Universals and variations in moral decisions made in 42 countries by 70,000 participants

Awad, Edmond; Dsouza, Sohan; Shariff, Azim; Rahwan, Iyad; Bonnefon, Jean‐François

doi:10.1073/pnas.1911517117

Cited by 166 publications

(134 citation statements)

References 38 publications

(40 reference statements)

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“…Awad et al. ( 2020 ) have revisited the well-known “trolley problem” in which one must rank two scenarios. In the “switch scenario”, a trolley is about to kill five workers, but can be redirected to a different track, in which case it will kill one worker.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

If the Objective is Herd Immunity, on Whom Should it be Built?

Gollier

2020

Environ Resource Econ

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Assuming that there is no other solution than herd immunity in front of the current pandemic, on which groups of citizens should we build this herd immunity? Given the fact that young people face a mortality rate which is at least a thousand times smaller than people aged 70 years and more, there is a simple rational to build it on these younger generations. The transfer of some mortality risk from the elderly to younger people raises difficult ethical issues. However, none of the familiar moral or operational guidelines (equality of rights, VSL, QALY, ...) that have been used in the Western world over the last century weights the value of young lives 1000 times or more than the lives of the elders. This suggests that Society could offer covid protection to the elders by recommending them to remain confined as long as this herd immunity has not been attained by the younger generations. This would be a potent demonstration of intergenerational solidarity towards the most vulnerable people in our community. The welfare gain of this age-specific deconfinement strategy is huge, as it can reduce the global death toll by more than 80% as compared to a strategy of non-targeted herd immunity.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

If the Objective is Herd Immunity, on Whom Should it be Built?

Gollier

2020

Environ Resource Econ

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“…Therefore, for each matrix, there were only 3 options in a variable order: Competition, Equality, and Maximizing option (see above). The matrices presented either a distribution of bonus points 2 , penalties 2 , or a combination thereof 2 . The combination matrices were primarily filler items added for exploratory purposes and were not included in the main analyses, but additional analyses with these combination matrices are presented at the osf page.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…People who decide to sacrifice the one workman to save the lives of the five others are considered to display utilitarian morality, whereas those who reject the option to sacrifice a life as an acceptable trade-off, display non-utilitarian or deontological morality 1 . This quite straightforward approach and empirical operationalization of a philosophical construct as intricate as utilitarianism has given an invaluable boost to empirical research in moral psychology, leading to a number of high-profile studies (e.g., 2 – 5 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Utilitarianism in minimal-group decision making is less common than equality-based morality, mostly harm-oriented, and rarely impartial

Roets

Bostyn

keersmaecker

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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In the study of utilitarian morality, the sacrificial dilemma paradigm has been the dominant approach for years. However, to address some of the most pressing issues in the current research literature, the present studies adopt an alternative approach by using a minimal group paradigm in which participants have to make decisions about the allocation of resources. This approach allows not only to pit utilitarianism against equality-based morality, but also to study these modes of morality for both harm and benefit, and to directly address the role of group identity affecting the (im)partial nature of ‘utilitarian’ (i.e., outcome maximizing) decisions. In our experiments, across four different samples (total N = 946), we demonstrate that although participants generally prefer equality-based allocations over maximizing distributions, outcome maximizing choices become more prevalent when they served to minimize harm compared to maximizing benefit. Furthermore, reducing the objective value of the equal distribution outcomes further prompts participants to adopt a more utilitarian approach in situations involving harm, but has little effect in situations where benefits have to be distributed. Finally, the introduction of (minimal) group identity consistently demonstrates that decisions that maximize the overall outcome are more likely if they also serve the ingroup compared to when they rather serve the outgroup. We discuss how these findings have meaningful implications that may be especially relevant for recent movements that advocate a utilitarian approach to charity, and for our understanding of (im)partiality in lay people’s ‘utilitarian’ decision making.

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“…Several hundred studies employing sacrificial dilemmas are in print to date (for reviews, see Christensen & Gomila, 2012), many of which have been very influential (e.g., Bartels & Pizarro, 2011;Cushman et al, 2006;Greene et al, 2001Greene et al, , 2009Patil, 2015). The trend continues, with some studies exploring whether consequentialist intuitions vary across cohorts (Hannikainen et al, 2018), cultures (Awad et al, 2020), modes of presentation such as virtual reality (Francis et al, 3 2016(Francis et al, 3 , 2017 or when real harm is administered (i.e., to mice: see Bostyn et al, 2018), to name but a few examples.…”

Section: Sacrificial Dilemmasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trolleys, Triage and Covid-19: The Role of Psychological Realism in Sacrificial Dilemmas

Kneer¹,

Ir²

2020

Preprint

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At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, frontline professionals at intensive care units around the world faced gruesome decisions about how to ration life-saving medical resources. These events provided a unique context for moral psychologists to understand how the general public reasons about real-world dilemmas involving trade-offs between human lives—in contrast to most prior research pursuing parallel questions via hypothetical thought experiments with limited relevance to the real world. In three studies (total N = 2387), we examined people’s moral attitudes toward triage of acute coronavirus patients. Our findings indicate that people generally support utilitarian approaches to critical care triage. These utilitarian tendencies do not stem from period change in people’s moral attitudes (relative to pre-pandemic levels); rather, people favor utilitarian resolutions of critical care dilemmas more than structurally analogous, non-medical dilemmas. Support for utilitarian triage decisions was rooted in prosocial dispositions, including empathy and impartial beneficence—which defies the received wisdom in moral psychology. Finally, despite abundant evidence of political polarization surrounding COVID-19, moral attitudes toward critical care triage differed modestly 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. Our results also illustrate how the dominant research methods in moral psychology may be handicapped by their reliance on hypothetical stimuli (e.g., trolley cases) and could deliver insights that do not generalize to real-world, ethical priorities.

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Universals and variations in moral decisions made in 42 countries by 70,000 participants

Cited by 166 publications

References 38 publications

If the Objective is Herd Immunity, on Whom Should it be Built?

If the Objective is Herd Immunity, on Whom Should it be Built?

Utilitarianism in minimal-group decision making is less common than equality-based morality, mostly harm-oriented, and rarely impartial

Trolleys, Triage and Covid-19: The Role of Psychological Realism in Sacrificial Dilemmas

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