Douglas J. Navarick’s research while affiliated with California State University, Fullerton and other places

Moral judgments can occur either in settings that call for impartiality or in settings that allow for partiality. How effective are impartiality settings such as hospitals in suppressing personal biases? Portrayed as decision-makers in an emergency department, 431 college students made judgments on which of two victims of a mass shooting should receive immediate, life-saving care. Patients differed in ways that could reveal biases, e.g., age (8 vs. 80 years), kinship (stranger vs. cousin), gender (female vs. male), and villain/hero (shooter vs. policeman who stopped him). Participants rated each patient’s moral deservingness to receive immediate care and the likelihood they would choose the patient. Both scales showed young favored over old, cousin (or daughter) over stranger, and policeman over shooter (largest difference). In a hospital-room scenario with high risk of injury from falling, age bias disappeared. With moderate fall risk, age bias reversed and kinship deservingness bias disappeared. Bias decreases when there is a decrease in severity of potential harm to the preferred stakeholder. Settings that call for impartiality are not reliable “boundary conditions” against expressions of bias. In the absence of explicit guidelines for allocating scarce resources, a systematic, objective method of random selection offers a potentially useful strategy.

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.

The purpose of the present study was to examine the use of a bivariate scale to measure moral judgments. A bivariate scale consists of two unidimensional scales that are linked to opposite sides of the same underlying scale and are presented at the same time. These features enable the bivariate scale to capture the complexity of a person’s positive and negative reactions more clearly than could a single summary rating on a bipolar scale (e.g., Kwak et al., 2013). In the literature on moral judgment there have been no studies that have used a bivariate scale of measurement but rather a wide variety of categorical, unidimensional and bipolar scales (cf. Navarick, 2016). The present study examined the use of the bivariate scale in two different ways. First, the correlation between feelings of right and wrong was examined. Second, Friesdorf, Conway, and Gawronski (2015) conducted a meta-analysis and found that men were more utilitarian than women and women were more deontological than men. The present study tested differences between men and women on ratings of right and wrong and it was expected that there would be a larger gender difference in ratings of wrong (deontological moral judgments) than ratings of right (utilitarian moral judgments). Gender differences in moral judgment were measured on separate bivariate scales of right and wrong. Overall judgments were calculated as (R­–W). 385 participants rated their moral sentiments toward harmful but useful actions described in 16 scenarios. Results showed that there was a significant, moderate negative correlation (r = -.57) between ratings of right and wrong. Additionally, results showed that women had higher ratings of wrong than men (d = .47) and men had higher ratings of right than women (d = .31). The gender effect on ratings of wrong was slightly larger than the gender effect on ratings of right. Females had lower overall values of (R­ – W) than males, reflecting greater disapproval of harmful but useful actions, but such summary measures obscure the moral ambivalence present in both genders. Although ratings of right and wrong were moderately negatively correlated, this interaction with gender demonstrates that the scales represented different underlying processes, basically, approach and avoidance motivation.

Moral judgments often appear to arise from quick affectively toned intuitions rather than from conscious application of moral principles. Sometimes people feel that an action they observe or contemplate could be judged as either right or wrong. Models of moral intuition need to specify mechanisms that could account for such moral ambivalence. The basic implication of moral ambivalence is that right and wrong are regions of a bivariate scale rather than a bipolar scale. The former allows for equally strong positive and negative evaluations of a stimulus, but the latter requires one evaluation to get weaker as the other one gets stronger (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1994). Covariation of evaluative activations is supported by classic animal research on approach–avoidance conflict showing that when rats are both rewarded and punished in the goal region of a runway, their approach and avoidance tendencies both increase as they get closer to the goal. The relevance of this research to moral judgment is underscored by recent studies indicating that judgments of right and wrong are fundamentally expressions of approach and avoidance motivation. Experimental and historical analyses illustrate 2 potential effects of ambivalence on moral judgment, vacillation and suppression, and a proposed model shows how the bivariate scale can be applied to existing formulations, including Haidt’s moral foundations theory. Studies of moral judgment that use rating scales, questionnaires, or interviews should give participants the option to express ambivalence (e.g., “can’t decide,” “don’t know”) instead of requiring definitive judgments, which is the current practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)

Pigeons' pecks in the presence of two concurrently available initial-link stimuli produced one of two (mutually exclusive) terminal-link stimuli on equal variable-interval schedules. Pecks during terminal-link stimuli produced food on fixed-interval schedules. In three of four birds, the probability of a peck increased on one key as a function of the time since the last choice response on either key. In the fourth bird, the probability of a peck increased with interresponse time on whichever key was pecked last (perseveration). Thus, choice responses terminating different interresponse times may not be functionally equivalent, or quantitatively interchangeable, in concurrent schedules.

In Milgram's (1963, 1965a, 1965b, 1974/2004) experiments on destructive obedience, an authority figure repeatedly ordered a resistant participant to deliver what seemed to be increasingly painful shocks to a confederate victim who demanded to be released. A three-stage behavioral model (aversive conditioning of contextual stimuli, emergence of a decision point, and a choice between immediate and delayed reinforcers) proposes that participants withdraw to escape personal distress rather than to help the victim. The model explains significant details in accounts of the 1942 massacres of some 3,200 Jewish civilians at Józefów and Lomazy, Poland, by Nazi Reserve Police Battalion 101. The use of historical analyses to test nomothetic psychological theories offers unique opportunities for advancing understanding of destructive obedience.

Undergraduates participating in experiments late in the semester generally perform more poorly on demanding tasks and withdraw more often than those participating early. To investigate effects of task aversiveness, some participants were instructed to choose brief cartoon reinforcement with a long time-out while others were instructed to choose longer cartoon reinforcement with a short time-out. Three times as many students withdrew under the unfavorable schedule but withdrawal rates were significantly higher at the end of the semester under both conditions. The Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999) marginally predicted task persistence. Numerous end-of-semester obligations appear to promote withdrawals independently of task aversiveness.

College students repeatedly chose between an immediate,small reinforcer (viewing animated cartoons for 15 s then waiting75 s before the next trial) and a delayed, large reinforcer (a delayof 55 s, then a viewing period of 25 s, followed by 10 s of waiting).Participants were classified as impulsive if, in Session 1, theychose the immediate, small reinforcer on at least 70% of trials, oras self-controlled if they chose it on 30% or less. In Session 2,informing impulsive participants about how much viewing timeeach schedule offered reduced but did not eliminate impulsiveresponding . Informing self-controlled participants about thedifferent delays had no effect. Giving information consistent withprevious preferences resulted in continuation of thosepreferences. The perSistence of impulsive responding despitecontrary instructions suggests a heightened tendency to discountthe value of delayed reinforcers, a process implicated in drugdependence and other pathologies.

Students repeatedly chose between brief reinforcement (cartoon viewing) followed by a long time-out and extended reinforcement followed by a brief time-out. They infrequently chose the former schedule, which they rated as "unpleasant." Then they were instructed to choose only this subjectively aversive schedule. When participants were informed that leaving would not interfere with the research and that most participants had left, the proportion of participants who withdrew rose across weeks of the semester, with later sign-ups quitting at more than twice the rate of early sign-ups. When normative information was omitted, the withdrawal rate was negligible. The time-of-semester trend for withdrawals broadens previous findings showing performance deficiencies on repetitive, aversive tasks in participants who sign up later in the semester.