The Morality of Inaction? The Impact of Public Situations on Moral Dilemma Decision Making

Jing Shuzhen; Fan Ning

doi:10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20240618

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2024, Vol. 47 ›› Issue (6) : 1465-1474. DOI: 10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20240618

Social，Personality & Organizational Psychology

The Morality of Inaction? The Impact of Public Situations on Moral Dilemma Decision Making

Jing Shuzhen, Fan Ning

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Abstract

Moral judgment is the process by which an individual makes a moral evaluation of someone's behavior according to the moral code when faced with a situation involving moral issues. Moral judgment itself has a strong social attribute. Most of the previous studies on moral dilemmas are based on the perspective of single individuals, and there is a lack of exploration of the psychological mechanism of moral decision-making in public situations or social situations where multiple people exist. In addition, the traditional moral dilemma paradigm based on the dual processing theory of moral judgment has been questioned by many researchers, who believe that it lacks ecological validity and is too absolute for the division between utilitarianism and deontology. The CNI model provides a comprehensive distinction of the cognitive processing involved in moral judgment and clarifies whether changes in moral decision-making are caused by sensitivity to consequences, sensitivity to norms, or general action/inaction tendencies.
This study conducted two experiments to investigate the cognitive mechanisms of moral judgment in different social contexts, and the moral dilemma materials in each experiment were constructed based on the CNI model. Experiment 1 used the social observation paradigm, in which participants were asked to perform a moral judgment task under the supervision of two independent and unfamiliar observers, to investigate whether an individual's moral judgment would be affected by a simple decision exposure. The results showed that participants’ moral judgement was not affected by the presence or absence of the observer in the context of other people's observations.
In experiment 2, we conducted parallel judgment paradigms and joint judgment paradigm to investigate how the participants' moral decisions changed. To better explain the difference between the different social contexts, perceived stress and social approval were also measured during the moral judgment task. Participants did not know each other in each paradigm. In the parallel judgment paradigm, participants were asked to judge the same moral dilemma without verbal communication, and then the judgment results of both parties were published after they had completed their judgements. The purpose was to examine whether individuals' moral judgments would be influenced by social feedback when they received information about others' judgments. The results showed that in the parallel judgment context, participants' low decision acceptance was due to their inaction tendency. In the joint judgment paradigm, two participants were required to make a joint decision about the same dilemma without verbal communication, and both pairs were required to reach consensus decisions on each dilemma. The results showed that in the joint judgment situation, the low decision acceptance of the participants was partly due to increased sensitivity to moral norms and a more pronounced tendency to inaction, and they had lower levels of perceived stress and higher levels of social approval. This suggests that when the final decision result was shared by two people, the responsibility of the individual alone became smaller, and the corresponding pressure perception was reduced. Meanwhile, participants in the joint judgment group wanted to be approved and approved by the other person, and in order to achieve this, their moral decisions became more in line with the requirements of social norms to improve their image.
Taken together, the results of the two experiments suggest that individuals are more inclined to make unacceptable moral decisions in the presence of others, and that this seemingly more moral decision stems on the one hand from the increased sensitivity of moral norms caused by the desire for higher social approval, and on the other hand from the general inaction tendency caused by the dispersion of responsibilities. Our finding indicate that different social situations have different effects on moral judgment.

Key words

public situation / moral dilemma / CNI model

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Jing Shuzhen, Fan Ning. The Morality of Inaction? The Impact of Public Situations on Moral Dilemma Decision Making[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2024, 47(6): 1465-1474 https://doi.org/10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20240618

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