Choosing between the Emotional Dog and the Rational Pal: A Moral Dilemma with a Tail

Abstract

Neuroscientific studies indicate moral cognition involves a cognitive struggle between two systems in the brain: the emotional "hot" system and the rational "cold" system. Past research has shown that when presented with personal dilemmas, individuals showed greater brain activity in the hot system areas. However, when further probed about their decisions, moral dumbfounding often occurs. Family selection may help explain moral judgments. Oftentimes, people consider their pets as part of their family. Based on the past research on moral decision-making, the current study presented a novel approach to exploring moral decision-making by forcing participants to choose to save the life between biological family and psychological-kin. Participants (n = 573) were given moral dilemmas and forced to decide whether to save humans or pets from imminent death. The level of relationship between the human shifted six times (foreign tourist, hometown stranger, distant cousin, best friend, grandparent, and sibling), while relationship to the pet had two levels (your pet, someone else's pet). Willingness to save a pet over a human consistently decreased as level of relationship between the participant and the human in the scenario increased. Participants were also more likely to save their own pet over a human life than someone else's pet over a human life. The results suggest that pets are often viewed as psychological-kin. Females were found to be more likely to save their pets over non-immediate family members than males (all ps < 0.05), suggesting that males and females may differ in the structure of their moral reasoning.

Searching for Moral Dumbfounding: Identifying Measurable Indicators of Moral Dumbfounding

“…Taking these responses to be indicators of a state of dumbfoundedness, it appears that moral dumbfounding can be evoked in face-to-face and online contexts. As such, the research presented here may be seen as more support for the existence of intuitionist theories of moral judgement (e.g., Cushman et al, 2010;Greene, 2008;Haidt, 2001;Hauser et al, 2008;Prinz, 2005) over rationalist theories (e.g., Kohlberg, 1971;Topolski et al, 2013).…”

“…In recent years moral dumbfounding has been challenged by a number of authors (e.g., Gray et al, 2014;Jacobson, 2012;Sneddon, 2007;Wielenberg, 2014), arguing, in line with rationalist theories of moral judgement (Kohlberg, 1971;Narvaez, 2005;Topolski, Weaver, Martin, & McCoy, 2013), that moral judgements are grounded in reasons. Recent work by Royzman, Kim, and Leeman (2015), involving a series of studies focusing on the Incest dilemma, identified two reasons that may be guiding participants' judgements.…”

“…This work is an attempt to identify possible reasons that may be guiding the judgement of participants and in limiting its focus to a single scenario (Incest), it is not classed here as a direct replication of the original work by Haidt et al (2000). 3 These are largely theoretical arguments offering explanations of dumbfounding that are consistent with a rationalist perspective (e.g., Kohlberg, 1971;Topolski, Weaver, Martin, & McCoy, 2013 2017), and wordcountaddin (0.2.0, Marwick, n.d.). 5 Some differences were observed in Study 3b, however these existed only when scenarios were grouped by type, this inter-scenario variation in rates of dumbfounding is not equivalent to that observed in Study 1.…”

What Makes You Swipe Right?: Gender Similarity in Interpersonal Attraction in a Simulated Online Dating Context

“…Moral decisionmaking scenarios have been the basis of numerous research studies on moral reason ing (e.g., Topolski, Weaver, Martin, & McCoy, 2013). In some classic scenarios, research participants were asked to choose whether to kill one individual in order to save a larger group of people.…”

“…Previous research found that, when participants were presented with a dilemma in which there was a limited supply of a drug, nearly all the participants said that they would give their pet, rather than a stranger, the drug under at least one circumstance (Cohen, 2002). In a related study, researchers examined the likelihood that one would save an animal's life over a human life (Topolski et al, 2013). Specifically, Topolski et al (2013) manipulated the degree of relatedness to the participant (i.e., sibling, grandparent, close friend, distant cousin, hometown stranger, and foreign tourist) and measured the effect of related ness on participants' likelihood of saving a human or their pet.…”