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.
Highlights
Physical Exertion and Moral Judgment exertion and fatigue, for example during military, firefighting or disaster medicine operations, and sometimes in sport
We investigated how moderate and high intensity exercise affected participants’ performance on a task that involved reasoning and decision-making on hypothetical moral dilemmas
We were able to demonstrate that different individually-tailored exercise intensities led to different levels of physical exertion and fatigue that had divergent effects on moral-reasoning and moral decision-making on personal and impersonal dilemmas
Summary
Physical Exertion and Moral Judgment exertion and fatigue, for example during military, firefighting or disaster medicine operations, and sometimes in sport. Whereas non-fatigued participants favored a dilemma solution that involved the killing of one individual in favor of saving five other individuals (utilitarian reasoning), fatigued participants favored a dilemma solution that did not involve the killing of one individual in favor of saving five other individuals (non-utilitarian or deontological reasoning) These findings are in accordance with findings on decisionmaking in the context of cooperation, distributive justice, and social choice theories, which show that cognitive fatigue facilitates intuitive and limits deliberative decision-making (Baumeister et al, 1998; Capraro and Cococcioni, 2016; Rand, 2016). Utilitarian decision-making, which violates this principle, involves deliberative thinking, while non-utilitarian decision-making, which follows this principle, involves intuitive thinking It remains to be investigated, whether physical fatigue affect moral reasoning and moral decision making in a similar manner as cognitive fatigue. On basis of previous findings (Timmons and Byrne, 2018), we expected participants to show less utilitarian reasoning and less utilitarian decisionmaking after high as compared to moderate intensity exercise, presumably due to acute exertion- and fatigue-induced changes from deliberative to intuitive thinking during task performance
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