It's Harder to Push, When I Have to Push Hard-Physical Exertion and Fatigue Changes Reasoning and Decision-Making on Hypothetical Moral Dilemmas in Males.

ABSTRACT: Despite the prevalence of physical exertion and fatigue during military, firefighting and disaster medicine operations, sports or even daily life, their acute effects on moral reasoning and moral decision-making have never been systematically investigated. To test the effects of physical exertion on moral reasoning and moral decision-making, we administered a moral dilemma task to 32 male participants during a moderate or high intensity cycling intervention. Participants in the high intensity cycling group tended to show more non-utilitarian reasoning and more non-utilitarian decision-making on impersonal but not on personal dilemmas than participants in the moderate intensity cycling group. Exercise-induced exertion and fatigue, thus, shifted moral reasoning and moral decision-making in a non-utilitarian rather than utilitarian direction, presumably due to an exercise-induced limitation of prefrontally mediated executive resources that are more relevant for utilitarian than non-utilitarian reasoning and decision-making.

SUBMITTER: Weippert M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6276357 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature