a Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati , Neuroscience Sector , Trieste , Italy.
Soc Neurosci. 2014 Feb;9(1):94-107. doi: 10.1080/17470919.2013.870091.
Although research in moral psychology in the last decade has relied heavily on hypothetical moral dilemmas and has been effective in understanding moral judgment, how these judgments translate into behaviors remains a largely unexplored issue due to the harmful nature of the acts involved. To study this link, we follow a new approach based on a desktop virtual reality environment. In our within-subjects experiment, participants exhibited an order-dependent judgment-behavior discrepancy across temporally separated sessions, with many of them behaving in utilitarian manner in virtual reality dilemmas despite their nonutilitarian judgments for the same dilemmas in textual descriptions. This change in decisions reflected in the autonomic arousal of participants, with dilemmas in virtual reality being perceived more emotionally arousing than the ones in text, after controlling for general differences between the two presentation modalities (virtual reality vs. text). This suggests that moral decision-making in hypothetical moral dilemmas is susceptible to contextual saliency of the presentation of these dilemmas.
尽管过去十年的道德心理学研究主要依赖于假设的道德困境，并有效地理解了道德判断，但由于所涉及行为的有害性质，这些判断如何转化为行为仍然是一个很大程度上未被探索的问题。为了研究这种联系，我们采用了一种基于桌面虚拟现实环境的新方法。在我们的被试内实验中，参与者在时间上分离的会议中表现出了判断行为的不一致，尽管他们在文字描述中对相同的困境做出了非功利主义的判断，但在虚拟现实困境中，他们中的许多人表现出功利主义的行为方式。这种决策变化反映在参与者的自主唤醒上，在控制了两种呈现方式（虚拟现实与文本）之间的一般差异后，虚拟现实中的困境比文本中的困境更能引起情绪上的唤醒。这表明，假设的道德困境中的道德决策容易受到这些困境呈现的语境显著性的影响。
