Moral damage: A project for a pilot exploratory study

This project is aimed at trying to better define and quantify moral damage. Moral damage can be defined as the amount of moral suffering caused by a traumatic event. Lawyers are very interested in psychological research on this topic, since they need a tool to assess moral damage. But the first question that needs an answer is whether it is possible to measure it. Due to the extreme complexity of the topic, we intend to restrict the domain to car accidents. The idea is to show short videos of car accidents having different outcomes in terms the gravity of injuries, thus generating a situation that has a high emotional investment. We intend to measure some physiological parameters (e.g., heart rate, skin conductance...), to administer some questionnaires, and some tests, like the Implicit Association Test. People who had car accidents, together with a comparable control group, constitute the population we intend to test. These measures will help us to define a criterion to scale moral damage according to the category of car accident