scholarly journals Response time modelling reveals evidence for multiple, distinct sources of moral decision caution

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milan Andrejević ◽  
Joshua P. White ◽  
Daniel Feuerriegel ◽  
Simon Laham ◽  
Stefan Bode
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Decision ◽  
Model Framework ◽  
Decision Bias ◽  
Moral Judgements ◽  
Information Dynamic ◽  
Moral Valence ◽  
Diffusion Decision Model

AbstractPeople are often cautious in delivering moral judgments of others’ behaviours, as falsely accusing others of wrongdoing can be costly for social relationships. Caution might further be present when making judgements in information-dynamic environments, as contextual updates can change our minds. This study investigated the processes with which moral valence and context expectancy drive caution in moral judgements. Across two experiments, participants (N = 122) made moral judgements of others’ sharing actions. Prior to judging, participants were informed whether contextual information regarding the deservingness of the recipient would follow. We found that participants slowed their moral judgements when judging negatively valenced actions and when expecting contextual updates. Using a diffusion decision model framework, these changes were explained by shifts in drift rate and decision bias (valence) and boundary setting (context), respectively. These findings demonstrate how moral decision caution can be decomposed into distinct aspects of the unfolding decision process.

scholarly journals Response time modelling reveals evidence for multiple, distinct sources of moral decision caution

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milan Andrejević ◽  
Joshua Paul White ◽  
Daniel Feuerriegel ◽  
Simon Laham ◽  
Stefan Bode
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Decision ◽  
Model Framework ◽  
Decision Bias ◽  
Moral Judgements ◽  
Information Dynamic ◽  
Moral Valence ◽  
Diffusion Decision Model

People are often cautious in delivering moral judgments of others’ behaviours, as falsely accusing others of wrongdoing can be costly for social relationships. Caution might further be present when making judgements in information-dynamic environments, as contextual updates can change our minds. This study investigated the processes with which moral valence and context expectancy drive caution in moral judgements. Across two experiments, participants (N = 122) made moral judgements of others’ sharing actions. Prior to judging, participants were informed whether contextual information regarding the deservingness of the recipient would follow. We found that participants slowed their moral judgements when judging negatively valenced actions and when expecting contextual updates. Using a diffusion decision model framework, these changes were explained by shifts in drift rate and decision bias (valence) and boundary setting (context), respectively. These findings demonstrate how moral decision caution can be decomposed into distinct aspects of the unfolding decision process.

scholarly journals A new scaling rule for context-dependent moral judgments.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Gomis-Pont ◽  
Mari Carmen Navarro-Plaza ◽  
Joaquin Navajas ◽  
Rodrigo Quian Quiroga ◽  
Salvador Sala ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Control Mechanism ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Gain Control ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Decision ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Quantitative Assessments ◽  
Scaling Rule

Moral judgments are typically explained by a combination of either deontological considerations about the nature of actions, or quantitative assessments of the consequences of those actions. These proposals, however, have serious limitations such as being insensitive to personal biases and global circumstances. This study presents an alternative approach based on comparative affective evaluations that modulate responses as more contextual information is presented to the choice set. We show that, when we make a moral decision, we do not simply judge the action and/or its consequences, we judge the protagonist performing the action embedded in a given set of circumstances and we normalize their behavior using the same gain control mechanism that operates in other sensory and motor domains. The explanatory power of this novel approach is broader than that provided by traditional paradigms and can be easily applied to more ecologically relevant scenarios.

Framing Morality: How Antecedent-Focused Strategies Can Shape Moral Judgments

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Kappes ◽  
Jay Joseph Van Bavel
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Decision ◽  
Process Dissociation ◽  
Moral Decision Making ◽  
First Response ◽  
High Conflict

From moral philosophy to programming driverless cars, scholars have long been interested in how to shape moral decision-making. We examine how framing can impact moral judgments either by shaping which emotional reactions are evoked in a situation (antecedent-focused) or by changing how people respond to their emotional reactions (response-focused). In three experiments, we manipulated the framing of a moral decision-making task before participants judged a series of moral dilemmas. Participants encouraged to go “with their first” response beforehand favored emotion-driven judgments on high-conflict moral dilemmas. In contrast, participants who were instructed to give a “thoughtful” response beforehand or who did not receive instructions on how to approach the dilemmas favored reason-driven judgments. There was no difference in response-focused control during moral judgements. Process-dissociation confirmed that people instructed to go with their first response had stronger emotion-driven intuitions than other conditions. Our results suggest that task framing can alter moral intuitions.

scholarly journals Do Moral Judgements Motivate Free Will Belief?

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Elliott Monroe ◽  
Dominic Ysidron
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Causal Relationship ◽  
Attribution Theory ◽  
Replication Study ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Experiment Study ◽  
Norm Violation ◽  
Immoral Behavior ◽  
Moral Judgements ◽  
Do So

Free will is often appraised as a necessary input to for holding others morally or legally responsible for misdeeds. Recently, however, Clark and colleagues (2014), argued for the opposite causal relationship. They assert that moral judgments and the desire to punish motivate people’s belief in free will. In three experiments—two exact replications (Studies 1 & 2b) and one close replication (Study 2a) we seek to replicate these findings. Additionally, in a novel experiment (Study 3) we test a theoretical challenge derived from attribution theory, which suggests that immoral behaviors do not uniquely influence free will judgments. Instead, our nonviolation model argues that norm deviations, of any kind—good, bad, or strange—cause people to attribute more free will to agents, and attributions of free will are explained via desire inferences. Across replication experiments we found no evidence for the original claim that witnessing immoral behavior causes people to increase their belief in free will, though we did replicate the finding that people attribute more free will to agents who behave immorally compared to a neutral control (Studies 2a & 3). Finally, our novel experiment demonstrated broad support for our norm-violation account, suggesting that people’s willingness to attribute free will to others is malleable, but not because people are motivated to blame. Instead, this experiment shows that attributions of free will are best explained by people’s expectations for norm adherence, and when these expectations are violated people infer that an agent expressed their free will to do so.

scholarly journals Famine, Affluence, and Amorality

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Sackris
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
First Person ◽  
Moral Decision ◽  
Moral Decision Making ◽  
Distinct Kind ◽  
Ordinary Case ◽  
Made In ◽  
The Way

I argue that the debate concerning the nature of first-person moral judgment, namely, whether such moral judgments are inherently motivating (internalism) or whether moral judgments can be made in the absence of motivation (externalism), may be founded on a faulty assumption: that moral judgments form a distinct kind that must have some shared, essential features in regards to motivation to act. I argue that there is little reason to suppose that first-person moral judgments form a homogenous class in this respect by considering an ordinary case: student readers of Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. Neither internalists nor externalists can provide a satisfying account as to why our students fail to act in this particular case, but are motivated to act by their moral judgments in most cases. I argue that the inability to provide a satisfying account is rooted in this shared assumption about the nature of moral judgments. Once we consider rejecting the notion that first-person moral decision- making forms a distinct kind in the way it is typically assumed, the internalist/externalist debate may be rendered moot.

scholarly journals The Role of Emotions in Moral Judgments: Time-resolved evidence from event-related brain potentials

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronja Demel ◽  
Michael Waldmann ◽  
Annekathrin Schacht
Keyword(s):  
Event Related Potentials ◽  
Emotional Valence ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Brain Potentials ◽  
Time Resolved ◽  
Moral Context ◽  
Early Processing ◽  
Related Potentials ◽  
Moral Valence ◽  
Relationship Of

AbstractThe influence of emotion on moral judgments has become increasingly prominent in recent years. While explicit normative measures are widely used to investigate this relationship, event-related potentials (ERPs) offer the advantage of a preconscious method to visualize the modulation of moral judgments. Based on Gray and Wegner’s (2009) Dimensional Moral Model, the present study investigated whether the processing of neutral faces is modulated by moral context information. We hypothesized that neutral faces gain emotional valence when presented in a moral context and thus elicit ERP responses comparable to those established for the processing of emotional faces. Participants (N= 26, 13 female) were tested with regard to their implicit (ERPs) and explicit (morality rating) responses to neutral faces, shown in either a morally positive, negative, or neutral context. Higher ERP amplitudes in early (P100, N170) and later (EPN, LPC) processing stages were expected for harmful/helpful scenarios compared to neutral scenarios. Agents and patients were expected to differ for moral compared to neutral scenarios. In the explicit ratings neutral scenarios were expected to differ from moral scenarios. In ERPs, we found indications for an early modulation of moral valence (harmful/helpful) and an interaction of agency and moral valence after 80-120 ms. Later time sequences showed no significant differences. Morally positive and negative scenarios were rated as significantly different from neutral scenarios. Overall, the results indicate that the relationship of emotion and moral judgments can be observed on a preconscious neural level at an early processing stage as well as in explicit judgments.

scholarly journals Can moral judgments be objectively justified?

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elvio Baccarini
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Judgements

An attempt is made to justify spontaneous moral judgements along anti- relativistic lines. The target of polemic is the work of G. Harman, specifically his thesis that the moral is just the result of implicit agreement of comunity. After criticising this standpoint by appeal to considerations of coherence and reliability, the author concludes by rehearsing the pragmatic point against relativism.

scholarly journals SENSITIVITAS ETIS DAN PERTIMBANGAN MORAL MAHASISWA AKUNTANSI TERHADAP DILEMA BISNIS

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-40
Author(s):  
Kiki Apriyana ◽  
Lisa Martiah Nila Puspita
Keyword(s):  
Regression Analysis ◽  
Negative Influence ◽  
Moral Intensity ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Accounting Students ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Ethical Sensitivity ◽  
Societal Pressure ◽  
Moral Judgements ◽  
The Impact

and perceived societal pressure) to the ethical sensitivity and moral judgments of accounting students andto prove the influence of the dimension of moral intensity to the moral judgments through ethical sensitivity. Thisstudy used four case scenarios to explain the impact of the dimension of moral intensity, such as passing ofcompany policies, approving of a questionable expense report, manipulating of company books, and extending ofquestionable credit, by using 85 samples of accounting students in University of Bengkulu. Primary data wereobtained from the result of the dissemination of the questionnaires. The testing of hypotesis in this study was usingmultiple regression analysis and hierarchical regression analysis. The result showed that perceived overall harmhas negative influence to the ethical sensitivity and moral judgements of accounting students, meanwhile perceivedsocietal pressure has positive influence to the ethical sensitivity and moral judgments of accounting students. Theresult also showed that the perceived overall harm and perceived societal pressure influence moral judgements ofaccounting students through ethical sensitivity.Key words: Ethical Sensitivity, Moral Judgments, Moral Intensity, Perceived Overall Harm, and PerceivedSocietal Pressure.

scholarly journals Political Dogma Stroll’s non political moral decision making

2013 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 33-44
Author(s):  
Ibrahim Noorani ◽  
Khurram Shakir ◽  
Muddasir Hussain
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Preliminary Evidence ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
Affective Responses ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Decision ◽  
Moral Decision Making ◽  
Moral Decisions

Ethical enigma kernelling concerns about actions against concerns about consequences have been dealt by philosophers and psychologists to measure “universal” moral intuitions. Although these enigmas contain no evident political content, we decipher that liberals are more likely than conservatives to be concerned about consequences, whereas conservatives are more likely than liberals to be concerned about actions. This denouement is exhibited in two large, heterogeneous samples and across several different moral dilemmas. In addition, manipulations of dilemma averseness and order of presentation suggest that this political difference is due in part to different sensitivities to emotional reactions in moral decision-making: Conservatives are very much inclined to “go with the gut” and let affective responses guide moral judgments, while liberals are more likely to deliberate about optimal consequences. In this article, extracting a sample from Western Europe, we report evidence that political differences can be found in moral decisions about issues that have no evident political content. In particular, we find that conservatives are more likely than liberals to attend to the action itself when deciding whether something is right or wrong, whereas liberals are more likely than conservatives to attend to the consequences of the action. Further, we report preliminary evidence that this is partly explained by the kernel of truth from the parodies – conservatives are more likely than liberals to “go with the gut” by using their affective responses to guide moral judgment.

Striving to make the difference

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iphigenia Moulinou
Keyword(s):  
Conflict Management ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Juvenile Delinquents ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Emotional Communication ◽  
Prosodic Features ◽  
Moral Indignation ◽  
The Difference ◽  
And Control

The present paper discusses issues of language aggression, conflict and identity, and of emotional communication and conflict. In particular, it explores different positionings of deviant identity as projected by a number of juvenile delinquents through the display of moral indignation (Ochs et al. 1989; Günthner 1995), at moments of crisis and conflictual relationships between them. Moral indignation is expressed through the co-occurrence of a number of linguistic and discursive devices, such as hypothetical examples and personal analogies (Günthner 1995; Kakavá 2002), prosodic features, implicit or explicit moral judgments (Günthner 1995), or non-literal threats. These devices are employed in interaction in order to construct opposing moral versions of identities. The paper argues for a tight interweaving between moral indignation, affect, identity indexing, and moral positioning. It further argues that displays of indignation are powerful interactional devices of conflict management and control of the moral and social order and of social relationships.

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