Acute psychosocial stress and everyday moral decision-making in young healthy men: The impact of cortisol

Effects of gender and personality on everyday moral decision-making after acute stress exposure

“…Building on the previous findings of my master's thesis (Singer et al, 2017), we hypothesized a higher percentage of altruistic decisions after acute stress exposure compared to a non-stress condition. Additionally, in Study II (see Chapter 5), we examined potential effects of social closeness and timing on everyday moral decisionmaking after acute stress exposure (Singer et al, 2020), due to empirical evidence that social distance and timing of the experimental paradigm relative to stressor onset affect the degree of prosocial behavior.…”

“…Everyday moral dilemmas require decisions between the fulfilment of a moral standard or a social obligation toward another person versus a personal-oriented hedonistic behavior that would explicitly not cause serious bodily harm or legal consequences (Sommer et al, 2010). Typically, the presented response alternatives are altruistic (e.g., helping an old woman who is in distress) versus egoistic (e.g., catching the waiting bus home; further examples can be found in Singer et al, 2017, Sommer et al, 2010, or Starcke et al, 2011. Starcke et al (2011) and Rosen et al (2015) additionally subdivided their scenarios into high-versus low-emotional dilemmas.…”

“…By contrast, the scenarios of Sommer et al (2010) do rather resemble typical everyday life situations and have already been successfully applied in several experimental studies (Singer et al, 2017;Sommer et al, 2010Sommer et al, , 2014. Though, since in a systematic review of 2 BACKGROUND: STRESS AND MORAL DECISION-MAKING 34 19 experimental design parameters of moral dilemmas, Christensen and Gomila (2012) have pointed out the importance of considering several influential variables in moral dilemma research, a more comprehensive validation of such everyday moral dilemmas would be highly desirable.…”

“…Section 2.3.1 focuses on abstract moral dilemmas, and Section 2.3.2 concentrates on everyday moral dilemmas. In Section 2.3.3, the previous findings of my master's thesis, where I also investigated stress effects on everyday moral decision-making (Singer et al, 2017), are integrated into the broader field of research on stress and social decision-making.…”

“…To the best of my knowledge, the effects of acute stress exposure on everyday moral decision-making have only been investigated so far by Starcke et al (2011) and in my master's thesis, which has been successfully published as a research paper in Hormones and Behavior (see Singer et al, 2017).…”