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Moral preference reversals: Violations of procedure invariance in moral judgments of sacrificial dilemmas
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Objective:
We introduce the concept of moral beacons-individuals who are higher in moral character than their peers and prominent within their social environment-and examine the degree to which moral beacons increase the moral awareness of their peers.
Background:
Using data from cohorts of students in graduate business education across two universities, we applied theory and methods from organizational behavior, personality psychology, and social networks analysis to test two research questions about moral beacons.
Method:
We used latent profile analysis of data from personality questionnaires and social network surveys completed by graduate business students at two universities (N = 502) to identify individuals classified as moral beacons. We used peer nominations and an in-class business case discussion exercise to assess moral influence.
Results:
Latent profile analysis identified a latent class of moral beacons in our sample. These individuals received more nominations from their peers in end-of-class surveys as guides for moral thought and action and positively impacted the moral awareness of their peers in a discussion of a difficult business case about possible lead poisoning of employees, but did not significantly change their counterparts' moral awareness in a different case.
Conclusions:
These results provide promising initial evidence that moral beacons can be distinguished from their peers by both moral character and social prominence and can act as guides for others, at times encouraging greater consideration of the moral aspects of situations and decisions. As these results are the first of their kind, we encourage further replication and investigations of moral beacons and moral influence in other settings.
In a series of ten preregistered experiments (N = 2043), we investigate the effect of outcome valence on judgments of probability, negligence, and culpability – a phenomenon sometimes labelled moral (and legal) luck. We found that harmful outcomes, when contrasted with neutral outcomes, lead to an increased perceived probability of harm ex post, and consequently, to a greater attribution of negligence and culpability. Rather than simply postulating hindsight bias (as is common), we employ a variety of empirical means to demonstrate that the outcome-driven asymmetry across perceived probabilities constitutes a systematic cognitive distortion. We then explore three distinct strategies to alleviate the hindsight bias and its downstream effects on mens rea and culpability ascriptions. Not all strategies are successful, but some prove very promising. They should, we argue, be considered in criminal jurisprudence, where distortions due to the hindsight bias are likely considerable and deeply disconcerting.
Cognitive effort is a central construct in our lives, yet our understanding of the processes underlying our judgments of effort are limited. Recent work has suggested that our judgments of effort are sensitive to the context in which they are made (i.e., the judgment context). Using a cognitive task and stimulus set that has produced a reliable dissociation between judgments of effort and cognitive demand (as measured by performance and other indirect measures of demand), we examined whether evaluation context might be able to eliminate this dissociation (i.e., bring judgments of effort more in line with measures of cognitive demand). To address this question, we conducted four experiments manipulating a number of aspects of the judgment context including, principally, a manipulation of joint versus separate evaluation; whether the judgment was prospective, or retrospective; and whether prospective judgments were made with or without having experienced the cognitive task. Additionally, we collected objective demand measures and examined participants' self-reported reasons for their judgments of effort across the joint and separate evaluation contexts. Results demonstrated that evaluation context has a marked effect on judgments of effort; however, no judgment context appeared to yield a pattern more similar to what is found using measures of cognitive demand. Moreover, the reasons individuals cited for their judgments varied across evaluation contexts. Implications of the present work for our understanding of judgments of effort are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
The study of moral judgements often centres on moral dilemmas in which options consistent with deontological perspectives (that is, emphasizing rules, individual rights and duties) are in conflict with options consistent with utilitarian judgements (that is, following the greater good based on consequences). Greene et al. (2009) showed that psychological and situational factors (for example, the intent of the agent or the presence of physical contact between the agent and the victim) can play an important role in moral dilemma judgements (for example, the trolley problem). Our knowledge is limited concerning both the universality of these effects outside the United States and the impact of culture on the situational and psychological factors affecting moral judgements. Thus, we empirically tested the universality of the effects of intent and personal force on moral dilemma judgements by replicating the experiments of Greene et al. in 45 countries from all inhabited continents. We found that personal force and its interaction with intention exert influence on moral judgements in the US and Western cultural clusters, replicating and expanding the original findings. Moreover, the personal force effect was present in all cultural clusters, suggesting it is culturally universal. The evidence for the cultural universality of the interaction effect was inconclusive in the Eastern and Southern cultural clusters (depending on exclusion criteria). We found no strong association between collectivism/individualism and moral dilemma judgements.
In ten studies (N = 9187), I systematically investigated the direction and size of seven helping effects (the identifiable-victim effect, proportion dominance effect, ingroup effect, existence effect, innocence effect, age effect and gender effect). All effects were tested in three decision modes (separate evaluation, joint evaluation and forced choice), and in their weak form (equal efficiency), or strong form (unequal efficiency). Participants read about one, or two, medical help projects and rated the attractiveness of and allocated resources to the project/projects, or choose which project to implement. The results show that the included help-situation attributes vary in their: (1) Evaluability-e.g., rescue proportion is the easiest to evaluate in separate evaluation. (2) Justifiability-e.g., people prefer to save fewer lives now rather than more lives in the future, but not fewer identified lives rather than more statistical lives. (3) Prominence-e.g., people express a preference to help females, but only when forced to choose.
I draw on neurobiological evidence to defend the rationalist thesis that moral judgments are essentially dependent on reasoning, not emotions (conceived as distinct from inference). The neuroscience reveals that moral cognition arises from domain-general capacities in the brain for inferring, in particular, the consequences of an agent's action, the agent's intent, and the rules or norms relevant to the context. Although these capacities entangle inference and affect, blurring the reason/emotion dichotomy doesn't preferentially support sentimentalism. The argument requires careful consideration of the empirical evidence (from neuroimaging to psychopathology) and philosophical analysis of the commitments of rationalism versus sentimentalism in ethics.
One core assumption of standard economic theory is that an individual’s preferences are stable, irrespective of the method used to elicit them. This assumption may be violated if preference reversals are observed when comparing different methods to elicit people’s preferences. People may then prefer A over B using one method while preferring B over A using another. Such preference reversals pose a significant problem for theoretical and applied research. We used a sample of medical and economics students to investigate preference reversals in the health and financial domain when choosing patients/clients. We explored whether preference reversals are associated with domain-relevant training and tested whether using guided ‘choice list’ elicitation reduces reversals. Our findings suggest that preference reversals were more likely to occur for medical students, within the health domain, and for open-ended valuation questions. Familiarity with a domain reduced the likelihood of preference reversals in that domain. Although preference reversals occur less frequently within specialist domains, they remain a significant theoretical and practical problem. The use of clearer valuation procedures offers a promising approach to reduce preference reversals.
In both theoretical and applied research, it is often of interest to assess the strength of an observed association. This is typically done to allow the judgment of the magnitude of an effect (especially when units of measurement are not meaningful, e.g., in the use of estimated latent variables; Bollen, 1989), to facilitate comparing between predictors' importance within a given model, or both. Though some indices of effect size, such as the correlation coefficient (itself a standardized covariance coefficient) are readily available, other measures are often harder to obtain. effectsize is an R package (R Core Team, 2020) that fills this important gap, providing utilities for easily estimating a wide variety of standardized effect sizes (i.e., effect sizes that are not tied to the units of measurement of the variables of interest) and their confidence intervals (CIs), from a variety of statistical models. effectsize provides easy-to-use functions, with full documentation and explanation of the various effect sizes offered, and is also used by developers of other R packages as the back-end for effect size computation, such as parameters (Lüdecke et al., 2020), ggstatsplot (Patil, 2018), gtsummary (Sjoberg et al., 2020) and more. Comparison to Other Packages effectsize's functionality is in part comparable to packages like lm.beta (Behrendt, 2014), MOTE (Buchanan et al., 2019), and MBESS (K. Kelley, 2020). Yet, there are some notable differences, e.g.: • lm.beta provides standardized regression coefficients for linear models, based on post-hoc model matrix standardization. However, the functionality is available only for a limited number of models (models inheriting from the lm class), whereas effectsize provides support for many types of models, including (generalized) linear mixed models, Bayesian models, and more. Additionally, in additional to post-hoc model matrix standardization, effectsize offers other methods of standardization (see below). • Both MOTE and MBESS provide functions for computing effect sizes such as Cohen's d and effect sizes for ANOVAs (Cohen, 1988), and their confidence intervals. However, both require manual input of For t-statistics, degrees of freedom, and sums of squares for the computation the effect sizes, whereas effectsize can automatically extract this information from the provided models, thus allowing for better ease-of-use as well as reducing any potential for error.
Companies can create value by differentiating their products and services along quantitative attributes. Existing research suggests that consumers’ tendency to rely on relatively effortless and affect-based processes reduces their sensitivity to the scope of quantitative attributes and that this explains why increments along quantitative attributes often have diminishing marginal value. The current article sheds new light on how “system 1” processes moderate the effect of quantitative product attributes on subjective value. Seven studies provide evidence that system 1 processes can produce diminishing marginal value, but also increasing marginal value, or any combination of the two, depending on the composition of the choice set. This is because system 1 processes facilitate ordinal comparisons (e.g., 256 GB is more than 128 GB, which is more than 64 GB) while system 2 processes, which are relatively more effortful and calculation based, facilitate cardinal comparisons (e.g., the difference between 256 and 128 GB is twice as large as between 128 and 64 GB).
This paper asks whether moral preferences in eight medical dilemmas change as a function of how preferences are expressed, and how people choose when they are faced with two equally attractive help projects. In two large-scale studies, participants first read dilemmas where they "matched" two suggested helping projects (which varied on a single attribute) so that they became equally attractive. They did this by filling in a missing number (e.g., how many male patients must Project M save in order to be equally attractive as Project F which can save 100 female patients). Later, the same participants were asked to choose between the two equally attractive projects. We found robust evidence that people do not choose randomly, but instead tend to choose projects that help female (vs. male), children (vs. adult), innocent (vs. non-innocent), ingroup (vs. outgroup) and existing (vs. future) patients, and imply no (vs. some) risk of a harmful side-effect, even when these projects have been matched as equally attractive as, and save fewer patients than the contrasting project. We also found that some moral preferences are hidden when expressed with matching but apparent when expressed with forced choice. For example, 88-95% of the participants expressed that female and male patients are equally valuable when doing the matching task, but over 80% of them helped female patients in the choice task.
Moral dilemmas often concern actions that involve causing harm to others in the attempt to prevent greater harm. But not all actions of this kind are equal in terms of their moral evaluation. In particular, a harm-causing preventive action is typically regarded as less acceptable if the harm is a means to achieve the goal of preventing greater harm than if it is a foreseen but unintended side-effect of the action. Likewise, a harm-causing preventive action is typically deemed less acceptable if it directly produces the harm than if it merely initiates a process that brings about the harmful consequence by its own dynamics. We report three experiments that investigated to which degree these two variables, the instrumentality of the harm (harm as means vs. side-effect; Experiments 1, 2, and 3) and personal force (personal vs. impersonal dilemmas; Experiments 2 and 3) influence deontological (harm-rejection) and utilitarian (outcome-maximization) inclinations that have been hypothesized to underly moral judgments in harm-related moral dilemmas. To measure these moral inclinations, the process dissociation procedure was used. The results suggest that the instrumentality of the harm and personal force affect both inclinations, but in opposite ways. Personal dilemmas and dilemmas characterized by harm as a means evoked higher deontological tendencies and lower utilitarian tendencies, than impersonal dilemmas and dilemmas where the harm was a side-effect. These distinct influences of the two dilemma conceptualization variables went undetected if the conventional measure of moral inclinations, the proportion of harm-accepting judgments, was analyzed. Furthermore, although deontological and utilitarian inclinations were found to be largely independent overall, there was some evidence that their correlation depended on the experimental conditions.
When do people find it acceptable to sacrifice one life to save many? Cross-cultural studies suggested a complex pattern of universals and variations in the way people approach this question, but data were often based on small samples from a small number of countries outside of the Western world. Here we analyze responses to three sacrificial dilemmas by 70,000 participants in 10 languages and 42 countries. In every country, the three dilemmas displayed the same qualitative ordering of sacrifice acceptability, suggesting that this ordering is best explained by basic cognitive processes, rather than cultural norms. The quantitative acceptability of each sacrifice, though, showed substantial country-level variations. We show that low relational mobility (where people are more cautious about not alienating their current social partners) is strongly associated with the rejection of sacrifices for the greater good (especially for Eastern countries), which may be explained by the signaling value of this rejection. We make our dataset fully available as a public resource for researchers studying universals and variations in human morality: all the data and code used in this article can be downloaded at https://bit.ly/2Y7Brr9.
This study examined framing effects in decisions concerning public health. Tversky and Kahneman’s famous Asian Disease Problem served as experimental paradigm. Subjects chose between a sure and a risky option either presented as gains (saving lives) or as losses (dying). The amount of risk varied in terms of different probabilities. The number of affected people was either small (low need) or large (high need). Additionally, the decisions were linked to three different types of diseases (unusual infection, AIDS, leukemia). We also implemented two different time constraints during which the subjects had to give a response. Finally, we tested a within-subject design. The data analysis assuming a linear mixed effects model revealed significant effects of framing, probabilities, and need. Furthermore, the type of disease and time constraints were moderating the framing effect. Across the different diseases, framing effects were amplified when decision time was short. © 2018, Society for Judgment and Decision making. All rights reserved.
We propose that methods from the study of category-based induction can be used to test the accuracy of theories of moral judgment. We had participants rate the likelihood that a person would engage in a variety of actions, given information about a previous behavior. From these likelihood ratings, we extracted a hierarchical, taxonomic model of how moral violations relate to each other (Study 1). We then tested the descriptive adequacy of this model against an alternative model inspired by Moral Foundations Theory, using classic tasks from induction research (Studies 2a and 2b), and using a measure of confirmation, which accounts for the baseline frequency of these violations (Study 3). Lastly, we conducted focused tests of combinations of violations where the models make differing predictions (Study 4). This research provides new insight into how people represent moral concepts, connecting classic methods from cognitive science with contemporary themes in moral psychology.
Research on moral judgment often employs bipolar rating scales to assess whether the difference between two contrasted options is judged to be morally relevant. We give an account of how different numbers of response options provided on such scales (odd vs. even) change the meaning of the test question by communicating different implicit presuppositions. We demonstrate experimentally that these changes can qualitatively affect the moral relevance judgments that subjects express in response to a given judgment problem. Several alternative explanations in terms of trivial measurement distortion are tested and refuted, and we present suggestive evidence as to what kind of factors might be prone to scale effects. The findings underscore that expressed moral judgments are constructed ad hoc and do not necessarily reflect the content of underlying stable moral commitments. We discuss implications for theories and methodology in moral psychology and in judgment and decision-making research more generally.
The severity of moral violations can vary by degree. For instance, although both are immoral, murder is a more severe violation than lying. Though this point is well established in Ethics and the law, relatively little research has been directed at examining how moral severity is represented psychologically. Most prominent moral psychological theories are aimed at explaining first-order moral judgments and are silent on second-order metaethical judgments, such as comparisons of severity. Here, the relative severity of 20 moral violations was established in a preliminary study. Then, a second group of participants were asked to decide which of two moral violations was more severe for all possible combinations of these 20 violations. Participant's response times exhibited two signatures of domain-general magnitude comparisons: we observed both a distance effect and a semantic congruity effect. These findings suggest that moral severity is represented in a similar fashion as other continuous magnitudes.
Research on moral dilemma judgments has been fundamentally shaped by the distinction between utilitarianism and deontology. According to the principle of utilitarianism, the moral status of behavioral options depends on their consequences; the principle of deontology states that the moral status of behavioral options depends on their consistency with moral norms. To identify the processes underlying utilitarian and deontological judgments, researchers have investigated responses to moral dilemmas that pit one principle against the other (e.g., trolley problem). However, the conceptual meaning of responses in this paradigm is ambiguous, because the central aspects of utilitarianism and deontology—consequences and norms—are not manipulated. We illustrate how this shortcoming undermines theoretical interpretations of empirical findings and describe an alternative approach that resolves the ambiguities of the traditional paradigm. Expanding on this approach, we present a multinomial model that allows researchers to quantify sensitivity to consequences (C), sensitivity to moral norms (N), and general preference for inaction versus action irrespective of consequences and norms (I) in responses to moral dilemmas. We present 8 studies that used this model to investigate the effects of gender, cognitive load, question framing, and psychopathy on moral dilemma judgments. The findings obtained with the proposed CNI model offer more nuanced insights into the determinants of moral dilemma judgments, calling for a reassessment of dominant theoretical assumptions.
Based on the dual-process theory of moral judgment, it has been suggested that in Footbridge-type dilemmas the anticipation of the emotional consequences of causing intentional harm might contribute to the decision of rejecting utilitarian resolutions. However, no empirical data have been reported on the emotions felt by participants after their decisions, and the role played by emotions in Trolley-type dilemmas remains to be determined. The present study investigated the specific emotions engaged both after decision choices and after the generation of the counterfactual scenario in Trolley- and Footbridge-type dilemmas. The results support the idea that in Footbridge-type dilemmas decision-making is driven by the attempt to minimize the aversive emotional state evoked by the decision outcome. A greater increase in emotional intensity was found overall for Footbridge-type than Trolley-type dilemmas after the counterfactual generation following typical (non-utilitarian) choices, with guilt, regret, and shame being the emotions that increased most. Critically, in Footbridge-type dilemmas only, typical choices were predicted by the increase in regret intensity experienced after counterfactual generation.
The Big Five Inventory–2 (BFI-2) uses 60 items to hierarchically assess the Big Five personality domains and 15 more-specific facet traits. The present research develops two abbreviated forms of the BFI-2—the 30-item BFI-2-S and the 15-item BFI-2-XS—and then examines their measurement properties. At the level of the Big Five domains, we find that the BFI-2-S and BFI-2-XS retain much of the full measure’s reliability and validity. At the facet level, we find that the BFI-2-S may be useful for examining facet traits in reasonably large samples, whereas the BFI-2-XS should not be used to assess facets. Finally, we discuss some key tradeoffs to consider when deciding whether to administer an abbreviated form instead of the full BFI-2.
The present study investigated the effect of dilemma type, framing, and number of saved lives on moral decision making. A total of 591 undergraduates, with a mean age of 20.56 (SD = 1.37) were randomly assigned to 12 groups on the basis of a grid of two dilemma types (the trolley problem or the footbridge dilemma) by three frames (positive, neutral, or negative frame) by two different numbers of workers (5 or 15 people). The main effects of dilemma type, frame, and number of saved workers were all significant. The interaction of dilemma type and number of saved workers and the interaction of the three independent factors were significant. Results indicated that moral judgment is affected by framing. Specifically, people were more inclined to utilitarianism in the positive or neutral frame and more inclined to intuitionism in the negative frame. Furthermore, this effect can be moderated by dilemma type and number of saved lives. Implications of our results are discussed.
We study how people reconcile conflicting moral intuitions by juxtaposing two versions of classic moral problems: the trolley problem and the footbridge problem. When viewed separately, most people favor action in the former and disapprove of action in the latter, despite identical consequences. The difference is often explained in terms of the intention principle—whether the consequences are intended or incidental. Our results suggest that when the two problems are considered together, a different judgment emerges: participants reject the intention principle and embrace either the principle of utilitarianism, which favors action in both problems, or the action principle, which rejects action in both problems. In subsequent studies, we find that when required to choose between two harmful actions, people prefer the action that saves more lives, despite its being more aversive. Our findings shed light on the formation of moral judgment under normative conflict, the conditions for preference reversal, and the potential polarization of moral judgment under joint evaluation. Organizational implications are discussed.
Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2659 .
This paper was accepted by Yuval Rottenstreich, judgment and decision making.
I present a novel way to conceptualize Turiel and colleagues' Social Domain Theory (SDT), and Haidt and colleagues' Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), as theories of how concepts of moral violations are mentally represented. I argue that SDT is best viewed as a theory of the features that are associated with concepts of moral violations, including wrongness, generalizability across cultures, and intrinsic harmfulness, and that MFT, in contrast, is best viewed as a theory of individual differences in what kinds of acts are categorized as moral violations (i.e., of category membership). This perspective generates a novel prediction: the same individual difference variables that predict variation in moral values according to MFT should predict ascription of the features predicted by SDT. That is, judgments of wrongness, generalizability, and intrinsic harmfulness should covary with the same predictors as do endorsed moral values, specifically, political orientation and analytic thinking. Three studies supported this hypothesis.
The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is thought to correlate with measures of utilitarian moral judgment because it measures system-2 correction of an initial intuitive response. And some theories of moral judgment hold that the same thing often happens when people arrive a utilitarian judgments. We find, however, that CRT-type items (using logic as well as arithmetic) can work just as well when they do not have obvious intuitive answers at predicting utilitarian moral judgment, assessed with self-report questionnaires as well as with hypothetical scenarios, and also at predicting a measure of actively open-minded thinking (AOT). Moreover, long response times, as well as high accuracy, also predict moral judgment and other outcomes. The CRT might thus be considered a test of reflection-impulsivity (RI). However, RI is only part of AOT, because RI is concerned only with the amount of thinking, not its direction. Tests of AOT also predict utilitarian moral judgments. Individual differences in AOT and moral judgments are both strongly (negatively) associated with belief that morality comes from God and cannot be understood through thought. The correlation of CRT and utilitarian judgment, when found, is thus likely due to the (imperfect) correlation of AOT and CRT. Intuition in these domains is thus not necessarily something that people overcome through additional thinking, but rather what they rely on when they do not think very much.
This chapter focuses on moral flexibility, a term that the authors use that people are strongly motivated to adhere to and affirm their moral beliefs in their judgments and choices, they really want to get it right, they really want to do the right thing, but context strongly influences which moral beliefs are brought to bear in a given situation. It reviews contemporary research on moral judgment and decision making, and suggests ways that the major themes in the literature relate to the notion of moral flexibility. The chapter explains what makes moral judgment and decision making unique. It also reviews three major research themes and their explananda: morally prohibited value trade-offs in decision making; rules, reason, and emotion in trade-offs; and judgments of moral blame and punishment. The chapter also comments on methodological desiderata and presents understudied areas of inquiry.
Two experiments were conducted to investigate the influences of outcome and negligence on moral judgments of accidental actions, and hence their roles in the explanation of moral luck. In Experiment 1 (N = 300), two previous studies were replicated in which an agent armed with either a bat or a gun (to manipulate negligence) unintentionally killed a suspected intruder who turned out, luckily, to be a burglar, or unluckily, a family friend (to manipulate outcome). In response to an online questionnaire, participants made moral judgments of punishment, blame and wrongness and rated the agent's negligence and intentionality. The effects of both outcome (victim) and negligence (weapon type) IVs were slight, whereas perceived negligence had a substantial impact on all three judgments. In Experiment 2 (N = 241) the potential influence of both outcome and negligence was raised by increasing the contrasts between conditions: the agent was armed or unarmed, and the suspected intruder was harmed or unharmed. Perceived negligence again had a substantial impact on all three judgments, but now outcome, too, had a strong and direct effect on punishment judgments. These findings indicate that outcome effects on blame and wrongness judgments of accidental agents result primarily from the differential attribution of negligence: agents are considered more negligent – and hence more culpable – when outcomes are worse. In contrast, high levels of punishment are usually assigned when, and only when, the accidental agent is considered negligent and the outcome is negative. We discuss the implications for the interpretation of previous findings of strong outcome effects, and whether these effects, and therefore moral luck, are best explained by hindsight bias or by more rational updating of moral judgments.
One of the main themes that has emerged from behavioral decision research during the past three decades is the view that people's preferences are often constructed in the process of elicitation. This idea is derived from studies demonstrating that normatively equivalent methods of elicitation (e.g., choice and pricing) give rise to systematically different responses. These preference reversals violate the principle of procedure invariance that is fundamental to all theories of rational choice. If different elicitation procedures produce different orderings of options, how can preferences be defined and in what sense do they exist? This book shows not only the historical roots of preference construction but also the blossoming of the concept within psychology, law, marketing, philosophy, environmental policy, and economics. Decision making is now understood to be a highly contingent form of information processing, sensitive to task complexity, time pressure, response mode, framing, reference points, and other contextual factors.
One of the main themes that has emerged from behavioral decision research during the past three decades is the view that people's preferences are often constructed in the process of elicitation. This idea is derived from studies demonstrating that normatively equivalent methods of elicitation (e.g., choice and pricing) give rise to systematically different responses. These preference reversals violate the principle of procedure invariance that is fundamental to all theories of rational choice. If different elicitation procedures produce different orderings of options, how can preferences be defined and in what sense do they exist? This book shows not only the historical roots of preference construction but also the blossoming of the concept within psychology, law, marketing, philosophy, environmental policy, and economics. Decision making is now understood to be a highly contingent form of information processing, sensitive to task complexity, time pressure, response mode, framing, reference points, and other contextual factors.
Investors frequently rely on individual analysts’ stock price targets. Aggressive price targets often reflect analysts’ attempts to strategically influence investors. Therefore, investors’ welfare may be compromised if they take aggressive price targets at face value. In this study we examine conditions under which investors are more likely to infer that analysts who issue aggressive price targets are acting strategically. Investors can evaluate multiple analysts’ price targets with or without other related information (e.g., earnings estimates). Investors can also evaluate the information provided by multiple analysts jointly or separately. Two experiments find that as predicted, when investors evaluate multiple analysts’ price targets without earnings estimates, there is no difference in investors’ perceptions about whether the aggressive analyst is acting strategically across joint versus separate evaluation. However, also as predicted, when investors evaluate multiple analysts’ price targets along with their earnings estimates, investors perceive the aggressive analyst as acting more strategically under joint evaluation than under separate evaluation. Our findings suggest that when investors evaluate multiple analysts’ price targets with other related information such as earnings estimates, adopting joint evaluation can reduce the likelihood that investors are overly influenced by aggressive analysts. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Valence framing effects occur when participants make different choices or judgments depending on whether the options are described in terms of their positive outcomes (e.g. lives saved) or their negative outcomes (e.g. lives lost). When such framing effects occur in the domain of moral judgments, they have been taken to cast doubt on the reliability of moral judgments and raise questions about the extent to which these moral judgments are self-evident or justified in themselves. One important factor in this debate is the magnitude and variability of the extent to which differences in framing presentation impact moral judgments. Although moral framing effects have been studied by psychologists, the overall strength of these effects pooled across published studies is not yet known. Here we conducted a meta-analysis of 109 published articles (contributing a total of 146 unique experiments with 49,564 participants) involving valence framing effects on moral judgments and found a moderate effect (d = 0.50) among between-subjects designs as well as several moderator variables. While we find evidence for publication bias, statistically accounting for publication bias attenuates, but does not eliminate, this effect (d = 0.22). This suggests that the magnitude of valence framing effects on moral decisions is small, yet significant when accounting for publication bias.
According to the ‘expertise defence’, experimental findings suggesting that intuitive judgments about hypothetical cases are influenced by philosophically irrelevant factors do not undermine their evidential use in (moral) philosophy. This defence assumes that philosophical experts are unlikely to be influenced by irrelevant factors. We discuss relevant findings from experimental metaphilosophy that largely tell against this assumption. To advance the debate, we present the most comprehensive experimental study of intuitive expertise in ethics to date, which tests five well-known biases of judgment and decision-making among expert ethicists and laypeople. We found that even expert ethicists are affected by some of these biases, but also that they enjoy a slight advantage over laypeople in some cases. We discuss the implications of these results for the expertise defence, and conclude that they still do not support the defence as it is typically presented in (moral) philosophy.
In the ‘push-dilemma,’ a train is about to run over several people and can only be stopped by pushing a heavy person onto the tracks. Most lay people and moral philosophers consider the ‘push-option,’ i.e., pushing the heavy person, as morally wrong. Peter Unger (1992, 1996) suggested that adding irrelevant options to the push-dilemma would overturn this intuition. This chapter tests Unger’s claim in an experiment with both lay people and expert moral philosophers. This allowed an investigation of the ‘expertise defense,’ which various philosophers have suggested as an answer to ‘experimental restrictionists,’ who argue that experimental philosophy undermines the trustworthiness of intuitions about hypothetical cases. Overall, the chapter finds that adding irrelevant options increases the ratings for the push-option. Moreover, the intuitions of expert moral philosophers are no less susceptible to the presence of irrelevant options than lay people’s intuitions. The chapter discusses how these findings bear on the expertise defense.
In sacrificial dilemmas, participants judge the morality of killing one person to save several others. For five sacrificial dilemmas, participants rated on separate unidimensional scales how “morally right” and how “morally wrong” they felt such actions would be under six combinations of beneficiaries (strangers, cousins, one’s children) and targets (firefighter, bank robber). Framing a survey question in terms of “morally right” potentially primes prescriptive moral norms, directing attention to the beneficiaries; framing it in terms of “morally wrong” potentially primes proscriptive moral norms, directing attention to the targets. Selective attention induced by a question should heighten sensitivity to changes in levels of the corresponding independent variable. Accordingly, ratings of right changed more than ratings of wrong across beneficiaries; ratings of wrong changed more than ratings of right across targets. Question framing can bias moral appraisal by heightening or attenuating attentiveness to individuals who would benefit or suffer from sacrificial action.
People evaluate the moral character of others not only based on what they do, but also on what leads them to do it. Because an agent's state of mind is not directly observable, people typically engage in mindreading—attempts at inferring mental states—when forming moral evaluations. The present paper identifies a general target of such mental state inference, mental occurrents—a catchall term for the thoughts, beliefs, principles, feelings, concerns, and rules accessible in an agent's mind when confronting a morally relevant decision. Moral mental occurrents are those that can provide a moral justification for a particular course of action. Whereas previous mindreading research has examined how people reason back to make sense of an agent's behavior, we instead ask how inferred moral mental occurrents (MOs) constrain moral evaluations for an agent's subsequent actions. Our studies distinguish three accounts of how inferred MOs influence moral evaluations, show that people rely on inferred MOs spontaneously (instead of merely when experimental measures draw attention to them), and identify non-moral contextual cues (e.g., whether the situation demands a quick decision) that guide inferences about MOs. Implications for theory of mind, moral psychology, and social cognition are discussed.
The authors compare two approaches to conjoint analysis in terms of their ability to predict shares in a holdout choice task. The traditional approach is represented by three models fit to individual-level ratings of full profiles, whereas the other approach is represented by four multinomial logit models fit to choice shares for sets of full profiles. Both approaches predict holdout shares well, with neither the ratings-based nor the choice-based approach dominant, though some models predict better than others. Particularly promising is a new aggregate model that captures departures from independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA).
Moral philosophers and psychologists often assume that people judge morally lucky and morally unlucky agents differently, an assumption that stands at the heart of the Puzzle of Moral Luck. We examine whether the asymmetry is found for reflective intuitions regarding wrongness, blame, permissibility, and punishment judg- ments, whether people’s concrete, case-based judgments align with their explicit, abstract principles regarding moral luck, and what psychological mechanisms might drive the effect.
Our experiments produce three findings: First, in within-subjects experiments favorable to reflective deliberation, the vast majority of people judge a lucky and an unlucky agent as equally blameworthy, and their actions as equally wrong and permissible. The philosophical Puzzle of Moral Luck, and the challenge to the very possibility of systematic ethics it is frequently taken to engender, thus simply do not arise. Second, punishment judgments are significantly more outcome- dependent than wrongness, blame, and permissibility judgments. While this constitutes evidence in favor of current Dual Process Theories of moral judgment, the latter need to be qualified: punishment and blame judgments do not seem to be driven by the same process, as is commonly argued in the literature. Third, in between-subjects experiments, outcome has an effect on all four types of moral judgments. This effect is mediated by negligence ascriptions and can ultimately be explained as due to differing probability ascriptions across cases.
Mental state reasoning has been theorized as a core feature of how we navigate our social worlds, and as especially vital to moral reasoning. Judgments of moral wrong-doing and punish-worthiness often hinge upon evaluations of the perpetrator's mental states. In two studies, we examine how differences in cultural conceptions about how one should think about others' minds influence the relative importance of intent vs. outcome in moral judgments. We recruit participation from three societies, differing in emphasis on mental state reasoning: Indigenous iTaukei Fijians from Yasawa Island (Yasawans) who normatively avoid mental state inference in favor of focus on relationships and consequences of actions; Indo-Fijians who normatively emphasize relationships but do not avoid mental state inference; and North Americans who emphasize individual autonomy and interpreting others' behaviors as the direct result of mental states. In study 1, Yasawan participants placed more emphasis on outcome than Indo-Fijians or North Americans by judging accidents more harshly than failed attempts. Study 2 tested whether underlying differences in the salience of mental states drives study 1 effects by inducing Yasawan and North American participants to think about thoughts vs. actions before making moral judgments. When induced to think about thoughts, Yasawan participants shifted to judge failed attempts more harshly than accidents. Results suggest that culturally-transmitted concepts about how to interpret the social world shape patterns of moral judgments, possibly via mental state inference.
Humans are cognitive misers because their basic tendency is to default to processing mechanisms of low computational expense. Such a tendency leads to suboptimal outcomes in certain types of hostile environments. The theoretical inferences made from correct and incorrect responding on heuristics and biases tasks have been overly simplified, however. The framework developed here traces the complexities inherent in these tasks by identifying five processing states that are possible in most heuristics and biases tasks. The framework also identifies three possible processing defects: inadequately learned mindware; failure to detect the necessity of overriding the miserly response; and failure to sustain the override process once initiated. An important insight gained from using the framework is that degree of mindware instantiation is strongly related to the probability of successful detection and override. Thus, errors on such tasks cannot be unambiguously attributed to miserly processing – and correct responses are not necessarily the result of computationally expensive cognition.
Moral judgment is influenced by both automatic and deliberative processing systems, and moral conflict arises when these systems produce competing intuitions. We investigated the role of emotional arousal in inhibiting harmful action in a behavioral study of utilitarian tradeoffs in a 3D digital simulation of two classic “trolley” scenarios in which participants decided whether to harm one person in order to avert harm to five others. Physiological arousal was measured via skin conductance response in real time. Results showed that physiological arousal is increased in situations in which using personal harm is necessary to achieve a utilitarian outcome relative to when the same outcome can be achieved with impersonal harm, and is linked to a decreased likelihood of engaging in harmful action, though a test of mediation was not statistically significant. In addition, when the use of personal harm was required to save lives, arousal was higher pre-action relative to post-action. Overall, our findings suggest that physiological arousal may be part of an affective system that functions to inhibit harmful action against others.
The Allais common ratio effect is one of the most robust violations of rational decision making under risk. In this paper, we conduct a novel test of the common ratio effect in which we elicit preferences for the common ratio choice alternatives in choice, pricing, and happiness rating tasks. We find large shifts in preference patterns across tasks, both within and between subjects. In particular, we find that both the consistency and distribution of responses differ systematically across tasks, with modal choices replicating the Allais preference pattern, modal happiness ratings exhibiting consistent risk aversion, and modal prices maximizing expected value. We discuss the predictions of various cognitive explanations of the common ratio effect in the context of our experiment. We find that a dual process framework provides the most complete account of our results. Surprisingly, we also find that although the Allais pattern was the modal behavior in the choice task, none of the 158 respondents in our experiment exhibited the Allais pattern simultaneously in choice, happiness, and pricing tasks. Our results constitute a new paradox for the leading theories of choice under risk. Copyright
Data collection using Internet-based samples has become increasingly popular in many social science disciplines, including advertising. This research examines whether one popular Internet data source, Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), is an appropriate substitute for other popular samples utilized in advertising research. Specifically, a five-sample between-subjects experiment was conducted to help researchers who utilize MTurk in advertising experiments understand the strengths and weaknesses of MTurk relative to student samples and professional panels. In comparisons across five samples, results show that the MTurk data outperformed panel data procured from two separate professional marketing research companies across various measures of data quality. The MTurk data were also compared to two different student samples, and results show the data were at least comparable in quality. While researchers may consider MTurk samples as a viable alternative to student samples when testing theory-driven outcomes, precautions should be taken to ensure the quality of data regardless of the source. Best practices for ensuring data quality are offered for advertising researchers who utilize MTurk for data collection.
This paper, which is based on a heuristic-systematic dual-process model, identifies the boundary conditions of the nine-ending pricing effect when nine-ending and zero-ending prices are separately, jointly, and sequentially evaluated. Study 1 proves the occurrence of the nine-ending effect in separate, but not joint, evaluation conditions. Study 2 adds an extra sequential evaluation mode to Study 1 and measures actual quantitative estimations with a shopping budget. The results are consistent with those from Study 1. The results of Study 3 demonstrate that the perceived price difference between nine- and zero-ending digits with different leftmost digits is greater in the separate-evaluation mode than it is in the jointevaluation mode. In Study 4, task complexity is manipulated and the results show that no nine-ending effect is observed when cognitive capacity, which is induced by greater task complexity, exceeds the capabilities that people possess.
Objective:
Although individual differences in the application of moral principles, such as utilitarianism, have been documented, so too have powerful context effects - effects that raise doubts about the durability of people's moral principles. In this paper, we examine the robustness of individual differences in moral judgment by examining them across time and across different decision contexts.
Method:
In Study 1, consistency in utilitarian judgment of 122 adult participants was examined over two different survey sessions. In Studies 2A and 2B, large samples (Ns = 130 and 327, respectively) of adult participants made a series of 32 moral judgments across eight different contexts that are known to affect preferences for utilitarian outcomes.
Results:
Contrary to some contemporary theorizing, our results reveal a strong degree of consistency in moral judgment. Across time and experimental manipulations of context, individuals maintained their relative standing on utilitarianism, and aggregated moral decisions reached levels of near-perfect consistency.
Conclusion:
Results support the view that on at least one dimension (utilitarianism), people's moral judgments are robustly consistent, with context effects tailoring the application of principles to the particulars of any given moral judgment. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Alternative explanations have been offered to explain consumers' inconsistent preferences in decision problems. We present a Dual Process Evaluability Framework (DPEF) which suggests that the characteristics of the decision problem, including response mode, presentation mode, and choice-set structure, are critical to predicting preference reversals related to decisions under risk and uncertainty, over time, and between product assortments, as well as presentation mode reversals involving joint versus separate evaluations, and response mode reversals involving a combination of choice tasks, monetary value tasks, and attractiveness ratings. Our framework, grounded in evaluability theory and dual process models, predicts how these decision problem characteristics directly affect the ease of evaluation of alternatives which subsequently affects the relative dominance of feeling versus calculation in these tasks. Application of DPEF to previously documented preference reversals, complemented by three studies which test new predictions of DPEF, reveals that DPEF provides a parsimonious explanation for a variety of decision anomalies.
Ss expressed preferences between pairs of decision alternatives characterized by 2 attributes, for example, price and quality. They were more likely to prefer the alternative that was superior with respect to the most important attribute when making choices and strength-of-preference judgments than when making matching and monetary-equivalent value judgments. Rating scale judgments fell between these two extremes. These findings extend the previously established choice versus matching prominence effect (Tversky, Sattath, & Slovic, 1988) to a more general qualitative versus quantitative task prominence effect. The data support the strategy-compatibility interpretation of the prominence effect. They also show that in riskless decision making, the generalized prominence effect is much stronger than simple scale-compatibility effects.
We examined the effects of framing and order of presentation on professional philosophers' judgments about a moral puzzle case (the "trolley problem") and a version of the Tversky & Kahneman "Asian disease" scenario. Professional philosophers exhibited substantial framing effects and order effects, and were no less subject to such effects than was a comparison group of non-philosopher academic participants. Framing and order effects were not reduced by a forced delay during which participants were encouraged to consider "different variants of the scenario or different ways of describing the case". Nor were framing and order effects lower among participants reporting familiarity with the trolley problem or with loss-aversion framing effects, nor among those reporting having had a stable opinion on the issues before participating the experiment, nor among those reporting expertise on the very issues in question. Thus, for these scenario types, neither framing effects nor order effects appear to be reduced even by high levels of academic expertise.
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Frederick, Lee, and Baskin (2014) and Yang and Lynn (2014) argue that the conditions for obtaining the attraction effect are so restrictive that the practical validity of the attraction effect should be questioned. In this commentary, the authors first ground the attraction (asymmetric dominance) effect in its historical context as a test of an important theoretical assumption from rational choice theory. Drawing on the research reported by scholars from many fields of study, the authors argue that the finding of an asymmetric dominance effect remains robust because it holds when the conditions of the study are essentially replicated. Next, the authors identify some of the factors that mitigate (and amplify) the attraction effect and then position the effect into a larger theoretical debate involving the extent to which preferences are constructed versus merely revealed. The authors conclude by arguing that researchers who try to measure values as well as choice architects who attempt to shape values must be sensitive to the context-dependent properties of choice behavior, as illustrated by the attraction effect.