A Large-Scale Investigation of Everyday Moral Dilemmas

Yudkin, D. A., Goodwin, G., et al. (2023, July 11).

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/5pcew

Abstract

Questions of right and wrong are central to daily life, yet how people experience everyday moral dilemmas remains uncertain. We combined state-of-the-art tools in machine learning with survey-based methods in psychology to analyze a massive online English-language repository of everyday moral dilemmas. In 369,161 descriptions (“posts”) and 11M evaluations (“comments”) of moral dilemmas extracted from Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” forum (AITA), users described a wide variety of everyday dilemmas, ranging from broken promises to privacy violations. Dilemmas involving the under-investigated topic of relational obligations were the most frequently reported, while those pertaining to honesty were the most widely condemned. The types of dilemmas people experienced depended on the interpersonal closeness of the interactants, with some dilemmas (e.g., politeness) being more prominent in distant-other interactions, and others (e.g., relational transgressions) more prominent in close-other interactions. A longitudinal investigation showed that shifts in social interactions prompted by the “shock” event of the global pandemic resulted in predictable shifts in the types of moral dilemmas that people encountered. A preregistered study using a census-stratified representative sample of the US population (N = 510), as well as other robustness tests, suggest our findings generalize beyond the sample of Reddit users. Overall, by leveraging a unique large dataset and new techniques for exploring this dataset, our paper highlights the diversity of moral dilemmas experienced in daily life, and helps to build a moral psychology grounded in the vagaries of everyday experience.

Significance Statement

People often wonder if what they did or said was right or wrong. In this paper we leveraged a massive online repository of descriptions of everyday moral situations, along with new methods in natural language processing, to explore a number of questions about how people experience and evaluate these moral dilemmas. Our results highlight just how often daily moral experiences concern questions about our responsibilities to friends, neighbors, and family. They also reveal the extent to which such experiences can change according to people’s social context—including large-scale social changes like the COVID-19 pandemic.

The research is here.

My take: 

This study may be very important to clinical psychologists. It provides insights into the diversity and prevalence of everyday moral dilemmas that people encounter in their daily lives.

Clinical psychologists often work with clients to navigate complex moral and interpersonal situations, so understanding the common types of dilemmas people face is valuable.  The study shows that dilemmas involving relational obligations are the most frequently reported, with honesty and betrayal as major themes.  This suggests that clinical work should pay close attention to how clients navigate moral issues within their close relationships and the importance they place on honesty.

When Good People Break Bad: Moral Impression Violations in Everyday Life

Guan, K. W., & Heine, S. J. (2022).

Social Psychological and Personality Science. 

https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506221076685

Abstract

The present research investigated the emotional, interpersonal, and impression-updating consequences of witnessing events that violate the moral character impressions people hold of others. Across three studies, moral character-violations predicted broad disruptions to participants’ sense of meaning, confidence judging moral character, and expectations of others’ moral characters. Participants who were in real life closer to perpetrators, directly victimized, and higher in preferences for closure and behavioral stability reported more negative outcomes. Moreover, experimental manipulations showed that character-violations lead to worse outcomes than the comparable experience of encountering consistently immoral others. The authors discuss implications for research on moral perception and meaning, as well as on understanding responses to everyday revelations about people’s characters.

From the General Discussion

Moral character-violations appear frequently in the media and occasionally in everyday life. The present research provides an explanation of how these experiences affect perceivers, grounded in the meaning maintenance model (Heine et al., 2006) and social perception literature (Goodwin et al., 2014). Across all three studies, good-to-bad character-violations were associated with disruptions in perceivers’ sense that they understand the world, their confidence judging character, and their impressions of people’s morality in general. In other words, the psychological impact is not restricted to people’s views of specific character-violated targets, but spills over to color how people view other people more generally. Studies 1 and 2 also illuminated the types of moral character-violations people tend to encounter in everyday life, exploring additional situational and dispositional factors that predict stronger feelings of loss of meaning. Study 3 found causal evidence for these effects.

Our findings speak to general experiences, but a few key variables powerfully predict recalled outcomes. Directly victimized targets, and those with higher preferences for closure and personality stability reported greater disruptions in meaning. These findings line up with past evidence that being directly betrayed or transgressed upon leads to strong negative emotions (Adams & Inesi, 2016; Hutcherson & Gross, 2011), and having higher dispositional needs for stability and closure predicts more negative reactions to meaning-violations (e.g., Doherty, 1998).

A pdf of the research is here.