Professor PUZZLE Moral Conflict

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Furthermore, we did not explicitly control for socially desirable responding in our surveys. Nevertheless, we tried to keep the potential impact of social desirability as low as possible by ensuring strict anonymity to all our participants. Moreover, we excluded all items with extremely high percentages of altruistic decisions. For the remaining items, we observed statistical variance both within participants and across items, which probably speaks against highly socially desirable responding. Interestingly, we also did not observe gender differences in our surveys, which, on the one hand, is not uncommon for hypothetical moral dilemmas [ 43], but, on the other hand, is in sharp contrast to early moral reasoning research [ 42] and current abstract moral decision-making studies [ 7, 38– 41]. This inconsistent result could potentially be explained by the fact that our new EMCS Scale measures altruistic and egoistic response tendencies, which are behavioral measures that rather reflect outcomes of morality, but not moral attitudes itself [ 43]. Altogether, in combination with the social closeness results, our data therefore point to the idea that everyday moral decision-making with altruistic versus egoistic response options seems to be quite a different construct than abstract moral decision-making with utilitarian versus deontological response alternatives.

S3 Table shows the inter-item correlations (tetrachoric correlations) of the final 40 items of the EMCS Scale. Will you be able to claim the moral high ground or does your moral compass need some fine-tuning? This game of moral conflict will allow you to discover the answer to this question.

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Margittai Z, Strombach T, van Wingerden M, Joёls M, Schwabe L, Kalenscher T. A friend in need: time-dependent effects of stress on social discounting in men. Horm Behav. 2015; 73: 75–82. 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2015.05.019

Find out who’s the goody-two-shoes and whose antics deserve a time-out in this hilarious family-friendly game of “Most likely to”! Capraro V, Sippel J. Gender differences in moral judgment and the evaluation of gender-specified moral agents. Cogn Process. 2017; 18: 399–405. 10.1007/s10339-017-0822-9 Armstrong J, Friesdorf R, Conway P. Clarifying gender differences in moral dilemma judgments: the complementary roles of harm aversion and action aversion. Soc Psychol Pers Sci. 2018. In the final version, the items 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 20 (socially close protagonists) and 24, 26, 27, 30, 31, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40 (socially distant protagonists) were assigned to set A; the items 1, 3, 4, 6, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19 (socially close protagonists) and 21, 22, 23, 25, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 36 (socially distant protagonists) became part of set B (see last column in S1 Table).Rilling JK, Sanfey AG. The neuroscience of social decision-making. Annu Rev Psychol. 2011; 62: 23–48. 10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131647 Graham J, Nosek BA, Haidt J, Iyer R, Koleva S, Ditto PH. Mapping the moral domain. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2011; 101: 366–385. 10.1037/a0021847 The player with the fewest nominations at the end of the game is the winner and can claim their title as the best-behaved of the bunch. With regard to research in laboratory settings, several scholars (e.g., [ 16, 22, 23]) recently developed everyday moral dilemmas. Everyday moral dilemmas are short vignettes describing hypothetical everyday life situations. The vignettes require decisions between the fulfilment of a moral standard or social obligation towards another person versus a personal-oriented hedonistic behavior that would explicitly not cause serious bodily harm or legal consequences [ 16]. The given response alternatives are typically altruistic (e.g., helping an old woman who is in distress) versus egoistic (e.g., catching the waiting bus home; see [ 23] or [ 24] for further examples). The results section is structured into two main parts. In the first main part, we present analyses concerning the development and validation of our new 40-items EMCS Scale as well as the development of two parallelized 20-item sets (each ten scenarios with socially close and socially distant protagonists) for future use in within-subjects design studies. For the two parallelized sets A and B, we used Wilks L mvc tests to demonstrate parallelism [ 54]. The procedure by Wilks tests the hypothesis that the means are equal, the variances are equal, and the covariances are equal. The test statistic is based on the weighted differences of the subsample means with the grand mean and the ratio of subsample and complete sample (co)variances, which are shown to be chi 2-distributed when the data meets hypothesis (see [ 54], formula 1.4). Moreover, we report the measurement qualities based on Rasch model analyses and classical test theory fit indices of the complete 40-items EMCS Scale and its two subsets A and B.

Interpersonal relationship modulates the behavioral and neural responses during moral decision-making. Neurosci Lett. 2018; 672: 15–21. 10.1016/j.neulet.2018.02.039 Decision-making in everyday moral conflict situations: Development and validation of a new measure - PMC

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In addition to scale development and validation, we aimed at investigating if everyday moral decision-making depends on the social closeness of the protagonists. As revealed in a recent review, the relatedness of the participant to the story characters is an important experimental design parameter in moral dilemma research [ 2]. Therefore, social closeness could be one further potential modulating factor of everyday moral decision-making (apart from the emotionality of a situation, which has already been examined in previous studies; see [ 22, 23]). Consistently, several studies have shown that both abstract and everyday moral decision-making differ depending on the closeness of the relationship with the target person (e.g., [ 5, 17, 28– 31]). With regard to everyday moral decision-making in laboratory settings, so far only Zhan and colleagues [ 31] investigated the impact of the social closeness of the protagonists. They observed that participants made less altruistic decisions, took more time for their decisions, and rated the situations as emotionally more negative if the moral conflicts involved strangers versus friends and acquaintances. Presuming that altruistic decisions are some kind of generous acts, this finding is also in line with studies in social psychology on social discounting, showing that generosity decreases hyperbolically with increasing social distance between the donor and the recipient [ 32– 37]. Thus, we experimentally varied the social closeness of the protagonists in our scenarios (socially close vs. socially distant) and hypothesized a lower percentage of altruistic decisions for scenarios involving socially distant protagonists as compared to stories involving socially close target persons. Hofmann W, Wisneski DC, Brandt MJ, Skitka LJ. Morality in everyday life. Science. 2014; 345: 1340–1343. 10.1126/science.1251560 Reise SP, Waller NG, Comrey AL. Factor analysis and scale revision. Psychol Assess. 2000; 12: 287–297. 10.1037/1040-3590.12.3.287As a library, NLM provides access to scientific literature. Inclusion in an NLM database does not imply endorsement of, or agreement with, Singer N, Sommer M, Döhnel K, Zänkert S, Wüst S, Kudielka BM. Acute psychosocial stress and everyday moral decision-making in young healthy men: the impact of cortisol. Horm Behav. 2017; 93: 72–81. 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2017.05.002