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Harm to others outweighs harm to self in moral decision making.

ABSTRACT: Concern for the suffering of others is central to moral decision making. How humans evaluate others' suffering, relative to their own suffering, is unknown. We investigated this question by inviting subjects to trade off profits for themselves against pain experienced either by themselves or an anonymous other person. Subjects made choices between different amounts of money and different numbers of painful electric shocks. We independently varied the recipient of the shocks (self vs. other) and whether the choice involved paying to decrease pain or profiting by increasing pain. We built computational models to quantify the relative values subjects ascribed to pain for themselves and others in this setting. In two studies we show that most people valued others' pain more than their own pain. This was evident in a willingness to pay more to reduce others' pain than their own and a requirement for more compensation to increase others' pain relative to their own. This "hyperaltruistic" valuation of others' pain was linked to slower responding when making decisions that affected others, consistent with an engagement of deliberative processes in moral decision making. Subclinical psychopathic traits correlated negatively with aversion to pain for both self and others, in line with reports of aversive processing deficits in psychopathy. Our results provide evidence for a circumstance in which people care more for others than themselves. Determining the precise boundaries of this surprisingly prosocial disposition has implications for understanding human moral decision making and its disturbance in antisocial behavior.

SUBMITTER: Crockett MJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4260587 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Harm to others outweighs harm to self in moral decision making.

Crockett Molly J MJ Kurth-Nelson Zeb Z Siegel Jenifer Z JZ Dayan Peter P Dolan Raymond J RJ

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20141117 48

Concern for the suffering of others is central to moral decision making. How humans evaluate others' suffering, relative to their own suffering, is unknown. We investigated this question by inviting subjects to trade off profits for themselves against pain experienced either by themselves or an anonymous other person. Subjects made choices between different amounts of money and different numbers of painful electric shocks. We independently varied the recipient of the shocks (self vs. other) and ...[more]

PMID: 25404350

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Project description:While extensive research has been conducted on adults' judgments in moral sacrificial dilemmas, there is little research on adolescents. The present study aimed at: (1) adding further empirical evidence about adolescents' moral decisions (deontological vs. utilitarian) in sacrificial moral dilemmas and (2) investigating how these moral decisions relate with gender, school grade, emotional traits (callous-unemotional traits), context-related experiences (perceived parental rejection and community violence exposure), and moral-related factors (moral disengagement and universalism value). A sample of 755 Italian adolescents (54.7% females; Mean age=16.45, SD=1.61) attending the second and the fifth year of secondary school took part in the study. Two sacrificial trolley-type dilemmas (where harmful actions promote the greater good) were presented. In the "switch" scenario (impersonal sacrificial dilemma), the choice is whether to hit a switch to save five people killing only one person. In the "footbridge" scenario (personal sacrificial dilemma), the choice is whether to push a large man off a footbridge saving five persons. For each scenario, participants had to indicate whether the proposed action was "morally acceptable" or not. Data were analyzed performing generalized linear mixed models. Our results showed that: (1) Adolescents were more likely to indicate as admissible to hit the switch rather than to push the large man; (2) male adolescents, compared to females, were more likely to say it was morally acceptable to intervene in the footbridge dilemma, whereas younger adolescents said it was morally acceptable both in the switch and the footbridge situations; and (3) higher levels of callous-unemotional traits, perceived parental rejection, and moral disengagement, on the one hand, and lower levels of universalism, on the other hand, were associated to higher admissibility to intervene in the footbridge scenario. Higher community violence exposure was associated with a lower propensity to intervene in the switch scenario. Overall, the present study expands the research on sacrificial dilemmas involving a sample of adolescents. The findings support previous studies concerning the role of emotions in making moral decisions but, at the same, open new perspectives regarding the role of contextual experiences and moral-related factors.

Project description:Moral distress is common among critical care physicians and can impact negatively healthcare individuals and institutions. Better understanding inter-individual variability in moral distress is needed to inform future wellness interventions.ObjectivesTo explore when and how critical care physicians experience moral distress in the workplace and its consequences, how physicians' professional interactions with colleagues affected their perceived level of moral distress, and in which circumstances professional rewards were experienced and mitigated moral distress.DesignInterview-based qualitative study using inductive thematic analysis.Setting and participantsTwenty critical care physicians practicing in Canadian ICUs who expressed interest in participating in a semi-structured interview after completion of a national, cross-sectional survey of moral distress in ICU physicians.ResultsStudy participants described different ways to perceive and resolve morally challenging clinical situations, which were grouped into four clinical moral orientations: virtuous, resigned, deferring, and empathic. Moral orientations resulted from unique combinations of strength of personal moral beliefs and perceived power over moral clinical decision-making, which led to different rationales for moral decision-making. Study findings illustrate how sociocultural, legal, and clinical contexts influenced individual physicians' moral orientation and how moral orientation altered perceived moral distress and moral satisfaction. The degree of dissonance between individual moral orientations within care team determined, in part, the quantity of "negative judgments" and/or "social support" that physicians obtained from their colleagues. The levels of moral distress, moral satisfaction, social judgment, and social support ultimately affected the type and severity of the negative consequences experienced by ICU physicians.Conclusions and relevanceAn expanded understanding of moral orientations provides an additional tool to address the problem of moral distress in the critical care setting. Diversity in moral orientations may explain, in part, the variability in moral distress levels among clinicians and likely contributes to interpersonal conflicts in the ICU setting. Additional investigations on different moral orientations in various clinical environments are much needed to inform the design of effective systemic and institutional interventions that address healthcare professionals' moral distress and mitigate its negative consequences.

Project description:Temperature is one of the major environmental factors that people are exposed to on a daily basis, often in conditions that do not afford control. It is known that heat and cold can influence a person's productivity and performance in simple tasks. With respect to social cognition, it has also been suggested that temperature impacts on relatively high-level forms of decision-making. For instance, previous research demonstrated that cold temperature promotes utilitarian judgment in a moral dilemma task. This effect could be due to psychological processing, when a cool temperature primes a set of internal representations (associated with "coldness"). Alternatively, the promotion of utilitarian judgment in cold conditions could be due to physiological interference from temperature, impeding on social cognition. Refuting both explanations of psychological or physiological processing, however, it has been suggested that there may be problems of reproducibility in the literature on temperature modulating complex or abstract information processing. To examine the role of temperature in moral decision-making, we conducted a series of experiments using ambient and haptic temperature with careful manipulation checks and modified task methodology. Experiment 1 manipulated room temperature with cool (21°C), control (24°C) and hot (27°C) conditions and found only a cool temperature effect, promoting utilitarian judgment as in the previous study. Experiment 2 manipulated the intensity of haptic temperature but failed to obtain the cool temperature effect. Experiments 3 and 4 examined the generalizability of the cool ambient temperature effect with another moral judgment task and with manipulation of exposure duration. However, again there were no cool temperature effects, suggesting a lack of reproducibility. Despite successful manipulations of temperature in all four experiments, as measured in body temperature and the participants' self-reported perception, we found no systematic influence of temperature on moral decision-making. A Bayesian meta-analysis of the four experiments showed that the overall data tended to provide strong support in favor of the null hypothesis. We propose that, at least in the range of temperatures from 21 to 27°C, the cool temperature effect in moral decision-making is not a robust phenomenon.

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Harm to others outweighs harm to self in moral decision making.

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Harm to others outweighs harm to self in moral decision making.

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