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.