David Tannenbaum

Chapter 10 Motivated Moral Reasoning

Abstract Moral judgments are important, intuitive, and complex. These factors make moral judgment particularly fertile ground for motivated reasoning. This chapter reviews research (both our own and that of others) examining two general pathways by which motivational forces can alter the moral implications of an act: by affecting perceptions of an actors moral accountability for the act, and by influencing the normative moral principles people rely on to evaluate the morality of the act. We conclude by discussing the implications of research on motivated moral reasoning for both classic and contemporary views of the moral thinker.

When it takes a bad person to do the right thing.

Three studies demonstrate that morally praiseworthy behavior can signal negative information about an agents character. In particular, consequentialist decisions such as sacrificing one life to save an even greater number of lives can lead to unfavorable character evaluations, even when they are viewed as the preferred course of action. In Study 1, throwing a dying man overboard to prevent a lifeboat from sinking was perceived as the morally correct course of action, but led to negative aspersions about the motivations and personal character of individuals who carried out such an act. In Studies 2 and 3, a hospital administrator who decided not to fund an expensive operation to save a child (instead buying needed hospital equipment) was seen as making a pragmatic and morally praiseworthy decision, but also as deficient in empathy and moral character.

The Elusive Search for Stable Risk Preferences

In the early morning hours of June 20, 2011 Ryan Dunn was driving his Porsche 911 GTE up to 140 miles per hour through the Pennsylvania countryside. The car careened over a guardrail and into a wooded area, killing Dunn and a passenger in a fiery crash. A toxicology report later determined that Dunns blood alcohol level was more than twice the legal limit. Many observers found the accident somewhat unsurprising because Dunn was best known for performing dangerous stunts in the popular Jackass television and movie series. As one blogger put it: “This is the type of person he was. He was a risk-taker”.1 Indeed, the headline in the Philadelphia Daily News later read: “Dunn deal: Death of a risk-taker.” The publics response to the Ryan Dunn tragedy illustrates a prevalent belief that there are consistent individual differences in not only peoples risk-taking behavior but also in their underlying appetite for risk. Several industries depend on this assumption. For instance, in financial services the “suitability doctrine” legally requires financial advisors to assess their clients’ risk preference before dispensing advice (Mundheim, 1965). Likewise, most social–science disciplines traditionally assume stable and measurable individual differences in risk preference. However, based on our reading of the empirical literature, the common intuition that risk preference is a stable disposition may reflect more of an attribution error than empirical fact.

On the misplaced politics of behavioural policy interventions

Government agencies around the world have begun to embrace the use of behavioural policy interventions (such as the strategic use of default options), which has inspired vigorous public discussion about the ethics of their use. Since any feasible policy requires some measure of public support, understanding when people find behavioural policy interventions acceptable is critical. We present experimental evidence for a ‘partisan nudge bias’ in both US adults and practising policymakers. Across a range of policy settings, people find the general use of behavioural interventions more ethical when illustrated by examples that accord with their politics, but view those same interventions as more unethical when illustrated by examples at odds with their politics. Importantly, these differences disappear when behavioural interventions are stripped of partisan cues, suggesting that acceptance of such policy tools is not an inherently partisan issue. Our results suggest that opposition to (or support for) behavioural policy interventions should not always be taken at face value, as people appear to conflate their attitudes about general purpose policy methods with their attitudes about specific policy objectives or policy sponsors.

Thinking More or Feeling Less? Explaining the Foreign-Language Effect on Moral Judgment

Would you kill one person to save five? People are more willing to accept such utilitarian action when using a foreign language than when using their native language. In six experiments, we investigated why foreign-language use affects moral choice in this way. On the one hand, the difficulty of using a foreign language might slow people down and increase deliberation, amplifying utilitarian considerations of maximizing welfare. On the other hand, use of a foreign language might stunt emotional processing, attenuating considerations of deontological rules, such as the prohibition against killing. Using a process-dissociation technique, we found that foreign-language use decreases deontological responding but does not increase utilitarian responding. This suggests that using a foreign language affects moral choice not through increased deliberation but by blunting emotional reactions associated with the violation of deontological rules.

Incentivizing Wellness in the Workplace Sticks (Not Carrots) Send Stigmatizing Signals

Companies often provide incentives for employees to maintain healthy lifestyles. These incentives can take the form of either discounted premiums for healthy-weight employees (“carrot” policies) or increased premiums for overweight employees (“stick” policies). In the three studies reported here, we demonstrated that even when stick and carrot policies are formally equivalent, they do not necessarily convey the same information to employees. Stick but not carrot policies were viewed as reflecting negative company attitudes toward overweight employees (Study 1a) and were evaluated especially negatively by overweight participants (Study 1b). This was true even when overweight employees paid less money under the stick than under the carrot policy. When acting as policymakers (Study 2), participants with high levels of implicit overweight bias were especially likely to choose stick policies—often on the grounds that such policies were cost-effective—even when doing so was more costly to the company. Policymakers should realize that the framing of incentive programs can convey tacit, and sometimes stigmatizing, messages.

Judgment Extremity and Accuracy Under Epistemic vs. Aleatory Uncertainty

People view uncertain events as knowable in principle (epistemic uncertainty), as fundamentally random (aleatory uncertainty), or as some mixture of the two. We show that people make more extreme probability judgments (i.e., closer to 0 or 1) for events they view as entailing more epistemic uncertainty and less aleatory uncertainty. We demonstrate this pattern in a domain where there is agreement concerning the balance of evidence (pairings of teams according to their seed in a basketball tournament) but individual differences in the perception of the epistemicness/aleatoriness of that domain (Study 1), across a range of domains that vary in their perceived epistemicness/aleatoriness (Study 2), in a single judgment task for which we only vary the degree of randomness with which events are selected (Study 3), and when we prime participants to see events as more epistemic or aleatory (Study 4). Decomposition of accuracy scores suggests that the greater judgment extremity of more epistemic events can manifes...

Data from a pre-publication independent replication initiative examining ten moral judgement effects

We present the data from a crowdsourced project seeking to replicate findings in independent laboratories before (rather than after) they are published. In this Pre-Publication Independent Replication (PPIR) initiative, 25 research groups attempted to replicate 10 moral judgment effects from a single laboratory’s research pipeline of unpublished findings. The 10 effects were investigated using online/lab surveys containing psychological manipulations (vignettes) followed by questionnaires. Results revealed a mix of reliable, unreliable, and culturally moderated findings. Unlike any previous replication project, this dataset includes the data from not only the replications but also from the original studies, creating a unique corpus that researchers can use to better understand reproducibility and irreproducibility in science.