Sacrificing oneself or another

Abstract

In situations where one has the opportunity to either sacrifice oneself or another person to save a group of people, one might think that there are instances where people would rather sacrifice themselves than others -thus showing an other-serving bias. So far however, most studies found instances of a self-serving bias -people would rather sacrifice others. In this paper, we test whether an other-serving bias might appear as a function of judgment type. That is, we looked at prescriptive (should/should not) and normative (wrong/right) types of judgments separately. We found that participants exhibited an other-serving bias, but only when asked whether self-or other-sacrifice is wrong. Otherwise, participants were exhibiting a self-serving bias; that is, they approved sacrificing others more. The results underscore the importance of question wording and suggest that some effects on moral judgment might depend on the type of judgment.