Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Nova Southeastern University, USA.
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Nova Southeastern University, USA.
Cognition. 2024 Nov;252:105919. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105919. Epub 2024 Aug 20.
In this research, we examine whether moral judgments sometimes violate the normative principle of procedure invariance - that is, whether normatively equivalent elicitation tasks can result in different judgment patterns. Specifically, we show that the relative morality of two actions can reverse across evaluation modes and elicitation tasks, mirroring preference reversals in consumer behavior. Across six studies (five preregistered, total N = 719), we provide evidence of three reversals of moral judgments of sacrificial dilemmas. First, directly killing one person to save many others was rated as morally worse than indirectly killing one person via an intervening mechanism in order to save a few others in separate evaluation, but this difference reversed in joint evaluation, in both between-subjects (Studies 1a and 1b) and within-subjects (Study 2) designs. Next, directly killing one person to save many others was judged as morally better than indirectly killing one person to save a few others more often in matching than in choice (Study 3) and rating (Study 4), between-subjects. Lastly, we replicate the results of Studies 3 and 4 within-subjects and show that susceptibility to these moral preference reversals is correlated with Faith in Intuition (Study 5). The present research introduces a new methodological approach to moral psychology, demonstrates that moral judgments can fully reverse across tasks, and supports an emerging view that moral judgments, like consumer preferences, are at least sometimes constructed in the moment, relative to the context and task at hand.
在这项研究中，我们考察了道德判断是否有时会违反规范的程序不变性原则——也就是说，规范上等同的启发式任务是否会导致不同的判断模式。具体来说，我们表明，两种行为的相对道德性可以在评估模式和启发式任务之间反转，反映出消费者行为中的偏好反转。在六项研究（五项预先注册，总样本量为 719 人）中，我们提供了三个关于牺牲困境的道德判断反转的证据。首先，直接杀死一个人以拯救许多其他人的行为，在单独评估时，被认为在道德上比通过中间机制间接杀死一个人以拯救另外几个人更糟糕，但在联合评估中，这种差异会反转，无论是在被试间设计（研究 1a 和 1b）还是在被试内设计（研究 2）中都是如此。其次，在匹配而非选择（研究 3）和评分（研究 4）中，直接杀死一个人以拯救许多其他人的行为，在被试间评估中，被判断为在道德上比间接杀死一个人以拯救少数几个人更优。最后，我们在被试内重复了研究 3 和 4 的结果，并表明对这些道德偏好反转的敏感性与直觉信仰（研究 5）相关。本研究为道德心理学引入了一种新的方法学方法，证明了道德判断可以在任务之间完全反转，并支持了一种新兴观点，即道德判断，就像消费者偏好一样，至少在某些情况下是在当下构建的，相对于手头的上下文和任务。
