Abstract
Complex moral decision making may share certain cognitive mechanisms with economic decision making under risk situations. However, it is little known how people weigh gains and losses between self and others during moral decision making under risk situations. The current study adopted the dilemma scenario-priming paradigm to examine how self-relevance and reputational concerns influenced moral decision making. Participants were asked to decide whether they were willing to sacrifice their own interests to help the protagonist (friend, acquaintance, or stranger) under the dilemmas of reputational loss risk, while the helping choices, decision times and emotional responses were recorded. In Study 1, participants showed a differential altruistic tendency, indicating that participants took less time to make more helping choices and subsequently reported weaker unpleasant experience toward friends compared to acquaintances and strangers. In Study 2, participants still made these egoistically biased altruistic choices under the low reputational loss risk conditions. However, such an effect was weakened by the high reputational loss risks. Results suggested that moral principle guiding interpersonal moral decision making observed in our study is best described as an egoistically biased altruism, and that reputational concerns can play a key role in restraining selfish tendency.
Highlights
How we make decisions that have direct consequences for ourselves and others forms the moral foundation of our society (Volz et al, 2017)
Results from Studies 1 and 2 found that all participants preferred to be willing to sacrifice self-interest to help others under moral dilemmas. This finding was consistent with the findings of previous studies which reported that people are generally altruistic, such as trusting and helping others and cooperating with others (Loke et al, 2011; Wang et al, 2016)
Results suggested that people made egoistically biased altruistic moral decision-making in the costly helping dilemmas
Summary
How we make decisions that have direct consequences for ourselves and others forms the moral foundation of our society (Volz et al, 2017). Economists typically characterized humans as profoundly selfish in economic decisions, but some recent psychological studies showed that people were hyperaltruistic in some social decisions, such as moral decision making (Crockett et al, 2014, 2015; Volz et al, 2017). Moral decision making is supposed as the ability to choose an optimal course of action among multiple alternatives within a system of norms and values that guides our behaviors in a community (Rilling and Sanfey, 2011). Knowledge on how people make choices for gains and losses between self and others under different moral dilemmas is limited (Christensen and Gomila, 2012; Hughes, 2017)
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