People regularly take prosocial actions, making individual sacrifices for the greater good.Similarly, people generally avoid causing harm to others. These twin desires to do good and avoid harm often align, but can sometimes diverge, creating situations of moral conflict.Here, we examined this moral conflict using a modified dictator game. Participants chose how much money to allocate away from a recipient, who was designated as an orphan, creating a sense of harm. This money was then re-allocated to either the participant or a charity. People were strongly prosocial: they allocated more money away from the orphan for charity than for themselves. Furthermore, people left more money with the orphan when the harm was framed as a means (taking) than as a side effect (splitting). As predicted by dualprocess theories of moral decision making, response times were longer with the take action and positively correlated with the amount taken from the orphan. We conclude that just as people take positive actions for the greater good, they are similarly more willing to cause harm when it benefits others rather than themselves.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.