close
Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2012 Sep 5:3:328.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00328. eCollection 2012.

Emotion and deliberative reasoning in moral judgment

Denise Dellarosa Cummins  1 , Robert C Cummins
Affiliations

Emotion and deliberative reasoning in moral judgment

Denise Dellarosa Cummins et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

According to an influential dual-process model, a moral judgment is the outcome of a rapid, affect-laden process and a slower, deliberative process. If these outputs conflict, decision time is increased in order to resolve the conflict. Violations of deontological principles proscribing the use of personal force to inflict intentional harm are presumed to elicit negative affect which biases judgments early in the decision-making process. This model was tested in three experiments. Moral dilemmas were classified using (a) decision time and consensus as measures of system conflict and (b) the aforementioned deontological criteria. In Experiment 1, decision time was either unlimited or reduced. The dilemmas asked whether it was appropriate to take a morally questionable action to produce a "greater good" outcome. Limiting decision time reduced the proportion of utilitarian ("yes") decisions, but contrary to the model's predictions, (a) vignettes that involved more deontological violations logged faster decision times, and (b) violation of deontological principles was not predictive of decisional conflict profiles. Experiment 2 ruled out the possibility that time pressure simply makes people more like to say "no." Participants made a first decision under time constraints and a second decision under no time constraints. One group was asked whether it was appropriate to take the morally questionable action while a second group was asked whether it was appropriate to refuse to take the action. The results replicated that of Experiment 1 regardless of whether "yes" or "no" constituted a utilitarian decision. In Experiment 3, participants rated the pleasantness of positive visual stimuli prior to making a decision. Contrary to the model's predictions, the number of deontological decisions increased in the positive affect rating group compared to a group that engaged in a cognitive task or a control group that engaged in neither task. These results are consistent with the view that early moral judgments are influenced by affect. But they are inconsistent with the view that (a) violation of deontological principles are predictive of differences in early, affect-based judgment or that (b) engaging in tasks that are inconsistent with the negative emotional responses elicited by such violations diminishes their impact.

Keywords: dual process; emotion; moral decision-making; moral judgment.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Proportion utilitarian decisions made under unlimited- and reduced-decision time for high-conflict vignettes (long decision times and low inter-subject decision consensus), moderate conflict vignettes (moderate decision times and moderate inter-subject decision consensus), and low-conflict vignettes (fast decision times and high inter-subject decision consensus) in Experiment 1.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Mean decision time for decisions made under unlimited- and reduced-decision time for high-conflict vignettes (long decision times and low decision consensus), moderate conflict vignettes (moderate decision times and moderate inter-subject decision consensus), and low-conflict vignettes (fast decision times and high inter-subject decision consensus) in Experiment 1.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Proportion utilitarian (“Yes”) decisions made as a function of decision time (unlimited or reduced) for vignettes that involve the use of personal force to intentionally produce harm and for vignettes that do no involve the use of personal force but yield harm as an unintended side effect in Experiment 1.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Mean decision time for utilitarian (“Yes”) decisions as a function of decision condition (unlimited or reduced-decision time) for vignettes that involve the use of personal force to intentionally produce harm and for vignettes that do no involve the use of personal force but yield harm as an unintended side effect in Experiment 1.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Proportion utilitarian decisions made under unlimited- and reduced-decision time for high decisional conflict vignettes, moderate conflict vignettes, and low-conflict vignettes when the moral judgment was queried as (A) “Is it appropriate to <take the described action>?” or (B) “Is it appropriate to refuse to <take the described action>?” in Experiment 2. A “yes” response constituted a utilitarian decision for the former query, while a “no” response constituted a utilitarian decision for the latter.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Mean decision time for decisions made under unlimited- and reduced-decision time for high-conflict vignettes, moderate conflict vignettes, and low-conflict vignettes in Experiment 2. First decisions were made within a time constraint of 6 s. Second decisions were made without time constraints. Moral judgments were queried as (A) “Is it appropriate to <take the described action>?” or (B) “Is it appropriate to refuse to <take the described action>?” A “yes” response constituted a utilitarian decision for the former query, while a “no” response constituted a utilitarian decision for the latter.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Mean decision times for utilitarian and deontological judgments as a function of question type in Experiment 2. First decisions were made within a time constraint of 6 s. Second decisions were made without time constraints.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Proportion utilitarian judgments following an emotion rating task involving pleasant stimuli, a cognitive task requiring mental arithmetic, and a control group that involved neither in Experiment 3. Dilemmas either involved the use of personal force to inflict intentional harm, or no personal force where harm was an unintended side effect, and were pre-classified as involving high or moderate decisional conflict.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Chaiken S., Trope Y. (eds). (1999). Dual-Process Theories in Social Psychology. New York: Guilford Press
    1. Cikara M., Farnsworth R. A., Harris L. T., Fiske S. T. (2010). On the wrong side of the trolley track: neural correlates of relative social valuation. Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci. 5, 404–413 10.1093/scan/nsq011 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Cushman F., Young L., Hauser M. (2006). The role of conscious reasoning and intuition in moral judgment: testing three principles of harm. Psychol. Sci. 17, 1082–1089 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01834.x - DOI - PubMed
    1. Evans J. St. B. T. (2003). In two minds: dual process accounts of reasoning. Trends Cogn. Sci. 7, 454–459 10.1016/j.tics.2003.08.012 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Gilbert D. T. (1989). “Thinking lightly about others: automatic components of the social inference process,” in Unintended Thought, eds Uleman J., Bargh J. A. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall; ), 189–211

LinkOut - more resources