Table 3 . Contingency Table for the Imagery Direction Group.
Frequency distribution of the yes and no moral dilemma choices between
the pretest and posttest for the imagery direction group.
A McNemar’s Chi-squared test was conducted to test whether the switch
from Yes-to-No or No-to-Yes was different between the non-imagery and
imagery direction groups. For the non-imagery direction group, there was
no significant difference between Yes-to-No shift and No-to-Yes shift,χ2 (1, n =58) = 0.18, n.s . The results imply that
the potential effect of the practice was not observed. For the imagery
group, there was a significant difference between Yes-to-No shift and
No-to-Yes shift, χ2 (1, n =54) = 3.24, p = 0.07.
Specifically, more participants changed from Yes-to-No.
The results showed a marginal significance between the changes for those
who shifted before and after the imagery task. It was found that a
significant number of those responded ”yes” in the pretest settings but
shifted to ”no” in the posttest settings. When observing the percentage
of participants in the non-imagery group who shifted their responses
from pretest to posttest, we could observe that the rate of change from
yes to no or vice versa was close in number.
Though the significance was only marginal, this shift is consistent with
our hypothesis that exposing participants to mental imagery directions
increases deontological choices, as these results were only observed in
the imagery direction group. Our interpretation of these outcomes is
that the posttest conditions with the imagery direction either increased
the feeling of unacceptability towards the sacrifice action or decreased
the feeling of willingness to sacrifice.