This study bridges cognitive and organizational psychology, focusing on how cognitive processes, particularly global and local processing, interact with perceived distance to influence judgments, attributions, and moral evaluations in workplace scenarios. By administering a questionnaire, data from 213 participants were collected and analyzed to understand how cognitive processes interact with moral questionability, attribution, and psychological distance within the workplace. During this research, we sought to confirm six hypotheses. The first two concerned attributions, focusing on whether local processing could influence people to resort to situational attribution, while global processing could favor dispositional attribution. Hypotheses three and four tested whether global processing made the behaviours perceived as morally objectionable and psychologically more distant than local processing. With hypothesis five, we wanted to investigate whether high psychological distance was associated with high moral questionability. The sixth hypothesis examined whether cognitive processing's impact on moral blame is partially mediated by perceived psychological distance. The findings revealed that individuals in the local processing condition were inclined to attribute behaviour more to dispositional factors, whereas those in the global processing condition tended to attribute it more to situational factors. Furthermore, people in the local processing condition perceived behaviours as more morally questionable and psychologically distant. Further analysis of Hypotheses 5 and 6 regarding the influence of perceived psychological distance on moral questionability and the mediating role of psychological distance between cognitive processes and moral questionability showed that there is a positive relationship between psychological distance and moral questionability and that perceived psychological distance has a mediating role between cognitive processes and moral questionability.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-130315 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Nugaela, Vidusha, Carlesso, Luca |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för psykologi (PSY) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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