Morality biases towards those who are closest.

• Main Author: Lim, Zheng Yong.
• Other Authors: Michael Donald Patterson
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences::Psychology::Consciousness and cognition
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/46514
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This study was about morality and its effect on memory. Numerous studies have been conducted in establishing development for the capacity of cognition and reasoning towards morality (Piaget, 1932). However, biases used by humans to justify their own actions and develop moral disengagement were found by Boardley and Kavussanu in 2007. These biases were found to be directional toward the self (Carver, De Gregorio, & Gillis, 1980; McAllister, 1996; Miller & Ross, 1975; Prolin, Lin, & Ross, 2002; Robins & Beer, 2001)and those with whom they held a close relationship (Tajfel, 1982) with the exception for some under life threatening situation (Favaro, Degortes, Colombo, & Santonastaso, 2000; Namnyak et al., 2008). This paper extends the study of morality and relationships to memory. No significant differences were found comparing the difference between the number of praiseworthy and blameworthy words remembered in each group. This contradicted the hypothesis that more praiseworthy words than blameworthy words would be remembered while these words were used in sentence construction if the person mentioned was themselves or someone close to them as opposed to acquaintance in the continuum of psychologically distance. The article concluded that biases may not be praiseworthy memory being encode and recall more readily or blameworthy memory being harder to encode and recall, just that the interpretation for these two memories differs.