Response time modelling reveals evidence for multiple, distinct sources of moral decision caution

Andrejević, M., et al. 

(2020, November 13). 

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/fa57h

Abstract

People are often cautious in delivering moral judgments of others’ behaviours, as falsely accusing others of wrongdoing can be costly for social relationships. Caution might further be present when making judgements in information-dynamic environments, as contextual updates can change our minds. This study investigated the processes with which moral valence and context expectancy drive caution in moral judgements. Across two experiments, participants (N = 122) made moral judgements of others’ sharing actions. Prior to judging, participants were informed whether contextual information regarding the deservingness of the recipient would follow. We found that participants slowed their moral judgements when judging negatively valenced actions and when expecting contextual updates. Using a diffusion decision model framework, these changes were explained by shifts in drift rate and decision bias (valence) and boundary setting (context), respectively. These findings demonstrate how moral decision caution can be decomposed into distinct aspects of the unfolding decision process.

From the Discussion

Our findings that participants slowed their judgments when expecting contextual information is consistent with previous research showing that people are more cautious when aware that they are more prone to making mistakes. Notably, previous research has demonstrated this effect for decision mistakes in tasks in which people are not given additional information or a chance to change their minds.The current findings show that this effect also extends to dynamic decision-making contexts, in which learning additional information can lead to changes of mind. Crucially, here we show that this type of caution can be explained by the widening of the decision boundary separation in a process model of decision-making.

“Do the right thing” for whom? An experiment on ingroup favouritism, group assorting and moral suasion

E. Bilancini, L. Boncinelli, & others
Judgment and Decision Making, 
Vol. 15, No. 2, March 2020, pp. 182-192

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the effect of moral suasion on ingroup favouritism. We report a well-powered, pre-registered, two-stage 2x2 mixed-design experiment. In the first stage, groups are formed on the basis of how participants answer a set of questions, concerning non-morally relevant issues in one treatment (assorting on non-moral preferences), and morally relevant issues in another treatment (assorting on moral preferences). In the second stage, participants choose how to split a given amount of money between participants of their own group and participants of the other group, first in the baseline setting and then in a setting where they are told to do what they believe to be morally right (moral suasion). Our main results are: (i) in the baseline, participants tend to favour their own group to a greater extent when groups are assorted according to moral preferences, compared to when they are assorted according to non-moral preferences; (ii) the net effect of moral suasion is to decrease ingroup favouritism, but there is also a non-negligible proportion of participants for whom moral suasion increases ingroup favouritism; (iii) the effect of moral suasion is substantially stable across group assorting and four pre-registered individual characteristics (gender, political orientation, religiosity, pro-life vs pro-choice ethical convictions).

From the Discussion:

The interest in moral suasion stems, at least in part, from being a cheap and possibly effective policy tool that could be applied to foster prosocial behaviours. While the literature on moral behaviour has so far produced a substantial body of evidence showing the effectiveness of moral suasion, its dependence on the identity of the recipients of the decision-maker’s actions is far less studied, leaving open the possibility that individuals react to moral suasion by reducing prosociality towards some types of recipients. This paper has addressed this issue in the setting of a decision to split a given amount of money between members of one’s own group and members of another group, providing experimental evidence that, on average, moral suasion increases pro-sociality towards both the ingroup and the outgroup; however, the increase towards the outgroup is greater than the increase towards the ingroup, and this results in the fact that ingroup favouritism, on average, declines under moral suasion.

The research is here.

The lesser of two evils: Explaining a bad choice by revealing the choice set

Andras Molnar & Shereen J. Chaudhry
PsyArXiv
Last edited 4 Feb 20

Abstract

Making the right choice does not always lead to a good outcome—sometimes there are only bad outcomes to choose from. Situations like this are likely to lead others to misunderstand the decision maker’s intentions. However, simply revealing the choice set could set the record straight. Are decision-makers intrinsically driven to fix this misjudgment? If so, why, and what is the effect on the audience? Previous studies could not examine this desire to be understood because the research designs used did not isolate the decision to reveal information from the original choice. In two experiments (N=448 pairs), we address this gap in the literature and show that people are willing to pay ex post to reveal their choice set to the person who was negatively affected by their decision (the recipient), even after a one-shot anonymous interaction with no reputational consequences, and in some cases even when doing so reveals their selfish intentions. We find that this revealing behavior is effective at improving recipients’ rating of their outcome when it signals generous intentions, but not when it signals selfish intentions. It follows that the choice to reveal is driven by concern for the thoughts and feelings of strangers, but only when revealing signals generous intentions; those who reveal a choice that appears selfish report doing so out of a desire to be and/or appear honest. Individual differences in the drive to reveal cannot be explained by selection effects or mistakes in predicting the observer’s reaction. Thus, we find that people are intrinsically (i.e., even in one-shot anonymous settings) driven to correct a misunderstanding of their intentions, but they may do so for a variety of reasons, not all of which are self-enhancing. And though some people leave a misunderstanding in place when it is self-enhancing to do so, almost no one is willing to create a misunderstanding (by hiding the other option), even when it could conceal selfish behavior.

The research is here.

Folk standards of sound judgment: Rationality vs. Reasonableness

Igor Grossman and others
PsyArXiv Preprints
Last edited on 10 Jan 20

Abstract

Normative theories of judgment either focus on rationality – decontextualized preference maximization, or reasonableness – the pragmatic balance of preferences and socially-conscious norms. Despite centuries of work on such concepts, a critical question appears overlooked: How do people’s intuitions and behavior align with the concepts of rationality from game theory and reasonableness from legal scholarship? We show that laypeople view rationality as abstract and preference-maximizing, simultaneously viewing reasonableness as social-context-sensitive and socially-conscious, as evidenced in spontaneous descriptions, social perceptions, and linguistic analyses of the terms in cultural products (news, soap operas, legal opinions, and Google books). Further, experiments among North Americans and Pakistani bankers, street merchants, and samples engaging in exchange (vs. market-) economy show that rationality and reasonableness lead people to different conclusions about what constitutes good judgment in Dictator Games, Commons Dilemma and Prisoner’s Dilemma: Lay rationality is reductionist and instrumental, whereas reasonableness integrates preferences with particulars and moral concerns.

The research is here.

Do the Right Thing: Experimental Evidence that Preferences for Moral Behavior, Rather Than Equity or Efficiency per se, Drive Human Prosociality

Capraro, Valerio and Rand, David G.
(January 11, 2018). Judgment and Decision Making.

Abstract

Decades of experimental research show that some people forgo personal gains to benefit others in unilateral anonymous interactions. To explain these results, behavioral economists typically assume that people have social preferences for minimizing inequality and/or maximizing efficiency (social welfare). Here we present data that are incompatible with these standard social preference models. We use a “Trade-Off Game” (TOG), where players unilaterally choose between an equitable option and an efficient option. We show that simply changing the labelling of the options to describe the equitable versus efficient option as morally right completely reverses the correlation between behavior in the TOG and play in a separate Dictator Game (DG) or Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD): people who take the action framed as moral in the TOG, be it equitable or efficient, are much more prosocial in the DG and PD. Rather than preferences for equity and/or efficiency per se, our results suggest that prosociality in games such as the DG and PD are driven by a generalized morality preference that motivates people to do what they think is morally right.

Download the paper here.

Punish the Perpetrator or Compensate the Victim?

Yingjie Liu, Lin Li, Li Zheng, and Xiuyan Guo
Front. Psychol., 28 November 2017

Abstract

Third-party punishment and third-party compensation are primary responses to observed norms violations. Previous studies mostly investigated these behaviors in gain rather than loss context, and few study made direct comparison between these two behaviors. We conducted three experiments to investigate third-party punishment and third-party compensation in the gain and loss context. Participants observed two persons playing Dictator Game to share an amount of gain or loss, and the proposer would propose unfair distribution sometimes. In Study 1A, participants should decide whether they wanted to punish proposer. In Study 1B, participants decided to compensate the recipient or to do nothing. This two experiments explored how gain and loss contexts might affect the willingness to altruistically punish a perpetrator, or to compensate a victim of unfairness. Results suggested that both third-party punishment and compensation were stronger in the loss context. Study 2 directly compare third-party punishment and third-party compensation in the both contexts, by allowing participants choosing between punishment, compensation and keeping. Participants chose compensation more often than punishment in the loss context, and chose more punishments in the gain context. Empathic concern partly explained between-context differences of altruistic compensation and punishment. Our findings provide insights on modulating effect of context on third-party altruistic decisions.

The research is here.

Do the Right Thing: Preferences for Moral Behavior, Rather than Equity or Efficiency Per Se, Drive Human Prosociality

Capraro, Valerio and Rand, David G.
(May 8, 2017).

Abstract

Decades of experimental research have shown that some people forgo personal gains to benefit others in unilateral one-shot anonymous interactions. To explain these results, behavioral economists typically assume that people have social preferences for minimizing inequality and/or maximizing efficiency (social welfare). Here we present data that are fundamentally incompatible with these standard social preference models. We introduce the “Trade-Off Game” (TOG), where players unilaterally choose between an equitable option and an efficient option. We show that simply changing the labeling of the options to describe the equitable versus efficient option as morally right completely reverses people’s behavior in the TOG. Moreover, people who take the positively framed action, be it equitable or efficient, are more prosocial in a separate Dictator Game (DG) and Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD). Rather than preferences for equity and/or efficiency per se, we propose a generalized morality preference that motivates people to do what they think is morally right. When one option is clearly selfish and the other pro-social (e.g. equitable and/or efficient), as in the DG and PD, the economic outcomes are enough to determine what is morally right. When one option is not clearly more prosocial than the other, as in the TOG, framing resolves the ambiguity about which choice is moral. In addition to explaining our data, this account organizes prior findings that framing impacts cooperation in the standard simultaneous PD, but not in the asynchronous PD or the DG. Thus we present a new framework for understanding the basis of human prosociality.

The paper is here.

Moral cleansing and moral licenses: experimental evidence

Pablo Brañas-Garzaa, Marisa Buchelia, María Paz Espinosa and Teresa García-Muñoz
Economics and Philosophy / Volume 29 / Special Issue 02 / July 2013, pp 199-212

ABSTRACT

Research on moral cleansing and moral self-licensing has introduced dynamic considerations in the theory of moral behavior. Past bad actions trigger negative feelings that make people more likely to engage in future moral behavior to offset them. Symmetrically, past good deeds favor a positive self-perception that creates licensing effects, leading people to engage in behavior that is less likely to be moral. In short, a deviation from a “normal state of being” is balanced with a subsequent action that compensates the prior behavior. We model the decision of an individual trying to reach the optimal level of moral self-worth over time and show that under certain conditions the optimal sequence of actions follows a regular pattern which combines good and bad actions. We conduct an economic experiment where subjects play a sequence of giving decisions (dictator games) to explore this phenomenon. We find that donation in the previous period affects present decisions and the sign is negative: participants’ behavior in every round is negatively correlated to what they did in the past. Hence donations over time seem to be the result of a regular pattern of self-regulation: moral licensing (being selfish after altruist) and cleansing (altruistic after selfish).

The entire article is here.

Researchers can change the outcome of studies just by being white

By Nikhil Sonnad
Quartz
Originally posted October 5, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

The implication is that every aspect of a study matters. Decision research has been criticized for attempting to explain all of human behavior based mainly on studies of undergraduates in rich democracies. That has led to repeating such research in other parts of the world, as the chart above shows. But that might not be enough.

“Behavioral studies that offer ‘cultural’ or other contextual explanations for variation in generosity should be taken with a grain of salt, unless we are confident that such differences aren’t driven by simpler explanations such as who was in the room at the time,” said Bilal Murtaza Siddiqi, an economist at the World Bank and one of the paper’s co-authors.

The entire article is here.