Moral Judgment and Decision Making

Bartels, D. M., and others (2015)
In G. Keren & G. Wu (Eds.)
The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making.

From the Introduction

Our focus in this essay is moral flexibility, a term that we use to capture to the thesis that people are strongly motivated to adhere to and affirm their moral beliefs in their judgments and choices—they really want to get it right, they really want to do the right thing—but context strongly influences which moral beliefs are brought to bear in a given situation (cf. Bartels, 2008). In what follows, we review contemporary research on moral judgment and decision making and suggest ways that the major themes in the literature relate to the notion of moral flexibility. First, we take a step back and explain what makes moral judgment and decision making unique. We then review three major research themes and their explananda: (i) morally prohibited value tradeoffs in decision making, (ii) rules, reason, and emotion in tradeoffs, and (iii) judgments of moral blame and punishment. We conclude by commenting on methodological desiderata and presenting understudied areas of inquiry.

Conclusion

Moral thinking pervades everyday decision making, and so understanding the psychological underpinnings of moral judgment and decision making is an important goal for the behavioral sciences. Research that focuses on rule-based models makes moral decisions appear straightforward and rigid, but our review suggests that they more complicated. Our attempt to document the state of the field reveals the diversity of approaches that (indirectly) reveals the flexibility of moral decision making systems. Whether they are study participants, policy makers, or the person on the street, people are strongly motivated to adhere to and affirm their moral beliefs—they want to make the right judgments and choices, and do the right thing. But what is right and wrong, like many things, depends in part on the situation. So while moral judgments and choices can be accurately characterized as using moral rules, they are also characterized by a striking ability to adapt to situations that require flexibility.

Consistent with this theme, our review suggests that context strongly influences which moral principles people use to judge actions and actors and that apparent inconsistencies across situations need not be interpreted as evidence of moral bias, error, hypocrisy, weakness, or failure.  One implication of the evidence for moral flexibility we have presented is that it might be difficult for any single framework to capture moral judgments and decisions (and this may help explain why no fully descriptive and consensus model of moral judgment and decision making exists despite decades of research). While several interesting puzzle pieces have been identified, the big picture remains unclear. We cannot even be certain that all of these pieces belong to just one puzzle.  Fortunately for researchers interested in this area, there is much left to be learned, and we suspect that the coming decades will budge us closer to a complete understanding of moral judgment and decision making.

A pdf of the book chapter can be downloaded here.

The radical moral implications of luck in human life

David Roberts
vox.com
Originally posted August 21, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

So, then, here you are. You turn 18. You are no longer a child; you are an adult, a moral agent, responsible for who you are and what you do.

By that time, your inheritance is enormous. You’ve not only been granted a genetic makeup, an ethnicity and appearance, by accidents of nature and parentage. You’ve also had your latent genetic traits “activated” in a very specific way through a specific upbringing, in a specific environment, with a specific set of experiences.

Your basic mental and emotional wiring is in place; you have certain instincts, predilections, fears, and cravings. You have a certain amount of money, certain social connections and opportunities, a certain family lineage. You’ve had a certain amount and quality of education. You’re a certain kind of person.

You are not responsible for any of that stuff; you weren’t yet capable of being responsible. You were just a kid (or worse, a teen). You didn’t choose your genes or your experiences. Both nature and the vast bulk of the nurture that matters happened to you.

And yet when you turn 18, it’s all yours — the whole inheritance, warts and all. By the time you are an autonomous, responsible moral agent, you have effectively been fired out of a cannon, on a particular trajectory. You wake up, morally speaking, midflight.

The info is here.

Assessing the contextual stability of moral foundations: Evidence from a survey experiment

David Ciuk
Research and Politics
First Published June 20, 2018

Abstract

Moral foundations theory (MFT) claims that individuals use their intuitions on five “virtues” as guidelines for moral judgment, and recent research makes the case that these intuitions cause people to adopt important political attitudes, including partisanship and ideology. New work in political science, however, demonstrates not only that the causal effect of moral foundations on these political predispositions is weaker than once thought, but it also opens the door to the possibility that causality runs in the opposite direction—from political predispositions to moral foundations. In this manuscript, I build on this new work and test the extent to which partisan and ideological considerations cause individuals’ moral foundations to shift in predictable ways. The results show that while these group-based cues do exert some influence on moral foundations, the effects of outgroup cues are particularly strong. I conclude that small shifts in political context do cause MFT measures to move, and, to close, I discuss the need for continued theoretical development in MFT as well as an increased attention to measurement.

The research is here.

Should a rapist get Viagra or a robber get a cataracts op?

Tom Douglas

Aeon Magazine

Originally published on July 7, 2017

Suppose a physician is about to treat a patient for diminished sex drive when she discovers that the patient – let’s call him Abe – has raped several women in the past. Fearing that boosting his sex drive might lead Abe to commit further sex offences, she declines to offer the treatment. Refusal to provide medical treatment in this case strikes many as reasonable. It might not be entirely unproblematic, since some will argue that he has a human right to medical treatment, but many of us would probably think the physician is within her rights – she’s not obliged to treat Abe. At least, not if her fears about further offending are well-founded.

But now consider a different case. Suppose an eye surgeon is about to book Bert in for a cataract operation when she discovers that he is a serial bank robber. Fearing that treating his developing blindness might help Bert to carry off further heists, she declines to offer the operation. In many ways, this case mirrors that of Abe. But morally, it seems different. In this case, refusing treatment does not seem reasonable, no matter how well-founded the surgeon’s fear. What’s puzzling is why. Why is Bert’s surgeon obliged to treat his blindness, while Abe’s physician has no similar obligation to boost his libido?

Here’s an initial suggestion: diminished libido, it might be said, is not a ‘real disease’. An inconvenience, certainly. A disability, perhaps. But a genuine pathology? No. By contrast, cataract disease clearly is a true pathology. So – the argument might go – Bert has a stronger claim to treatment than Abe. But even if reduced libido is not itself a disease – a view that could be contested – it could have pathological origins. Suppose Abe has a disease that suppresses testosterone production, and thus libido. And suppose that the physician’s treatment would restore his libido by correcting this disease. Still, it would seem reasonable for her to refuse the treatment, if she had good grounds to believe providing it could result in further sex offences.

The article is here.

Face-saving or fair-minded: What motivates moral behavior?

Alexander W. Cappelen  Trond Halvorsen  Erik Ø. Sørensen  Bertil Tungodden
Journal of the European Economic Association (2017) 15 (3): 540-557.

Abstract

We study the relative importance of intrinsic moral motivation and extrinsic social motivation in explaining moral behavior. The key feature of our experiment is that we introduce a dictator game design that manipulates these two sources of motivation. In one set of treatments, we manipulate the moral argument for sharing, in another we manipulate the information given to the recipient about the context of the experiment and the dictator's decision. The paper offers two main findings. First, we provide evidence of intrinsic moral motivation being of fundamental importance. Second, we show that extrinsic social motivation matters and is crowding-in with intrinsic moral motivation. We also show that intrinsic moral motivation is strongly associated with self-reported charitable giving outside the lab and with political preferences.

The research is here.

How rational is our rationality?

Interview by Richard Marshall
3 AM Magazine
Originally posted March 18, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

As I mentioned earlier, I think that the point of the study of rationality, and of normative epistemology more generally, is to help us figure out how to inquire, and the aim of inquiry, I believe, is to get at the truth. This means that there had better be a close connection between what we conclude about what’s rational to believe, and what we expect to be true. But it turns out to be very tricky to say what the nature of this connection is! For example, we know that sometimes evidence can mislead us, and so rational beliefs can be false. This means that there’s no guarantee that rational beliefs will be true. The goal of the paper is to get clear about why, and to what extent, it nonetheless makes sense to expect that rational beliefs will be more accurate than irrational ones. One reason this should be of interest to non-philosophers is that if it turns out that there isn’t some close connection between rationality and truth, then we should be much less critical of people with irrational beliefs. They may reasonably say: “Sure, my belief is irrational – but I care about the truth, and since my irrational belief is true, I won’t abandon it!” It seems like there’s something wrong with this stance, but to justify why it’s wrong, we need to get clear on the connection between a judgment about a belief’s rationality and a judgment about its truth. The account I give is difficult to summarize in just a few sentences, but I can say this much: what we say about the connection between what’s rational and what’s true will depend on whether we think it’s rational to doubt our own rationality. If it can be rational to doubt our own rationality (which I think is plausible), then the connection between rationality and truth is, in a sense, surprisingly tenuous.

The interview is here.

Does moral identity effectively predict moral behavior?: A meta-analysis

Steven G. Hertz and Tobias Krettenauer
Review of General Psychology, Vol 20(2), Jun 2016, 129-140.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000062

Abstract

This meta-analysis examined the relationship between moral identity and moral behavior. It was based on 111 studies from a broad range of academic fields including business, developmental psychology and education, marketing, sociology, and sport sciences. Moral identity was found to be significantly associated with moral behavior (random effects model, r = .22, p < .01, 95% CI [.19, .25]). Effect sizes did not differ for behavioral outcomes (prosocial behavior, avoidance of antisocial behavior, ethical behavior). Studies that were entirely based on self-reports yielded larger effect sizes. In contrast, the smallest effect was found for studies that were based on implicit measures or used priming techniques to elicit moral identity. Moreover, a marginally significant effect of culture indicated that studies conducted in collectivistic cultures yielded lower effect sizes than studies from individualistic cultures. Overall, the meta-analysis provides support for the notion that moral identity strengthens individuals’ readiness to engage in prosocial and ethical behavior as well as to abstain from antisocial behavior. However, moral identity fares no better as a predictor of moral action than other psychological constructs.

And the conclusion...

Overall, three major conclusions can be drawn from this metaanalysis. First, considering all empirical evidence available it seems impossible to deny that moral identity positively predicts moral behavior in individuals from Western cultures. Although this finding does not refute research on moral hypocrisy, it put the claim that people want to appear moral, rather than be moral into perspective (Batson, 2011; Frimer et al., 2014). If this were always true, why would people who feel that morality matters to them engage more readily in moral action? Second, explicit self-report measures represent a valid and valuable approach to the moral identity construct. This is an important conclusion because many scholars feel that more effort should be invested into developing moral identity measures (e.g., Hardy & Carlo, 2011b; Jennings et al., 2015). Third, although moral identity positively predicts moral behavior the effect is not much stronger than the effects of other constructs, notably moral judgment or moral emotions. Thus, there is no reason to prioritize the moral identity construct as a predictor of moral action at the expense of other factors. Instead, it seems more appropriate to consider moral identity in a broader conceptual framework where it interacts with other personological and situational factors to bring about moral action. This approach is well underway in studies that investigate the moderating and mediating role of moral identity as a predictor of moral action (e.g., Aquino et al., 2007; Hardy et al., 2015). As part of this endeavor, it might become necessary to give up an overly homogenous notion of the moral identity construct in order to acknowledge that moral identities may consist of different motivations and goal orientations. Recently, Krettenauer and Casey (2015) provided evidence for two different types of moral identities, one that is primarily concerned with demonstrating morality to others, and one that is more inwardly defined by being consistent with one's values and beliefs. This differentiation has important ramifications for moral emotions and moral action and helps to explain why moral identities sometimes strengthen individuals' motivation to act morally and sometimes undermine it.