Moral Decision-Making during COVID-19: Moral judgments, moralisation, and everyday behaviour

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to pose significant health, economic, and social challenges. Given that many of these challenges have moral relevance, the present study investigates whether the COVID-19 pandemic is influencing moral decision-making and whether moralisation of behaviours specific to the crisis predict adherence to government-recommended behaviours. While proto-utilitarian tendencies and utilitarian moral judgments remain unchanged during the pandemic, individuals have moralised non-compliant behaviours associated with the pandemic such as failing to physically distance from others. Importantly, our findings show that this moralisation predicts individual compliance with government-recommended behaviours and as such, provides significant implications for public messaging strategies during the pandemic.

‘Distancers’ and ‘non‐distancers’? The potential social psychological impact of moralizing COVID‐19 mitigating practices on sustained behaviour change

“…When both sides of the spectrum feel their particular preference is the morally correct course of action, the other party is not just 'different' but 'wrong' (Goodwin & Darley, 2012). As COVID-19 mitigating behaviours (such as social distancing or mask wearing) are so strongly seen as morally relevant practices (Francis & McNabb, 2020), their continued enactment as regulations ease means potentially walking on socially thin ice. Perceived moral motivation for behaviour, regardless of specific content of the moral arguments, is enough to produce defensiveness and self-concept threat in others, which may lead individuals to 'doubledown' on their own moralized behaviour and derogate others who behave differently (Cramwinckel, van Dijk, Scheepers & van den Bos, 2013).…”

Moral Decision-Making, Stress, and Social Cognition in Frontline Workers vs. Population Groups During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Explorative Study

“…The aim of study 1 was to compare the moral decision-making, level of perceived stress, the ability of mentalizing, and empathy in front-line workers (FLW), second-line workers (SLW), and university students (US) during COVID-19 pandemic. As pointed out by Francis and McNabb (2020), moral judgment can be influenced by specific features of the situation and characteristics of decision-makers, such as mood.…”

“…During an emergency like a pandemic, some decisions are made under stress and several studies showed that stress can influence moral decision-making (Lützen et al, 2010;Starcke et al, 2011;Starcke and Brand, 2012;Youssef et al, 2012;Romero-Rivas and Rodríguez-Cuadrado, 2020). As pointed out by Francis and McNabb (2020), the COVID-19 pandemic caused radical changes in social, community, health, and political practices that could affect what is considered right or wrong and moral principles underlying decision-making processes. Moreover, public messages inspired by moral principles have increased considerably during pandemic (Everett et al, 2020;Francis and McNabb, 2020).…”

“…As pointed out by Francis and McNabb (2020), the COVID-19 pandemic caused radical changes in social, community, health, and political practices that could affect what is considered right or wrong and moral principles underlying decision-making processes. Moreover, public messages inspired by moral principles have increased considerably during pandemic (Everett et al, 2020;Francis and McNabb, 2020). These public messages from government institutions, celebrities and health officials, urged citizens to adopt certain behaviors as moral imperatives referring, for example, to utilitarian, virtue-based or deontological moral theories (Mill, 1863;Singer, 1972;Hursthouse, 1999;Scanlon, 2003;Brooks et al, 2020;Everett et al, 2020).…”

“…Some recent studies examined empathy (Jordan et al, 2020;Oosterhoffand Palmer, 2020;Pfattheicher et al, 2020), psychological consequences (Cao et al, 2020;Elmer et al, 2020;Li et al, 2020;Oosterhoffand Palmer, 2020;Qiu et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2020) and moral decision-making (Francis and McNabb, 2020;Romero-Rivas and Rodríguez-Cuadrado, 2020) in people during COVID-19 pandemic. To our knowledge, there are no studies that focused on specific categories of individuals that have undergone different changes in their lives during pandemic.…”