Lights Out: The Effects of Brightness on Judging Morally Ambiguous Behavior

Just this passed semester, your blog team had conducted a research based on a question posed Banerjee, Chatterjee, and Sinha (2012) regarding the association of brightness and darkness to moral judgment.

Given that light and dark appear to be linked to moral behavior, can ambient light affect the perception and evaluation of morally ambiguous behaviors?

 Their original study showed that when participants were asked to recall a good deed they have done in the past, they judged the room they were in to be brighter while participants who were asked to recall a morally wrong behavior in the past, judged the room to be darker (Banerjee, et. al., 2012).

Our research aimed to find out whether the brightness of the room affected the participants' judgments of a morally ambiguous behavior, and guess what? It did, and what more, participants who were in the bright condition gave softer, kinder forms of punishment and were more inclined to give a reward to the doer of the morally ambiguous behavior while participants in the dark condition gave harsher, stricter punishments and none were inclined to give any form of reward to the doer of the ambiguous behavior.

Light and dark have always been connected with good and evil. In media, villains, demons and evil are always depicted in dark colors while protagonists, angels and goodness are depicted in a brighter more vibrant manner.

Can you tell which ones are the angels of Paradiso and which ones are the infernal demons of Inferno from the pictures on the left? The pictures come from a game called Bayonetta and in this game, Paradise and angels are depicted in bright hues of white and gold while demons and infernal representations are depicted in hues of black, purple and red. In the Holy Bible, Jesus is known as the "Light of the world" while Lucifer is known as the "Prince of darkness" who disguises himself as an "Angel of light" to trick the people of the world. When I tell you to imagine heaven, do you imagine a dark and dim place or a bright, well-lit place?

Yin (black) and Yang (white): Respectively, negative and positive energies

Sleeping Beauty's Maleficent

Our study made use of an audio recording of a recently published news article in Pilipino Star Ngayon (Cantos, 2012) where an 11-year-old-daughter of a 38-year-old-abusive father, Alvin Victorio stabbed said man multiple times after seeing him hurt the mother Inday Victorio again and receiving no help from neighbors she has apparently asked for help. We manipulated the brightness of the room by turning the lights on for the bright condition, and turning the lights off for the dark condition. The true intentions of the experiment were masked until the debriefing [we told them it was to judge whether brightness affects their hearing comprehension].

A Likert scale was used to determine the acceptability of the stimulus, ranging from -3: Absolutely Wrong, -2: Wrong, -1: Slightly Wrong, 0: Undecided, +1: Slightly Right, +2: Right, to +3: Absolutely Right. A follow up question were asked as well inquiring the participants what forms of reward or punishment they would they give the 11-year-old if they were given the chance. Two versions of the questionnaire were used to control for the possible effects of the word order of ‘reward’ and ‘punishment’.   

The results of the t-test performed on the participants' ratings showed that those who were placed on the darker condition judged the stimulus to be more morally wrong (M = -1.07, SD = 1.64) than those who were placed on the bright condition (M = -0.17, SD = 1.80); t(58) = 2.02, p = .048, α = .05. As you can see, there's a 0.9 difference between the means of the dark and bright condition. Yes, they were significantly different!


As mentioned earlier, we've also asked them a qualitative question. It was found that people in the dark condition more freely gave punishments to the protagonist of the stimulus such as juvenile jail, youth correction community, and various rehabilitation centers while people in the light condition gave softer and lighter sentences to the protagonist. Both conditions recommended rehabilitation centers but dark conditions usually gave it as a form of punishment while those from the light condition recommended it as a form of treatment, protection and help for the protagonist. Punishments recommended in the light condition was justified as a means to teach the child and correct her behavior while punishments recommended in the dark condition were often given in conjunction to the notion that the child was mentally unstable or was a "psycho".

Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD): Participants recommended the child to be taken in by the government both as a form of punishment and as a form of reward

Moreover, only the participants in the light condition justified the actions of the protagonist to be that of self defense or to be an action that was done in order to save the mother. Some mentioned that the act of saving the mother should be rewarded even though the act of killing the father should be punished. One participant from the same condition also mentioned the act of the protagonist to be courageous and should be rewarded for it.

Zhong et al. (2010) coined the inclination of the people from the dark condition to give harsher judgments to the protagonist as being associated to illusory anonymity wherein it isn't that a person feels anonymous because he or she cannot be visually seen, but because of their own "phenomenological experience of darkness", likened to a child closing his or her eyes to believe in themselves that others will not be able to see them. This illusory anonymity gave the participants in the dark condition a sense of courage to be able to give an unpopular opinion, or a harsher opinion on the matter at hand.

The OFC

Physiologically, the effects of brightness and darkness to the inclination to give a reward or a punishment could be explained by the activities in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the insular cortex, directly responsible for positive and negative emotions (Tsukiura & Cabeza, 2011). The cortical pathway responsible for the perception of brightness is connected with the OFC which is responsible for eliciting positive emotions and rewarding of both real and imagined rewards (Huang, McEvoy & Paradiso, 2002; Bray, Shimojo & O’Doherty, 2010). The brightness of the room could have affected the activation of the OFC and consequently, also the reasoning behind the actions to be taken on the protagonist of the stimulus. 

Tsukiura and Cabeza (2011) also found that the insular cortex on the other hand is indirectly proportional to the OFC. As mentioned earlier, the insular cortex is responsible for the negative emotions. Thus, with the lesser activation of the OFC in the dark condition, the insular cortex is more greatly activated, eliciting negative emotions such as disgust, fear and punishment for the stimulus, making them more inclined to give punishments to the protagonist of the stimulus.

Can you see the significance of our study?

Next time you're feeling down, or find yourself thinking negatively, try going to a brightly lit place! It might help you think more positively and enforce more morally right thinking which would hopefully also be able to affect your behavior.

References:

Banerjee, P., Chatterjee, P., & Sinha, J. (2012). Is it light or dark? Recalling moral behavior changes
perception of brightness. Psychological science, 23 (4), 407-409. doi: 10.1177/0956797611432497.

Bray, S., Shimojo, S., & O'Doherty, J. (2010). Human Medial Orbitofrontal Cortex is recruited during Experience of imagined and real rewards. Journal of Neurophysiology, 103, 2506-2512. Retrieved from http://www.odohertylab.org/Publications/Bray2010_JNeurophys.pdf.

Cantos, J. (2012, September 18). Ama pinatay sa saksak ng 11-anyos anak. Pilipino Star Ngayon.
Retrieved from http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=850126&publicationSubCategoryId=49.

Huang, X., MacEvoy, S., & Paradiso, M. (2002). Perception of brightness and brightness illusions in the Macaque monkey. The Journal of Neuroscience,22(21), 9618-9625. Retrieved from http://www.jneurosci.org/content/22/21/9618.full.pdf.

Tsukiura, T., & Cabeza, R. (2011). Shared brain activity for aesthetic and moral judgments: implications for the Beauty-is-Good stereotype. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 6(1), 138-148.

Zhong, C., Bohns, V., & Gino, F. (2010). Good Lamps Are the Best Police:  Darkness Increases
Dishonesty and  Self-Interested Behavior. Psychological Science, 21(3) 311–314. doi: 10.1177/0956797609360754. Retrieved from http://www.francescagino.com/uploads/4/7/4/7/4747506/zhong_bohns_gino_psychs_2010.pdf