Decision conflict drives reaction times and utilitarian responses in sacrificial dilemmas

Abstract

In the sacrificial moral dilemma task, participants have to morally judge an action that saves several lives at the cost of killing one person. According to the dual process corrective model of moral judgment suggested by Greene and collaborators (2001; 2004; 2008), cognitive control is necessary to override the intuitive, deontological force of the norm against killing and endorse the utilitarian perspective. However, a conflict model has been proposed more recently to account for part of the evidence in favor of dual process models in moral and social decision making. In this model, conflict, moral responses and reaction times arise from the interplay between individually variable motivational factors and objective parameters intrinsic to the choices offered. To further explore this model in the moral dilemma task, we confronted three different samples with a set of dilemmas representing an objective gradient of utilitarian pull, and collected data on moral judgment and on conflict in a 4-point scale. Collapsing all cases along the gradient, participants in each sample felt less conflicted on average when they gave extreme responses (1 or 4 in the UR scale). They felt less conflicted on average when responding to either the low- or the high-pull cases. The correlation between utilitarian responses and conflict was positive in the low-pull and negative in the high-pull cases. This pattern of data suggests that moral responses to sacrificial dilemmas are driven by decision conflict, which in turn depends on the interplay between an objective gradient of utilitarian pull and the moral motivations which regulate individual responsiveness to this gradient.

Individual attitudes towards moral costs and benefits drive responses to moral dilemmas

“…If the two principles in question are activated simultaneously, their relative strength determines the response, as in a ‘tug of war’ between conflicting attitudes. Simultaneous activation fits the evidence of conflict in participants, which MPT models have some difficulty explaining (Baron & Goodwin, 2020; Bialek & de Neys, 2016; Liu & Liao, 2021; Rosas, Bermúdez et al., 2019; see the useful discussion of the implications of MPT models in this respect in Baron & Goodwin, 2021, section 7). If participants consider the positive balance in the outcomes conditional on not considering the cost of the deontological violation, and vice versa, as the MPT approach assumes, they should not feel any conflict when confronting dilemmas.…”

“…Participants do not just estimate whether the moral benefits are greater than the costs. They care about how much greater they are, counting a rights‐violation as a weighty cost (Bucciarelli, 2015; Christensen et al., 2014; Gürçay & Baron, 2017; McGuire et al., 2009; Moore et al., 2008; Rosas & Aguilar‐Pardo, 2020; Rosas, Bermúdez et al., 2019; Rosas & Koenigs, 2014; Ryazanov et al., 2021; Trémolière & Bonnefon, 2014). The weighty cost of a rights‐violation is the reason why people generally do not judge that causing deaths is permissible whenever more lives are saved.…”

A tale of two histories: Dual-system architectures in modular perspective

“…There is accumulating evidence that the utilitarian response is not slower Cova et al, 2021;Koop, 2013;Rosas, 2019;, despite a body of evidence indicating that it is (Greene, Morelli, Lowenberg, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2008;Suter & Hertwig, 2011;. De Neys argues that such dilemmas simply involve two competing intuitions, and he gives no reason to think that they are driven by distinct processes.…”

We know what stops you from thinking forever: A metacognitive perspective

“…There is accumulating evidence that the utilitarian response is not slower Cova et al, 2021;Koop, 2013;Rosas, 2019;, despite a body of evidence indicating that it is (Greene, Morelli, Lowenberg, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2008;Suter & Hertwig, 2011;. De Neys argues that such dilemmas simply involve two competing intuitions, and he gives no reason to think that they are driven by distinct processes.…”