sanitizer, spending significantly more money on it than usual.
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- Develop your intuition
In the second experiment, the subjects were asked to write about some immoral act of theirs (participants from the control group wrote on a different topic), and then they were asked to take an “unsolvable” IQ test. The test consisted of ten questions, while on the table the subjects had turned over pieces of paper with “answers” for self-examination. At the end of the test, the participants had to set their own marks, while the top 10% promised a lottery ticket as a reward. Up to 23% of the subjects rated themselves dishonestly.
“Our second experiment showed that people who are used to relying on intuition are less likely to cheat after they remember their past unsightly actions. We believe that in this way they are trying to atone for their past sins by doing the right thing in the present moment,” says Sarah Ward. She suggests that these results show that in situations requiring moral choices, it is worth trusting intuition.
Подробнее см. S. Ward, L. King «Individual differences in intuitive processing moderate responses to moral transgressions», Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 87, December 2015.