Who Makes a Tough Call? An Emotion Regulation Approach to Moral Decision Making

Abstract

In this paper, we contribute to the theory of conflict monitoring by showing that emotion regulation plays a key role in making utilitarian decisions by inhibiting the influence of negative emotions that are associated with the prospect of harm. In particular, we provide much needed data of concurrent monitoring of psycho-physiological indices of emotion while participants make decisions in the moral dilemma situations. In Study 1, we found that individuals who engage in suppression more frequently were more likely to make utilitarian choices in the moral dilemma situation, while those who engage in reappraisal more frequently were less likely to make utilitarian choice. In Study 2, not only did participants make more utilitarian decisions when they were told to suppress emotional reactions they experienced, but also their utilitarian preferences carried over to increase perceptions of moral clarity concerning unrelated moral decisions. More specifically, this relationship between suppression and utilitar...