Abstract
In everyday life we are constantly updating our moral judgements as we learn new information. However, this judgement updating process has not been systematically studied. We investigated how people update their moral judgements of fairness-related actions of others after receiving contextual information regarding the deservingness of the action recipient. Participants (N = 313) observed a virtual ‘Decision-maker’ share a portion of $10 with a virtual ‘Receiver’. Participants were aware that the Decision-maker made these choices knowing the Receiver’s previous offer to another person. Participants first made a context-absent judgement of the Decision-maker’s offer to the Receiver, and then a subsequent context-present judgement of the same offer after learning the Receiver’s previous offer. This sequence was repeated for varying dollar values of Decision-makers’ and Receivers’ offers. Patterns of judgements varied across individuals and were interpretable in relation to moral norms. Most participants flexibly switched from relying on context-independent norms (generosity, equality) to related, context-dependent norms (relative generosity, indirect reciprocity) as they integrated contextual information. Judgement of low offers varied across individuals, with a substantial minority of participants withholding their context-absent judgements of selfishness, and another minority that was lenient towards selfishness across both judgements. Our paradigm provides a novel framework for investigating how moral judgements evolve in real time as people learn more information about a given situation.
Highlights
In everyday life we are constantly updating our moral judgements as we learn new information
In the present study we investigated how people update their moral judgements in the face of new information and aimed to provide new insights into how our moral cognition flexibly adapts to account for context-dependent moral norms
Our findings suggest that people substantially adjust their judgements in information-dynamic situations, which is important to consider for the future development of moral judgement theories
Summary
In everyday life we are constantly updating our moral judgements as we learn new information. If contextual information is presented after an initial decision is made, moral evaluators may become susceptible to several well studied effects including: the status quo effect—a tendency to maintain the current or previous decision[15], the choice-induced preference effect—a tendency to increase preference for the chosen option[16,17], the congeniality bias—a tendency to pay less attention to information that does not conform to an initially formed impression[18], and anchoring—a tendency to make insufficient adjustments to starting estimates, or initial beliefs[19,20] All of these biases work against changing initial judgements and integrating new contextual information. Whether moral judgements are immune to these decision biases is still unknown
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