Moral preferences in helping dilemmas expressed by matching and forced choice

Abstract

This paper asks whether moral preferences in eight medical dilemmas change as a function of how preferences are expressed, and how people choose when they are faced with two equally attractive help projects. In two large-scale studies, participants first read dilemmas where they “matched” two suggested helping projects (which varied on a single attribute) so that they became equally attractive. They did this by filling in a missing number (e.g., how many male patients must Project M save in order to be equally attractive as Project F which can save 100 female patients). Later, the same participants were asked to choose between the two equally attractive projects. We found robust evidence that people do not choose randomly, but instead tend to choose projects that help female (vs. male), children (vs. adult), innocent (vs. non-innocent), ingroup (vs. outgroup) and existing (vs. future) patients, and imply no (vs. some) risk of a harmful side-effect, even when these projects have been matched as equally attractive as, and save fewer patients than the contrasting project. We also found that some moral preferences are hidden when expressed with matching but apparent when expressed with forced choice. For example, 88–95% of the participants expressed that female and male patients are equally valuable when doing the matching task, but over 80% of them helped female patients in the choice task.

Seven (weak and strong) helping effects systematically tested in separate evaluation, joint evaluation and forced choice

“…The third lesson is that preferences inferred from attractiveness ratings and resource allocations in joint evaluation do not always correspond with preferences obtained from forced choices, despite that these decision modes share the joint evaluation feature (Erlandsson et al, 2020;Slovic, 1975). The clearest evidence of this is found in the weak gender effect where participants expressed no preference between saving 6 male and 6 female patients when expressed with ratings or resource-allocations, but a robust preference for helping females when they were forced to choose.…”

“…As predicted by the prominence effect (Slovic, 1975;Tversky et al, 1988), people do not choose randomly when faced with two alternatives that they previously rated as equally attractive, but instead tend to choose the alternative that is superior on the relatively more prominent attribute. This applies both when choosing which product to buy (Nowlis & Simonson, 1997), and when making moral choices about which people to help (Erlandsson et al, 2020). This article will test both forms of the IVE in all three decision modes.…”

“…( 3) That all helping effects were tested using non-behavioral outcome variables. Possible ways to further improve helping-effect research include investigating where the efficiency related tipping points are for different effects (e.g., how many future patients must be treated in order to surpass treating one existing patient; Dolan & Tsuchiya, 2011;Erlandsson et al, 2020), investigating cultural, demographic and personality-based differences in both weak and strong helping effects (e.g., Deshpande & Spears, 2016;Fiedler, et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2015), and investigating whether different effects are differently affected when moving from hypothetical helping decisions to real (cost-incurring) helping decisions (Ferguson et al, 2019).…”

The prominence effect in health-care priority setting

“…Comparison with other studies. The prominence effect is a stable behavioral phenomenon that has been studied theoretically and empirically in the judgement and decisionmaking literature (Busemeyer & Johnson, 2004;Erlandsson et al, 2020;Erlandsson, 2021;Slovic, 1975;Sunstein, Kahneman, Schkade & Ritov, 2002;Tversky et al, 1988;Zhang & Slovic, 2019). It is also gaining traction as an explanation for the systematic failure of national governments to prevent humanitarian disasters in foreign countries (Slovic & Slovic, 2015).…”

Does the evaluability bias hold when giving to animal charities?

“…A third issue is that despite being sufficiently-powered, the sample sizes are quite small. Fourth, when evaluating charities jointly, participants could have been motivated by fairness concerns in their donation allocations (Li & Hsee, 2019;Erlandsson et al 2020;Hsee et al, 2005).…”