Department of Economics, Middlesex University, London, United Kingdom.
Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
PLoS One. 2018 Oct 11;13(10):e0205066. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0205066. eCollection 2018.
Why do people make deontological decisions, although they often lead to overall unfavorable outcomes? One account is receiving considerable attention: deontological judgments may signal commitment to prosociality and thus may increase people's chances of being selected as social partners-which carries obvious long-term benefits. Here we test this framework by experimentally exploring whether people making deontological judgments are expected to be more prosocial than those making consequentialist judgments and whether they are actually so. In line with previous studies, we identified deontological choices using the Trapdoor dilemma. Using economic games, we take two measures of general prosociality towards strangers: trustworthiness and altruism. Our results procure converging evidence for a perception gap according to which Trapdoor-deontologists are believed to be more trustworthy and more altruistic towards strangers than Trapdoor-consequentialists, but actually they are not so. These results show that deontological judgments are not universal, reliable signals of prosociality.
为什么人们会做出道义上的决定，尽管这些决定往往导致整体不利的结果？有一种解释受到了广泛关注：道义判断可能表明对亲社会行为的承诺，从而增加人们被选为社交伙伴的机会——这带来了明显的长期利益。在这里，我们通过实验探索了这一框架，即是否可以预期做出道义判断的人比做出后果主义判断的人更具有亲社会性，以及他们实际上是否如此。我们通过使用“陷门困境”来识别道义选择，与之前的研究一致。我们使用经济游戏，对两种对陌生人的一般亲社会性进行衡量：可信度和利他主义。我们的结果提供了一致的证据，表明根据感知差距，人们认为在“陷门困境”中做出道义选择的人比做出后果主义选择的人对陌生人更值得信赖、更利他，但实际上并非如此。这些结果表明，道义判断并不是普遍的、可靠的亲社会行为信号。
