Discrepancies between Judgment and Choice of Action in Moral Dilemmas

Abstract

Everyone has experienced the potential discrepancy between what one judges as morally acceptable and what one actually does when a choice between alternative behaviors is to be made. The present study explores empirically whether judgment and choice of action differ when people make decisions on dilemmas involving moral issues. Two hundred and forty participants evaluated 24 moral and non-moral dilemmas either by judging (“Is it acceptable to…”) or reporting the choice of action they would make (“Would you do…”). We also investigated the influence of varying the number of people benefiting from the decision and the closeness of relationship of the decision maker with the potential victim on these two types of decision. Variations in the number of beneficiaries from the decision did not influence judgment nor choice of action. By contrast, closeness of relationship with the victim had a greater influence on the choice of action than on judgment. This differentiation between evaluative judgments and choices of action argues in favor of each of them being supported by (at least partially) different psychological processes.

Divergent roles of autistic and alexithymic traits in utilitarian moral judgments in adults with autism

“…over appropriateness of action ("Is it appropriate for you to do it?") because: (i) it tends to be more emotionally arousing 102 , (ii) it tends to elicit more egocentric/self-focused (versus allocentric/other-focused) frame of reference because of potential self-relevant consequences 103 , and (iii) perceived appropriateness of utilitarian course of action on moral dilemmas does not differ in ASD 11 (as compared to healthy controls). Thus, the behavioural choice of action provides a more sensitive measure to tap into moral cognition in autism.…”

“…and found that alexithymia was predictive of acceptability judgments only in controls but not in ASD and concluded that autistics' judgments were based on complying with social rules and were less susceptible to emotional biases. It is possible that these differences stem from emotional saliency of the stimuli used across studies; moral dilemmas involve situations where the individuals have to mull over behavioural choice of directly harming or even killing someone for the benefit of the many and are, thus, inherently highly emotionally evocative 49 , while providing more objective acceptability judgments about emotional sentences may not engage emotional processes to the same extent 102,103 . Another possibility is that there was not enough variation in alexithymia scores in their ASD group to detect an effect (indeed, variance in alexithymia scores in the control group was higher than in the ASD group in the previous study 6 ).…”

Sacrificing oneself or another

“…The observed effects of judgment type and framing underscore how question wording may influence moral judgment (O'Hara, Sinnott-Armstrong, & Sinnott-Armstrong, 2010;Pastötter, Gleixner, Neuhauser, & Bäuml, 2013;Tassy et al, 2013). It is possible that similar wording effects might limit generalizability of other previously found effects on moral judgment and researchers should pay attention to wording effects in future studies to overcome these possible limitations.…”

“…That different types of judgment may lead to different moral evaluations was observed in previous studies which showed lower approval of utilitarian actions in case of normative, rather than descriptive judgments 3 (Tassy, Oullier, Mancini, & Wicker, 2013), and lower approval of aggressive retaliation after being provoked in case of prescriptive, rather than descriptive judgments (Goldstein, Tisak, & Boxer, 2002).…”

Do as I Say, Don’t Do as I Do: Differences in moral judgments do not translate into differences in decisions in real-life trolley problems

“…Some previous experiments on actions in moral dilemmas have asked participants to predict their own behavior (e.g. Bartels, 2008;Petrinovich & O'Neill, 1996;Schaich Borg, Hynes, Van Horn, Grafton, & Sinnott-Armstrong, 2006;Tassy, Oullier, Mancini, & Wicker, 2013). Predictions of behavior have been shown to be notoriously unreliable (Osberg & Shrauger, 1986;Vallone, Griffin, Lin, & Ross, 1990).…”