Abstract
On March 9, 2020, Italy has gone into “lockdown” because of COVID-19 pandemic, with a national quarantine. All non-essential working activities and schools of all levels have been temporarily closed: consequently, the entire population have been forced to dramatically change their daily habits. The pandemic raised important psychological, moral, social, and economic issues. Our research focused on the moral decision-making of people during an emergency. This paper reports two studies. The aim of Study 1 was to evaluate moral decision-making, level of perceived stress, ability of mentalizing and empathy in university students and Italian workers. 224 front-line workers (FLW), 413 second-line workers (SLW), and 663 university students (US), during Italian Phase 1 of lockdown, completed an online questionnaire. The results of Study 1 showed that participants in the FLW group are more likely to choose utilitarian solutions and judge as morally acceptable actions finalized to saving lives of more people if this requires sacrificing a low number of individuals. At the same time, decision-making was experienced as less unpleasant and less arousing with respect to the other two groups, demonstrating a greater ability to keep emotional control under pressure. In Study 2, we compared the same variables used in Study 1, selecting two professional categories from the FLW group engaged in emergency during COVID-19, namely healthcare providers (n = 82) and public safety personnel (n = 117). Our results showed that healthcare providers were more stressed and emotionally involved than public safety personnel, with higher empathic concern and arousal in moral decision-making. We suggest it is essential providing immediate psychological support and monitoring physical and emotional well-being for workers in the front-line during emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to prevent experiences of moral distress or mental health problems.
Highlights
In March 2020, the outbreak of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) placed Italy in front of unprecedented health, social, economic, and political challenges
We found no significant differences between the second-line workers (SLW) group and the university students (US) group
Posthoc comparisons showed that the front-line workers (FLW) group was more likely to accept utilitarian choices than the US group on Incidental dilemmas (p = 0.02); no significant differences were found between the SLW group and the other two groups
Summary
In March 2020, the outbreak of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) placed Italy in front of unprecedented health, social, economic, and political challenges. A moral dilemma is a problematic situation that involves a conflict between two mutually exclusive alternatives, both implying negative and undesirable consequences (Sinnott-Armstrong, 1987; Tasso et al, 2017; Palmiotti et al, 2020) These are situations in which the individual is faced with two moral principles, in opposition to each other, which imply making a decision: maximizing the common good according to a cost-benefit analysis (utilitarian resolution) or deciding for the unconditional respect for a moral rule, regardless of the consequences (deontological resolution). These evidences support the assumption that moral decision-making involves social cognitive processes (Moll et al, 2002a; Young et al, 2007; Moran et al, 2011; Bzdok et al, 2012)
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