The influence of decision time on sensitivity for consequences, moral norms, and preferences for inaction: Time, moral judgments, and the CNI model

Abstract

It is often discussed that moral judgments are either consistent with the principle of utilitarianism or with the principle of deontology. Utilitarianism is a moral principle stating that the right act is the one that produces the best overall outcome. Deontology represents an ethical position indicating that the morality of an action depends on the intrinsic nature of the action regardless of the consequences. Criticism on the structure of moral dilemmas includes the problem that these dilemmas confound norms and consequences. Recently, a multinomial model (the CNI model) was developed to disentangle and measure sensitivity to consequences (C), sensitivity to moral norms (N), and general preference for inaction versus action (I), respectively. In Experiment 1, we examined the influence of time pressure on moral judgments using the CNI model. We found that time pressure influenced moral dilemma judgments by decreasing participants' sensitivity for consequences. There were no significant effects of time pressure on participants' sensitivity to norms and general preference for inaction. Furthermore, in Experiment 2, we examined the link of reaction times to moral judgments more closely by fitting a hierarchical Bayesian version of the CNI model. Longer reaction times lead to an increase in parameter N, and there was no influence of reaction times on parameter C or I.

Brains, trains, and ethical claims: Reassessing the normative implications of moral dilemma research

“…12. Different from the effect of cognitive load in Gawronski et al's (2017) studies, Kroneisen and Steghaus (2021) found that time pressure reduced sensitivity to consequences on the CNI model's C parameter. However, this effect failed to replicate in a follow-up study reported in the same article.…”

Consequences, norms, and general action tendencies: Understanding individual differences in moral dilemma judgments.

“…Further analyses using the CNI model suggest that this negative relation is driven by a positive association between need for cognition and sensitivity to moral norms. A conceptually similar link has been found in studies that have used reaction times as an indicator of cognitive elaboration, showing that longer reaction times are associated with greater sensitivity to moral norms (Kroneisen & Steghaus, 2021). A potential explanation for the conflicting findings is that low plausibility of the dilemmas in prior research produces artificial associations that do not reflect genuine differences in moral preferences (see Körner et al, 2019).…”

Remembering the bad ones: Does the source memory advantage for cheaters influence our later actions positively?

“…Hierarchical multinomial modelling is an increasingly popular approach in memory research (Marevic et al, 2018;Schaper et al, 2019) but is also used in other research fields (Kroneisen et al, 2021;Kroneisen & Heck, 2020). In line with Schaper et al (2019), we used a twostep strategy to test (1) whether source memory and guessing processes differed between trustworthy and untrustworthy looking cheaters and cooperators and (2) whether there is a relationship between these source-monitoring processes and decision making during the decision-task.…”