No Utilitarians in a Pandemic? Shifts in Moral Reasoning during the COVID-19 Global Health Crisis

Antoniou, Rea; Romero-Kornblum, Heather; Jc, Young; M, You; Kramer, Joel H.; Chiong, Winston

doi:10.31234/osf.io/yjn3u

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Some studies have examined the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on moral decision making in adults. However, most of these studies have focused on contrasting utilitarian and deontological responses to hypothetical dilemmas and revealed mixed findings (Antoniou et al, 2020;Francis & McNabb, 2020;Navajas et al, 2020). To the best of our knowledge, no study has examined the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the endorsement of moral foundations.…”

Section: Chronic Moral Foundations As the Determinants Of Moral Priorities In Threatening Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such situations create tension between maintaining one's moral priorities (e.g., loyalty) and reducing the spread of COVID-19 (Prosser et al, 2020). Although these issues make the COVID-19 pandemic quite relevant to moral decision making research, only limited studies have examined how this pandemic influences moral judgments (Antoniou et al, 2020;Francis & McNabb, 2020). In addressing this gap, the current study draws on the Moral Foundation Theory (MFT; Haidt, 2007), and mainly Originality This manuscript has not been published in any language before and has not being considered concurrently for publication elsewhere.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Deciding between moral priorities and COVID-19 avoiding behaviors: A moral foundations vignette study

2021

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Novel moral norms peculiar to the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in tension between maintaining one’s preexisting moral priorities (e.g., loyalty to one’s family and human freedoms) and avoiding contraction of the COVID-19 disease and SARS COVID-2 virus. By drawing on moral foundations theory, the current study questioned how the COVID-19 pandemic (or health threat salience in general) affects moral decision making. With two consecutive pilot tests on three different samples ( n s ≈ 40), we prepared our own sets of moral foundation vignettes which were contextualized on three levels of health threats: the COVID-19 threat, the non-COVID-19 health threat, and no threat. We compared the wrongness ratings of those transgressions in the main study ( N = 396, M age = 22.47). The results showed that the acceptability of violations increased as the disease threat contextually increased, and the fairness, care, and purity foundations emerged as the most relevant moral concerns in the face of the disease threat. Additionally, participants’ general binding moral foundation scores consistently predicted their evaluations of binding morality vignettes independent of the degree of the health threat. However, as the disease threat increased in the scenarios, pre-existing individuating morality scores lost their predictive power for care violations but not for fairness violations. The current findings imply the importance of contextual factors in moral decision making. Accordingly, we conclude that people make implicit cost-benefit analysis in arriving at a moral decision in health threatening contexts. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-021-01941-y.

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Section: Chronic Moral Foundations As the Determinants Of Moral Priorities In Threatening Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Deciding between moral priorities and COVID-19 avoiding behaviors: A moral foundations vignette study

2021

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Trolleys, triage and Covid-19: the role of psychological realism in sacrificial dilemmas

Kneer

Hannikainen

2021

Cognition and Emotion

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At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, frontline medical professionals at intensive care units around the world faced gruesome decisions about how to ration life-saving medical resources. These events provided a unique lens through which to understand how the public reasons about real-world dilemmas involving trade-offs between human lives. In three studies (total N = 2298), we examined people's moral attitudes toward triage of acute coronavirus patients, and found elevated support for utilitarian triage policies. These utilitarian tendencies did not stem from period change in moral attitudes relative to pre-pandemic levels--but rather, from the heightened realism of triage dilemmas. Participants favored utilitarian resolutions of critical care dilemmas when compared to structurally analogous, non-medical dilemmas-and such support was rooted in prosocial dispositions, including empathy and impartial beneficence. Finally, despite abundant evidence of political polarization surrounding Covid-19, moral views about critical care triage differed modestly, if at all, between liberals and conservatives. Taken together, our findings highlight people's robust support for utilitarian measures in the face of a global public health threat, and illustrate how hypothetical scenarios in moral psychology (e.g. trolley cases) should strive for more experiential and psychological realism, otherwise their results might not generalize to real-world moral dilemmas.

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No Utilitarians in a Pandemic? Shifts in Moral Reasoning during the COVID-19 Global Health Crisis

Cited by 2 publications

References 19 publications

Deciding between moral priorities and COVID-19 avoiding behaviors: A moral foundations vignette study

Deciding between moral priorities and COVID-19 avoiding behaviors: A moral foundations vignette study

Trolleys, triage and Covid-19: the role of psychological realism in sacrificial dilemmas

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