Vou have always hated the blond, thin and pink dolls that many little girls love. If it were up to you, you’d throw away the ones that get in your way. And yet when you see one lying around the living room, you would almost restyle it before gently putting it away. You are therefore capable of changing your point of view out of love.
This is what Rachel Magid and Laura Schulz of MIT, Cambridge, call “moral alchemy”. It’s not about emotional contagion or the influence someone you love has on you. Indeed, you continue to hate these dolls, but you almost have a moral obligation to give value to what has value for your loved ones. In order to highlight this phenomenon, these two researchers have developed an original protocol. First, the participants had to give their opinion on a fact, such as: “Exercising is essential to staying healthy. » Then they had to imagine what people in general think or what a loved one thinks of this statement. Finally, they were asked to judge to what extent not respecting this statement was inadmissible.
Moral obligations and the gaze of our loved ones
The results show that not doing sport is more serious if our other half considers that it is necessary to do so. Our moral obligations are therefore intimately linked to the opinion of those close to us. Does this mean that love truly makes us blind? It seems that as upright as we are, as soon as our loved ones are at stake, our good resolutions of impartiality and moral righteousness are shattered! In fact, according to a study by Jamie Hughes and his colleagues at the University of Texas, mistreating loved ones is considered more immoral than treating strangers just as badly. Two weights, two measures.
In a later study, the same author goes even further by asking participants to judge two scenarios, one biased and the other impartial. In the partial condition, a young woman decides to spend the day with her mother who lives alone. In the impartial condition, she chooses instead to volunteer for an association, and her action will thus help several people for several weeks. After listening to the scenario, the participants must evaluate the young woman’s personality (moral or not), her behavior (based on moral principles or not) and also judge on a scale of 1 to 7 her degree of solidarity, compassion and kindness. Guess what ? Regardless of the utilitarian moral aspects (helping the greatest number of people), the young woman has all the qualities in the eyes of the participants if she makes a biased choice and spends a day with her mother.
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