Moral Preferences Research Articles

The effect of moral preferences on purchase intention toward unethical fashion companies’ products: the moderating role of collectivism and individualism

Purpose This study aims to fill the gap between academia and reality by empirically confirming the effect of moral preferences on consumer responses (purchase intention) to fashion companies’ unethical activities. This study also explores the moderating effect of collectivism and individualism on the paths from moral preferences to purchase intention. Design/methodology/approach Respondents read a stimulus passage describing unethical activities of imaginary fashion brand A and the economic benefits of purchasing/using the brand's products. Then, they were asked to answer questions about homo moralis, homo economicus, individualism, collectivism and purchase intention. Findings Homo moralis significantly and negatively influenced respondents’ purchase intention. Homo economicus significantly and positively affected purchase intention. Collectivism further increased the negative influence of homo moralis on purchase intention. In contrast, individualism increased the positive effect of homo economicus on purchase intention. Research limitations/implications The scope of future research should include various products and explore variables that help consumers perceive that the ethical issues of the industry are deeply related to themselves. Studies should also examine the intention not to purchase products from unethical companies as an outcome variable. The economic aspect that responds to incentives affects purchase intention more strongly than the moral aspect of consumers, which helps explain the behavior of consumers who think of themselves as ethical but purchase products from unethical companies. Originality/value This study can help fashion companies establish strategies such as corporate social responsibility that will lead to a positive effect on consumers’ purchase intention.

Evaluating ChatGPT's moral competence in health care-related ethical problems.

Artificial intelligence tools such as Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) have been used for many health care-related applications; however, there is a lack of research on their capabilities for evaluating morally and/or ethically complex medical decisions. The objective of this study was to assess the moral competence of ChatGPT. This cross-sectional study was performed between May 2023 and July 2023 using scenarios from the Moral Competence Test (MCT). Numerical responses were collected from ChatGPT 3.5 and 4.0 to assess individual and overall stage scores, including C-index and overall moral stage preference. Descriptive analysis and 2-sided Student's t-test were used for all continuous data. A total of 100 iterations of the MCT were performed and moral preference was found to be higher in the latter Kohlberg-derived arguments. ChatGPT 4.0 was found to have a higher overall moral stage preference (2.325 versus 1.755) when compared to ChatGPT 3.5. ChatGPT 4.0 was also found to have a statistically higher C-index score in comparison to ChatGPT 3.5 (29.03 ± 11.10 versus 19.32 ± 10.95, P =.0000275). ChatGPT 3.5 and 4.0 trended towards higher moral preference for the latter stages of Kohlberg's theory for both dilemmas with C-indices suggesting medium moral competence. However, both models showed moderate variation in C-index scores indicating inconsistency and further training is recommended. ChatGPT demonstrates medium moral competence and can evaluate arguments based on Kohlberg's theory of moral development. These findings suggest that future revisions of ChatGPT and other large language models could assist physicians in the decision-making process when encountering complex ethical scenarios.

Value preference profiles and ethical compliance quantification: a new approach for ethics by design in technology-assisted dementia care

AbstractMonitoring and assistive technologies (MATs) are being used more frequently in healthcare. A central ethical concern is the compatibility of these systems with the moral preferences of their users—an issue especially relevant to participatory approaches within the ethics-by-design debate. However, users’ incapacity to communicate preferences or to participate in design processes, e.g., due to dementia, presents a hurdle for participatory ethics-by-design approaches. In this paper, we explore the question of how the value preferences of users in the field of dementia care can be integrated into AI-based MATs. First, we briefly introduce different ethics-by-design approaches and explain the challenges they face in dementia care. Next, we introduce a novel approach for addressing these challenges. Through a qualitative content analysis of interviews with persons with dementia and their family caregivers (n = 27), we identified multiple ideal–typical value preference profiles. We then applied these profiles in a computer simulation, by which we also introduce the concept of ethical compliance quantification to scale the moral preferences of the interviewees for the simulation. Finally, we discuss study results, the advantages of using computer simulations, and general study limitations before drawing conclusions for further research. The study contributes to the ongoing debate on participatory ethics-by-design by defining on the basis of empirical data ideal–typical value preference frameworks that can be used to guide MAT actions and their outcomes. Going forward, MAT end-users with dementia and other communication-impaired persons could be enabled to choose a value profile that best fits their moral preferences.

From Outcome-Based to Language-Based Preferences

We review the literature on models that try to explain human behavior in social interactions described by normal-form games with monetary payoffs. We start by covering social and moral preferences. We then focus on the growing body of research showing that people react to the language with which actions are described, especially when it activates moral concerns. We conclude by arguing that behavioral economics is in the midst of a paradigm shift toward language-based preferences, which will require an exploration of new models and experimental setups.(JEL C70, C90, D11, D90, Z13)

Moral preferences in bargaining

Moral preferences in bargaining

Moral Preferences over Health-Wealth Trade-offs

Moral Preferences over Health-Wealth Trade-offs

Lying is sometimes ethical, but honesty is the best policy: The desire to avoid harmful lies leads to moral preferences for unconditional honesty.

People believe that some lies are ethical, while also claiming that "honesty is the best policy." In this article, we introduce a theory to explain this apparent inconsistency. Even though people view prosocial lies as ethical, they believe it is more important-and more moral-to avoid harmful lies than to allow prosocial lies. Unconditional honesty (simply telling the truth, without finding out how honesty will affect others) is therefore seen as ethical because it prevents the most unethical actions (i.e., harmful lies) from occurring, even though it does not optimize every moral decision. We test this theory across five focal experiments and 10 supplemental studies. Consistent with our account, we find that communicators who tell the truth without finding out how honesty will affect others are viewed as more ethical, and are trusted more, than communicators who look for information about the social consequences of honesty before communicating. However, the moral preference for unconditional honesty attenuates when it is certain that looking for more information will not lead to harmful lies. Overall, this research provides a holistic understanding of how people think about honesty and suggests that moral rules are not valued because people believe all rule violations are wrong, but rather, because they believe some violations must be avoided entirely. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Moral Preferences Co-Evolve With Cooperation in Networked Populations

Moral Preferences Co-Evolve With Cooperation in Networked Populations

Supplemental Material for Lying Is Sometimes Ethical, But Honesty Is the Best Policy: The Desire to Avoid Harmful Lies Leads to Moral Preferences for Unconditional Honesty

Supplemental Material for Lying Is Sometimes Ethical, But Honesty Is the Best Policy: The Desire to Avoid Harmful Lies Leads to Moral Preferences for Unconditional Honesty

인간의 도덕적 결함과 도덕교육에 관한 연구

In human nature, good and evil exist together. Regarding human wickedness, the Old Testament keeps The God away from the human mind, and in the New Testament, there is also evil for me who wants to do good, so it is an incomplete mind that can do evil at any time. Characteristics close to human morality or evil can be relatively strong when the altruistic mind weakens. In order to overcome the moral flaws of human selfishness and proceed with wiser moral education, the moral flaws of concepts close to evil, moral flaws, unethical, unhuman, selfish, antisocial, poor defense mechanisms, and deviance should be revealed in more detail. Focusing on the philosophical and psychological perspectives on the area of human moral defects, this study presented moral defects in the use of defense mechanisms in the behavior of moral defects of lack of discernment, weakness of will, lack of duty, inferior function of moral preference, and rationalization. It also presented the skills of moral education in behavior modification and discipline measures that can overcome the error rationalization of behavior that students themselves give themselves by distinguishing students' moral defects and moral errors of self-immunity at a time when teacher education rights need to be reformed.

The Conservatism Principle and Asymmetric Preferences over Reporting Errors

ABSTRACT Accounting conservatism has been described as deriving from preferences for reporting errors to be in the direction of understatement rather than overstatement. We pair reporters with users (who rely on reporters’ information) in a multiperiod experiment. We posit that, under misaligned incentives that motivate aggressive reporting, users view aggressive reports as reflecting exploitative intent and expect that a norm prohibiting aggressive reporting applies. We predict that users use noisy reporting errors to gauge reporters’ norm compliance. We find that, ceteris paribus, users prefer not to be paired with reporters producing overstatement errors likely to reflect aggressive reporting relative to reporters producing understatement errors likely to reflect conservative reporting; alternatively, we find no such asymmetric preferences when the agents’ motives are aligned. The asymmetric preferences cannot be explained by agency theory predictions of payoff maximization or loss aversion. These moral preferences provide an initial condition from which conservatism can endogenously emerge. Data Availability: Data are available from the authors upon request. JEL Classifications: B52; D81; D82; M41.

When tainted money should fund public goods: fundraising professional and public moral preferences.

Philanthropy is essential to public goods such as education and research, arts and culture, and the provision of services to those in need. Providers of public goods commonly struggle with the dilemma of whether to accept donations from morally tainted donors. Ethicists also disagree on how to manage tainted donations. Forgoing such donations reduces opportunities for societal well-being and advancement; however, accepting them can damage institutional and individual reputations. Half of professional fundraisers have faced tainted donors, but only around a third of their institutions had relevant policies (n = 52). Here, we draw on two large samples of US laypeople (ns = 2,019; 2,566) and a unique sample of experts (professional fundraisers, n = 694) to provide empirical insights into various aspects of tainted donations that affect moral acceptability: the nature of the moral taint (criminal or morally ambiguous behavior), donation size, anonymity, and institution type. We find interesting patterns of convergence (rejecting criminal donations), divergence (professionals' aversion to large tainted donations), and indifference (marginal role of anonymity) across the samples. Laypeople also applied slightly higher standards to universities and museums than to charities. Our results provide evidence of how complex moral trade-offs are resolved differentially, and can thus motivate and inform policy development for institutions dealing with controversial donors.

Local Justice and Machine Learning: Modeling and Inferring Dynamic Ethical Preferences toward Allocations

We consider a setting in which a social planner has to make a sequence of decisions to allocate scarce resources in a high-stakes domain. Our goal is to understand stakeholders' dynamic moral preferences toward such allocational policies. In particular, we evaluate the sensitivity of moral preferences to the history of allocations and their perceived future impact on various socially salient groups. We propose a mathematical model to capture and infer such dynamic moral preferences. We illustrate our model through small-scale human-subject experiments focused on the allocation of scarce medical resource distributions during a hypothetical viral epidemic. We observe that participants' preferences are indeed history- and impact-dependent. Additionally, our preliminary experimental results reveal intriguing patterns specific to medical resources---a topic that is particularly salient against the backdrop of the global covid-19 pandemic.

Would Genetically Engineering a Child’s Preferences Diminish Her Autonomy?


 
 
 Proponents of “moral enhancement” argue that we should harness emerging technologies such as genome editing to instill preferences for performing morally good actions over bad ones, and they suggest that this would be worthwhile even if it made performing bad actions psychologically impossible. Critics object that such a gain in moral behavior would not be worth the resulting loss to human autonomy. This debate has remained confined within the context of moral preferences. Genetic engineering for non-moral preferences (GENP) – such as enjoying music or athletics – however, has not been discussed. Since preferences – what an agent likes, values, or tends to desire – form the core of who she is and what she pursues in life, and since autonomy requires that an agent be her own person and pursue her own life projects, her autonomy might seem to be diminished if her preferences were selected before birth by a third party. Plausible as this may seem, we disagree. In this paper, we argue that parents could select for a wide variety of substantive (i.e. not merely insignificant) non-moral preferences without compromising their child’s autonomy, provided that certain criteria that we propose are satisfied, e.g. the selected preferences must not be such as to inhibit the agent’s capacity for rational deliberation, which is a key component of the conception of autonomy we employ. We then respond to two objections: (a) GENP would be inherently incompatible with autonomy, regardless of whether it meets any such criteria, and (b) even if GENP would not be inherently incompatible with autonomy, people might still regard it as an alienating influence and might regard their selected preferences as non-autonomous. We then argue that this second objection would be less forceful according to a more “externalist” rather than “internalist” conception of autonomy.
 
 

Performative Quantification: Design Choices Impact the Lessons of Empirical Surveys About the Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles

In recent years, researchers have emphasized the relevance of data about commonsense moral judgments for ethical decision-making, notably in the context of debates about autonomous vehicles (AVs). As such, the results of empirical studies such as the Machine Moral Experiment have been influential in debates about the ethics of AVs and some researchers have even put forward methods to automatize ethical decision-making on the basis of such data. In this paper, we argue that data collection is not a neutral process, and the difference in study design can change participants’ answers and the ethical conclusions that can be drawn from them. After showing that participants’ individual answers are stable in the sense that providing them with a second occasion to reflect on their answers does not change them (Study 1), we show that different conclusions regarding participants’ moral preferences can be reached when participants are given a third option allowing AVs to behave randomly (Study 2), and that preference for this third option can be increased in the context of a collective discussion (Study 3). We conclude that design choices will influence the lessons that can be drawn from surveys about participants’ moral judgments about AVs and that these choices are not morally neutral.

Why ethical consumers buy products from unethical companies: consumers’ ambivalent responses towards fashion companies’ unethical activities

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to investigate the role of consumers’ moral preferences between moral and economic benefits and consumers’ moral and rational behaviour intentions based on moral decision-making models of previous studies.Design/methodology/approachRespondents were asked to answer a questionnaire measuring moral and economic benefits, consumers’ moral preferences and moral and rational behaviour intention after reading a stimulus describing imaginary fashion brand A’s unethical activities.FindingsMoral and economic benefits directly and significantly affect moral and rational behaviour intention. Homo economicus evoked by an economic benefit had a negative effect on moral behaviour intention.Research limitations/implicationsThis study focused only on a moral benefit and an economic benefit as factors evoking consumers’ moral preferences. This study was also conducted only in a Korean context and considered a specific industry. In future research, the results of this study should be extended to design the “possibility of punishment” to encourage moral behaviour by discouraging the effect of homo economicus. The results have implications for companies such as social enterprises and charities that want to promote consumers’ moral behaviour.Originality/valueThis study provides evidence on why ethical consumers do not always make ethical decisions by confirming that homo economicus has a significant influence on not only rational behaviour intention but also moral behaviour intention.

"Doing what others do" does not stabilize continuous norms.

Differences in social norms are a key source of behavioral variation among human populations. It is widely assumed that a vast range of behaviors, even deleterious ones, can persist as long as they are locally common because deviants suffer coordination failures and social sanctions. Previous models have confirmed this intuition, showing that different populations may exhibit different norms even if they face similar environmental pressures or are linked by migration. Crucially, these studies have modeled norms as having a few discrete variants. Many norms, however, have a continuous range of variants. Here we present a mathematical model of the evolutionary dynamics of continuously varying norms and show that when the social payoffs of the behavioral options vary continuously the pressure to do what others do does not result in multiple stable equilibria. Instead, factors such as environmental pressure, individual preferences, moral beliefs, and cognitive attractors determine the outcome even if their effects are weak, and absent such factors populations linked by migration converge to the same norm. The results suggest that the content of norms across human societies is less arbitrary or historically constrained than previously assumed. Instead, there is greater scope for norms to evolve towards optimal individual or group-level solutions. Our findings also suggest that cooperative norms such as those that increase contributions to public goods might require evolved moral preferences, and not just social sanctions on deviants, to be stable.

Mindfulness training reduces slippery slope effects in moral decision-making and moral judgment

Extant research has demonstrated the positive intrapersonal effects of mindfulness training. However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying the effects of mindfulness training on interpersonal processes are less clear. Here, we combined a randomized control mindfulness training design with computational approach to moral decision-making and moral judgments. Participants were randomly assigned to a Training group (N = 32) who received an 8-week mindfulness training or a Control group (N = 26) who waited for the same period of time. Before and after the 8-week period, participants completed a moral decision-making task, where they made tradeoff between money for themselves and unpleasant electric shocks to another person, and a moral judgment task, where they evaluated the blameworthiness of someone else’s choices in the same moral decision-making task. Trait mindfulness, as measured by the Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, significantly increased from the pre- to post-training session for the Training group, but not the Control group, demonstrating the effectiveness of the mindfulness manipulation. For the Control group, participants’ moral preference in both the decision-making task and the judgment task declined over time, exhibiting a “slippery slope” effect. In contrast, for the Training group, mindfulness training prevented moral preferences from declining. Computational modeling revealed that mindfulness training specifically reduced the increase in the weights of money over time in both the decision-making and judgment tasks, thereby curbing the “slippery slope” effects. These findings provide a cognitive account of the prosocial effects of mindfulness training on moral decision-making and moral judgments.

Psychological mechanisms and interventions directed at vaccination attitudes.

Attitudes about vaccination impact not only the individual but also society. Therefore, understanding the underlying psychological processes of those who disagree with vaccination is critical for creating compassion through understanding and change through promoting autonomy. The current review aimed to fill a gap in the literature, outlining the state of the recent research on vaccination attitudes, specifically on the underlying mechanisms driving anti-vaccination movements and individuals' thoughts and behaviors. In addition, we aimed to evaluate current research on the effectiveness of interventions targeting these mechanisms. Overall, results indicated that those declining vaccines had beliefs related to distrust in the scientific community and pharmaceutical companies and moral preferences for purity and liberty. In addition, our review identified the potential for utilizing motivational interviewing techniques as an intervention. This literature review provides a platform for further research and enhances the current understanding of vaccination attitudes.

Gender Differences in Moral Development and Moral Reasoning

Based on Kohlberg's stage theory, this paper reviews the gender and age differences of individuals in moral choice and moral reasoning. Most experimental study did not show significant differences in moral choices at the Kohlberg stage. However, more women have a moral preference for care in moral reasoning. Moreover, women show different moral reasoning for different contexts and give more reactions, which is more flexible and complex. Moreover, older participants placed more emphasis on the morality of justice while younger participants placed more emphasis on the morality of care. Moral reasoning reasoning can become comprehensive and complex with grade level. This paper systematically sorts out the moral differences between men and women by reviewing and summarizing previous empirical research, in order to provide some references for subsequent research. However, previous empirical studies have mostly been based on middle-class samples, so hopefully there will be experiments on a wider sample in the future.