biblio.ugent.be€¦ · web viewbeyond physical harm: how preference for consequentialism and...

BEYOND PHYSICAL HARM 1

Beyond Physical Harm: How Preference for Consequentialism and Primary Psychopathy

Relate to Decisions on a Monetary Trolley Dilemma

Dries H. Bostyn, Sybren Sevenhant, & Arne Roets

Ghent University; Department of Developmental, Personality, and Social Psychology; Henri

Dunantlaan 2, B-9000, Ghent, Belgium.

[email protected], ORCid: 0000-0001-9994-4615

[email protected]

[email protected], ORCid: 0000-0001-5814-1189

WORD COUNT: 5722

Authors’ Note

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dries H. Bostyn,

Department of Developmental, Personality, and Social Psychology, Henri Dunantlaan 2, B-

9000, Ghent, Belgium. E-mail: [email protected].

mailto:[email protected]




Abstract

When is it appropriate to harm a single person to help multiple others? Psychologists have

investigated this question through the study of hypothetical “trolley” dilemmas involving

extreme physical harm life-or-death situations that contrast outcome-focused, consequentialist

moral reasoning with principle-focused, deontological moral reasoning. The present studies

investigate whether participants’ preference for consequentialism generalizes across domains.

We administered traditional physical harm dilemmas as well as a trolley-type dilemma

involving monetary harm. Across four studies (N = 809), an internal meta-analysis

demonstrated that participants’ responses to the traditional dilemmas predicted their responses

to the monetary dilemma. Additionally, previous research has uncovered that primary

psychopathy predicts consequentialist responses on physical harm dilemmas. The current

work uncovers that this association does not generalize to monetary harm dilemmas,

suggesting that the association between primary psychopathy and consequentialist reasoning

is not related to consequentialist reasoning per se, but to the idiosyncrasies of traditional

harm-centric trolley dilemmas instead.

Keywords: Consequentialism; Utilitarianism; Psychopathy; Trolley Dilemmas; Moral

Reasoning


During the past fifteen years, moral psychologists have used imaginative moral

dilemmas to probe people’s moral intuitions (for an overview, see Cushman & Greene, 2012).

Although many variants of these so-called “trolley” dilemmas exist, they all share a common

core: On each dilemma, participants are asked whether it is morally appropriate to

deliberately cause serious physical harm or even death to a single individual to ensure that

equal physical harm to the many is averted (Foot, 1967). For instance, in the basic version of

the dilemma, participants are asked whether it is appropriate to deliberately divert a runaway

trolley so that it will hit and kill only a single bystander and not an entire group of five others.

These trolley dilemmas aim to contrast two different perspectives on the central question of

normative ethics: What ought we to do (Kant, 1956)? Consequentialists argue that this

question can be answered by looking at the potential outcomes of our actions (Bentham,

1983). Actions that lead to an overall better world are the ones that should be broadly labelled

as “good”. Moral reasoning, according to the consequentialist, is tantamount to figuring out

which actions maximize overall well-being or minimize overall harm. Deontologists, on the

other hand, argue that each action has a moral quality in and of itself that is independent of its

outcomes but is instead guided by a principled system of values, rights and duties (Alexander

& Moore, 2008). In the mind of a deontologist, killing can never be a “good” act, even when

it serves to avert a greater harm. In the context of trolley dilemmas, consequentialists thus

propose the better action is the one that minimizes overall harm (i.e., forfeit the life of a single

bystander for the sake of the group) whereas deontologists contend that each person has an

immaterial right to life and thus that committing an active murder is immoral, even in the

context of “the greater good”.

Each of the two options in the trolley dilemma corresponds with a different ethical

perspective and therefore, some moral psychologists have assumed that responses to these

kinds of dilemmas can serve to measure participants’ generalized preference for either of


these two ethical philosophies (Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001;

Greene, 2015; Kahane, 2015; Kahane, Wiech, Shackel, Farias, Savulescu, & Tracey, 2012).

However, beyond its face validity, there is little to no direct empirical evidence to support this

assumption. Trolley dilemmas have typically involved extreme life-or-death situations that the

average participant has no prior experience with. They require participants to respond to

purely hypothetical scenarios and make decisions that have, for obvious reasons, no actual

real life consequences. It is not clear to what extent participants can actually gauge the

dramatic weight of each of the two moral choices presented in these dilemmas, nor is it clear

whether the judgment they reach in these hypothetical dilemmas is related to what they would

do in a real-life dilemma situation (Bostyn, Sevenhant, & Roets, 2018). Yet studies involving

participants’ responses to these extreme physical harm trolley dilemmas are used throughout

moral psychology to draw conclusions about human moral cognition in general.

Beyond mere historical happenstance, there is no compelling reason why trolley

dilemmas should involve this type of extreme physical harm scenarios. If indeed participants’

responses are indicative of a general preference for a certain type of moral cognition

(outcome-focused versus principled) it should not matter whether these dilemmas involve life-

threatening situations or other forms of harms. Indeed, recently, some researchers have

expanded the scope of these trolley-style moral dilemmas to include less extreme versions of

physical harm such as bodily injury or dismemberment (Gold, Pulford, Colman, 2013;

Trémolière, & De Neys, 2013), dilemmas that have focused on property damage (Millar,

Turri, & Friedman, 2014; Millar, Starmans, Fugelsang, & Friedman, 2016), or versions that

were centered on monetary harm (Gold, Colman, & Pulford, 2014). These studies have

primarily focused on whether small changes in the scenario effect shifts in moral preference

for extreme harm and other types of harm alike. For instance, people typically tend to judge

sacrificial harm that is committed in an indirect manner (for instance, by pressing a switch) to


be more acceptable than sacrificial harm committed in an up close and personal manner

(Greene, Cushman, Stewart, Lowenberg, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2009); a distinction that appears

to generalize across moral domains (Gold et al., 2013). Similarly, DeScioli, Asao, & Kurzban

(2012) found that people tend to judge actions leading to moral violations as more wrong than

omissions of actions leading to the same violation independent of whether said moral

violation was related to harm, sexuality, property or group loyalty. Interestingly however,

while these studies have expanded the scope of trolley dilemma research, we are not aware of

any study that has directly investigated whether participants’ responses to extreme harm

trolley dilemmas predict their responses on trolley dilemmas involving other types of harms;

i.e. whether there is a general preference for consequentialist moral reasoning that spans

across multiple moral domains.

This issue also speaks to another controversy in moral psychology. A recent line of

research has uncovered that a robust predictor of consequentialist moral choice appears to be

“anti-social personality”. Machiavellianism, narcissism and sub-clinical psychopathy all

reliably predict participants’ preference for consequentialist responses on extreme harm

trolley dilemmas (Glenn, Holeva, Iyer, & Ditto, 2010; Bartels & Pizarro, 2011; Koenigs,

Kruepke, Zeier, & Newman, 2012). Furthermore, anti-social participants do not seem to act

consequentialist because of a higher interest in the greater good, but because they have a

diminished response to actively harming others (Djeriouat, & Trémolière, 2014). This

observation is not only curious, it also seems to detract from the paradigm because it suggests

that consequentialist moral choice itself is not in fact related to a genuine concern for others,

but might instead be driven by an ethical defect: the inability to empathize with the sacrificial

victim (Wiech, Kahane, Shackel, Farias, Savulescu, & Tracey, 2013). As such, some

researchers have advanced that the trolley paradigm does not investigate consequentialist or

deontological moral reasoning, but is little more than a convoluted way to measure the extent


with which participants are willing to harm innocent others (Kahane, Everett, Earp, Farias, &

Savulescu, 2015).

We suggest that the near exclusive use of the traditional, extreme physical harm

dilemmas and their hypothetical nature might be an underlying cause for the aforementioned

associations that have been uncovered between consequentialist moral choice and anti-social

personality traits. Indeed, recent work by Bostyn, et al. (2018) has uncovered that primary

psychopathy is unrelated to the decisions people make in a real-life trolley dilemma. Previous

research has also shown that anti-social personality is associated with mentalizing issues and

theory of mind deficits, especially in terms of the empathic understanding of others (Ali,

Chamorro-Premuzic, 2010; Wai & Tiliopoulos, 2012; Vonk, Zeigler-Hill, Ewing, Mercer, &

Noser, 2015). While this is speculative, we argue that the unrealistic and exorbitant setting of

the traditional, hypothetical trolley dilemmas may actually exacerbate this problem, thus

biasing anti-social participants towards consequentialist moral decisions; not because

consequentialist choice is driven by anti-social personality, but because the nature of

traditional trolley dilemmas hinders an already difficult empathizing process.

The present studies

In a set of four studies, we directly link participants’ responses in traditional extreme

harm hypothetical trolley dilemmas to a trolley dilemma variant involving monetary harm in a

more realistic context. On this monetary trolley dilemma, participants had to decide whether

they wanted to take away some money from one fellow participant to ensure that five others

received an additional bonus. As such, this dilemma directly mimics the structure of

traditional trolley dilemmas but clearly does not involve a life-or-death decision. This allows

us to directly compare participants’ preference for consequentialist moral reasoning across

two moral domains (i.e., hypothetical, extreme physical harm, versus more realistic, monetary

harm), and test whether responses are consistent across domains.


Additionally, we asked participants to fill out individual difference measures,

including most crucially, primary psychopathy. Primary psychopathy assesses “a selfish,

uncaring, and manipulative posture towards others” and can be distinguished from Secondary

psychopathy which assesses “impulsivity and a self-defeating life style” (p. 152; Levenson,

Kiehl, & Fitzpatrick, 1995). As such, we also investigated whether the association between

this measure of anti-social personality and preference for consequentialist moral choice

generalizes across moral domains or, whether it is, as we hypothesized, related to the specific

features of physical harm trolley research.

Materials and Methods

Participants

We conducted four similar studies, each in a two wave format. Participants were

recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk and paid US$0.40 for their participation in the

first and US$0.60 for their participation in the second wave of the study. All participants

received an invitation to participate in the second wave, one week after their participation in

the first. If participants did not immediately complete the second wave, they received up to

three reminders, each interspaced with a week.

An a priori power analysis determined that a sample of 190 participants is sufficient to

have approximately ~80% chance of finding a statistically significant association, assuming a

small effect at population level of r = .20. Anticipating some drop-out, we aimed for 200

participants for the first wave in each study. Demographical statistics and sample sizes for

each wave of the four studies are displayed in Table 1. Dropout was higher than we

anticipated, thereby slightly reducing the actual power of the individual studies. However, our

conclusions will be drawn based on an internal meta-analysis across the four studies, and as

such the combined power of all four studies is more than sufficient.

Insert Table 1about here


Procedure

Each study followed the same two-wave procedure. In the first wave, participants

completed a traditional moral dilemma battery and a short questionnaire including a measure

of primary psychopathy.1 To ensure that participants would not be primed by their responses

to the traditional trolley dilemmas, the monetary trolley dilemma was administered during the

second wave of data-collection. All materials, data and statistical code is available at

https://osf.io/u6x9r/

Measures

Traditional Moral Dilemma battery. Participants in all four studies completed the

same battery of ten moral dilemmas (Bostyn & Roets, 2017). On each trial of Studies 1 and 3,

participants were presented with a trolley dilemma and then asked to indicate the

appropriateness of the consequentialist and separately, the deontological option using a 5-

point scale going from “Absolutely inappropriate” (1) to “Absolutely appropriate” (5), to

measure their preference for consequentialist and deontological reasoning respectively. In

Studies 2 and 4, a slightly different response format was presented with participants being

asked to indicate whether they would undertake the action required to achieve the

consequentialist outcome using a 5-point scale going from “Definitely would not” (1) to

“Definitely would” (5). In other words, whereas Studies 1 and 3 measured participants’

judgment on moral appropriateness, Studies 2 and 4 measured an intention towards

consequentialist action. As both measures are frequently used in the literature, we used both to

ensure broad generalizability of our results (however, for a critical discussion of using these

particular response formats, see Kahane & Shackel, 2010).1 Four additional individual difference measures were included: need for cognition, empathic concern,

perspective taking, and moral identity. Though we only focus on the key variable psychopathy in this manuscript, a full analysis of the data is available through the supplementary materials on OSF. Perhaps most importantly: results for empathic concern mirrored those of primary psychopathy. Crucially, controlling for primary psychopathy eliminated the relationship of empathic concern with the outcome measures. Neither need for cognition, perspective taking, or moral identity showed any consistent effects.

https://osf.io/u6x9r/


Primary psychopathy. As a general measure for subclinical anti-social tendencies we

used the Primary psychopathy scale (Levenson et al., 1995). Participants were asked to

indicate their agreement on 16 statements, such as “For me, what’s right is whatever I can get

away with.” using a 4-point scale ranging from “Disagree strongly” (1) to “Agree strongly”

(4).

Monetary trolley dilemma. In all studies, participants were told that we wanted to

reward some of them with a bonus and that the main goal of the second wave was to allocate

these bonuses. Participants were told that they had been divided into subgroups of seven

people each and that a computer algorithm had randomly selected two participants from each

group. All participants were told that the two randomly selected participants would earn a

total of US$0.60 whereas the other five would only earn US$0.20. In all studies, each

participant was told that they had been selected as one of the lucky two who would receive the

US$0.60. Furthermore, we told them that they specifically had been additionally selected to

make one more choice: if they wanted to, they could override the selection process, and take

the extra US$0.40 from the other randomly selected participant to ensure that each of the

other five participants would receive the additional US$0.40. Like the traditional trolley

dilemma, this monetary trolley dilemma contrasts a consequentialist option (forfeit the bonus

of a single victim to maximize the total welfare) with a deontological option.

We used two slightly different versions of the same monetary trolley dilemma across

the four studies. In Studies 1 and 2, the US$0.40 difference was framed as a loss for the five

participants that were not selected, whereas in Studies 3 and 4 this was framed as an

additional bonus for the two selected participants. This led to a subtle difference in study

design across these studies, as in Studies 1 and 2 participants had to actively “harm” the other

selected participant (take away US$0.40) to ensure the five others wouldn’t lose the US$0.40,

whereas on Studies 3 and 4 they had to decide if they wanted to prevent the other selected


participant from receiving a bonus to ensure an increased bonus for the other five participants.

Importantly, participants were assured that their decision would not impact their own bonus.

The decisions participants made did not actually impact what other participants

received, as this part of each study was misdirection: All participants earned the full US$0.60

for completing the second wave. The verbatim text displayed to the participants is also

available on the study’s OSF page.

Results

Preliminary analyses

Reliabilities for all measures were satisfactory (all Cronbach α > .81). Because not all

participants returned for the second wave of our study, we tested for each study whether

dropout was related to any of the measures included in the studies. These analyses

demonstrated that dropout was not significantly related to any of the measures used in our

analyses (p-values between .066 and .935) except for age, which was significantly related to

drop-out in two of the four studies (p = .012, .048, .130, and .095, respectively). Framing the

monetary dilemma as either a “bonus” or a “loss” was unrelated to the proportion of

consequentialist decisions on that dilemma (49%, 51%, 40%, 53% for Studies 1 to 4

respectively), z = 1.04, p = .322.

Main analyses

We analyzed the data from all four studies from a meta-analytical perspective. To

ensure that we appropriately controlled for between-study heterogeneity, we conducted an

Individual Participant Data Meta-analysis (or IPD meta-analysis) for each of our research

questions. We used a random-effects mixed modelling approach with a generic factor for

“Study” as a random-effect and included random slopes for the main predictors whenever

appropriate (Bates, Kliegl, Vasisth, Baayen, 2015). IPD meta-analysis is considered to be the

gold standard approach to evidence synthesis (Stewart, Altman, Askie, Duley, Simmonds, &


Stewart, 2012), and allows us to explicitly model potential differences in effect size between

different studies to see if a general effect remains once we control for between study variance

in effect size, while still maintaining the information of each individual participant.

Importantly, previous research has demonstrated that participants’ age and gender

substantially impact responses on trolley dilemmas (Armstrong, Friesdorf, & Conway, 2018;

Hannikainen, Machery, & Cushman, 2018). Furthermore, both of these variables are also

related to primary psychopathy (Levenson, et al., 1995). In our samples, this appeared to be

the case as well: men were more likely to make consequentialist decisions on the monetary

trolley dilemma, OR = 1.52, z = 2.62, p = .008, had a higher preference for consequentialist

moral reasoning as measured through the traditional trolley dilemma battery, b = 0.19, se =

0.06, t(805.53) = 3.03, p = .003, and additionally scored higher on the primary psychopathy

measure, b = 0.29, se = 0.04, t(806) = 7.61, p < .001. Conversely, participants’ age was

negatively related to their likelihood of consequentialist judgment on the monetary trolley

dilemma, OR = 0.99, z = -2.09, p = .037, to their preference for consequentialist moral

reasoning on the traditional trolley dilemma battery, b = -0.07, se = 0.00, t(805.10) = -6.93, p

< .001, and to scores on primary psychopathy, b = -0.13, se = 0.00, t(806) = -8.96, p < .001.

Given the nature of these relationships we considered it important to control our main

analyses for these demographical measures.

For our main analyses, we first tested whether participants’ responses to the traditional

trolley dilemmas predicted their decision on the monetary trolley dilemma. Subsequently, we

tested whether primary psychopathy predicted participants’ responses to the traditional trolley

dilemmas and finally, we tested whether primary psychopathy predicted participants’

decisions on the monetary trolley dilemma.

We found that participants’ likelihood of making a (binary) consequentialist decision

on the monetary dilemma was significantly associated with the measures for consequentialist


moral preference based on the traditional trolley dilemma battery, OR = 1.53, z = 4.47, p

< .001. Furthermore, confirming the results of earlier studies, we found a clear linear

association between measures for consequentialist moral preference based on the traditional

trolley dilemma battery and participants’ levels of primary psychopathy, std. β = .14, t(76.3) =

3.60, p < .001. Crucially, however, participants’ levels of primary psychopathy did not appear

to be associated with participants’ odds of making a (binary) consequentialist decision on the

monetary trolley dilemma OR = 1.20, z = 1.24, p = .217.

Results did vary somewhat across the different studies suggesting that differences in

study design might have moderated these effects (see Table 2). Our four studies differed in

two regards: whether the monetary dilemma was framed as a loss (Studies 1 and 2) or a bonus

(Studies 3 and 4) and whether we asked participants to respond to the traditional trolley

dilemma on a moral appropriateness scale (Studies 1 and 3) or whether they were asked to

rate their intent of consequentialist action (Studies 2 and 4). We combined the data of all four

studies into a single sample to explicitly test if “Framing of Monetary Dilemma”, “Response

Format for Traditional dilemmas”, or the interaction of these two factors moderated any of the

relationships studied in the current manuscript. Crucially, none of these moderation analyses

demonstrated a significant moderation of any of the three relationships (all p > .217) nor did

any of these analyses lead to a qualitative change in the significance of any of the effects we

report. In other words, despite some variation in the significance of the results across all

studies, these results were not moderated by either the framing of the monetary dilemma (as a

loss or as a bonus), the response format for the traditional trolley dilemmas (rating moral

appropriateness vs. intent of consequentialist action), or the interaction of these two factors

thus corroborating the results from the meta-analyses.

Finally, we want to point out that repeating our main analyses without the

demographical controls (i.e., gender and age) yielded similar results, with one exception.


Whereas we did not find a statistically significant association of primary psychopathy with

responses to the monetary trolley dilemma when controlling for the demographical variables,

an analysis without these controls showed a significant association, OR = 1.38, z = 2.33, p

= .020. However, we believe this result is potentially misleading, because previous research

has demonstrated the substantial impact of gender and age on responses to trolley dilemmas

as well as on primary psychopathy. Hence not controlling for these variables may lead to

unwarranted interpretations of potentially spurious relationships. Indeed, in our studies,

including gender and age as control variables substantially diminishes the strength of the

association of primary psychopathy with consequentialist preference in all dilemma types (i.e.

with the traditional physical harm dilemmas, and with the monetary trolley dilemma).

However, even after controlling, a clear and significant relationship remains for the

hypothetical harm dilemmas, whereas this the association becomes non-significant for the

monetary dilemmas (see above). We argue that the substantial impact of gender and age on

both psychopathy and dilemma responses established in previous research, is a compelling

reason to include these controls when investigating the link between psychopathy and

consequentialist judgment, and we hence caution against interpreting analyses without these

controls.

Insert Table 2 About Here

Discussion

The current manuscript investigated to what extent participants’ preference for

consequentialism in the moral domain of physical harm is predictive of their preference for

consequentialism in the domain of monetary harms. Additionally, we investigated whether the

association between primary psychopathy and preference for consequentialism generalized to

the domain of monetary harms. The results from our IPD meta-analyses demonstrated that


people’s responses to traditional harm-centric trolley dilemmas are indeed related to their

decisions on a monetary trolley dilemma, which extends previous studies that have uncovered

other similarities in moral judgments across different domains (Gold et al., 2013; DeScioli et

al., 2012). Furthermore, we replicated earlier research (Bartels & Pizarro, 2011; Koenigs, et

al., 2012) that found that participants’ levels of primary psychopathy predicted their

consequentialist preference on traditional trolley dilemmas involving extreme physical harm.

However, despite the generalizability of participants’ preference for consequentialist judgment

across domains, primary psychopathy was unrelated to the likelihood of consequentialist

choice in the more realistic trolley dilemma that involved monetary harm.

It should be noted that the results of the internal meta-analyses did not replicate

perfectly in each of our individual studies. However, the internal meta-analyses and the

additional moderation analyses provide a more powerful and more valid test of our

hypotheses. These analyses clearly confirm this overall pattern of results and did not suggest a

problematic degree of inter-study heterogeneity. Therefore, a focus on the apparent

differences between individual study results would be misleading.

Intra-individual consistency on trolley dilemmas

Our findings are especially interesting against the backdrop of the recent criticism of

the trolley dilemma paradigm. Recently, some researchers have argued that the labels

‘consequentialist’ and ‘deontological’ are a poor descriptor for participants’ choices on trolley-

type moral dilemmas (Kahane, 2015). This controversy is largely related to the question about

what drives intra-individual consistency in participants’ responses to trolley dilemmas. Some

research has suggested that what we label as ‘preference for consequentialist moral reasoning’

might be driven by egoistic or anti-social tendencies (Kahane et al, 2015; Bartels & Pizarro,

2011). If indeed participants’ consistency across multiple moral dilemmas could be fully

explained by their overall level of anti-social personality, trolley dilemma research would


constitute little more than a convoluted way to study harm aversion. However, the current

study offers clear evidence that the problematic association between consequentialist moral

reasoning and measures of anti-social individual differences does not generalize to

consequentialist moral reasoning in other types of trolley dilemmas.

It is important to point out that the current studies do not directly prove that the intra-

individual consistency driving participants’ responses is best explained by an explicit

commitment of participants towards a very specific moral philosophy; other mediating

mechanisms may also play a role. Still, it is hard to imagine why responses to physical harm

dilemmas would be related to responses on our monetary dilemma if not for the moral conflict

central to these dilemmas. The most parsimonious explanation for responses on one type of

trolley dilemma predicting responses on the other type is simply that both types of moral

dilemmas share the same moral conflict and that participants’ intuitions on this conflict drive

their responses in both cases. This would suggest that there really is something akin to an

authentic preference for consequentialist moral reasoning.

The results also suggest that the aforementioned associative pattern between primary

psychopathy and responses to physical harm trolley dilemmas could potentially be a by-

product of the idiosyncrasies of the type of dilemma being studied in the traditional trolley

dilemma paradigm, rather than something directly involved in the central moral conflict that

trolley dilemmas aim to investigate (deontological vs. consequentialist thinking). We suggest

that the mentalizing deficits of primary psychopaths (Vonk et al., 2015) in combination with

the hypothetical and unrealistic nature of extreme physical harm dilemmas causes primary

psychopaths to respond more consequentialist than they would when confronted with a real-

life dilemma situation (see for instance, Bostyn et al., 2018). Alternatively, some research has

suggested that moral judgment can partly be driven by strategic self-presentation concerns

(Bostyn & Roets, 2017; Rom & Conway, 2018). It could be that primary psychopaths differ in


this regard and are less reluctant to display consequentialist judgments (which are perceived

as less trustworthy by others). Future research will need to investigate this issue more directly.

Limitations

It is important to point out that the specific procedure we used for the monetary

dilemma does have some limitations. We told each participant that a computer algorithm had

randomly selected two participants out of groups of seven to receive a bonus. We also told

them that they had been additionally selected to decide what should happen to the bonus of

the other selected participant. We did not inform participants whether or not their hypothetical

‘victim’ would be told of their decision, i.e. whether the other selected participant would be

notified that their bonus had been taken away. As such, some participants might have assumed

that their ‘victim’ would be none the wiser and might have been more likely to make

consequentialist decisions. We don’t see an a priori reason to assume this would impact the

relationship between preference for consequentialist reasoning and primary psychopathy but it

is an aspect of our procedure that future research could control more closely.

Additionally, some participants might have thought that the other selected participant

would have been offered the same choice as they were, i.e. that the other participant could

have taken away their bonus. We explicitly told participants that they were additionally

selected for this choice and that they would receive their bonus no matter what they decided.

As such, any considerations of reciprocity would constitute a misinterpretation of the task on

participants’ part. Nevertheless, it could be that a small number of participants might have

considered themselves to be in a symmetrical position with their victims, and if so, this would

have introduced an element of reciprocity into the monetary trolley dilemma that might have

swayed some participants towards the deontological option. We think it unlikely that this was

the case for more than a small subset of participants but again, it is a specific part of our

procedure that future research might want to control more closely.


Conclusion

Based on the results of our studies, the generalizability of preference for

consequentialist moral reasoning across moral domains holds much promise, especially if this

finding holds up for other moral domains as well. Only by studying a larger variety of trolley-

style moral dilemmas can we hope to disentangle people’s preference for consequentialist or

deontological moral thinking from the specifics associated with moral judgments within a

certain moral domain. To capture the full range of moral thought, more research is needed into

dilemmas that do not involve the extreme conditions of traditional trolley research.


Declaration of interest statement

We declare that we have no competing interests.


References

Armstrong, J., Friesdorf, R., & Conway, P. (2018). Clarifying Gender Differences in Moral

Dilemma Judgments: The Complementary Roles of Harm Aversion and Action

Aversion. Social Psychological and Personality Science, doi:

10.1177/1948550618755873

Alexander L., Moore M. (2008). Deontological ethics. In Zalta E. N. (Ed.), The Stanford

encyclopedia of philosophy. Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Center for the

Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. Retrieved from

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/

Ali, F., & Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2010). Investigating theory of mind deficits in nonclinical

psychopathy and Machiavellianism. Personality and Individual Differences, 49(3),

169-174. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2010.03.027

Bates, D., Kliegl, R., Vasishth, S., & Baayen, H. (2015). Parsimonious mixed models. arXiv

preprint, arXiv:1506.04967.

Bartels, D. M., & Pizarro, D. A. (2011). The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial personality

traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas. Cognition, 121(1), 154-161.

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2011.05.010

Bentham, J. (1983). The collected works of Jeremy Bentham: Deontology, together with a

table of the springs of action; and the article on utilitarianism. Oxford, England:

Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1879.)

Bostyn, D. H., & Roets, A. (2017). An asymmetric moral conformity effect subjects conform

to deontological but not consequentialist majorities. Social Psychological and

Personality Science, 8(3), 243-251. doi:10.1177/1948550616671999


Bostyn, D.H., Sevenhant., S., & Roets, A. (2018). Of Mice, men, and trolleys: Hypothetical

judgment versus real-life behavior in trolley-style moral dilemmas. Psychological

Science. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1177/0956797617752640

Cushman, F., & Greene, J. D. (2012). Finding faults: How moral dilemmas illuminate

cognitive structure. Social neuroscience, 7(3), 269-279.

doi:10.1080/17470919.2011.614000

DeScioli, P., Asao, K., & Kurzban, R. (2012). Omissions and byproducts across moral

domains. PloS one, 7(10), e46963.

Djeriouat, H., & Trémolière, B. (2014). The Dark Triad of personality and utilitarian moral

judgment: the mediating role of Honesty/Humility and Harm/Care. Personality and

Individual Differences, 67, 11-16. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2013.12.026

Foot, P. (1967). The problem of abortion and the doctrine of double effect, Oxford Review, 5,

5–15.

Glenn, A. L., Koleva, S., Iyer, R., Graham, J., & Ditto, P. H. (2010). Moral identity in

psychopathy. Judgment and Decision Making, 5, 497–505.

Gold, N., Colman, A. M., & Pulford, B. D. (2014). Cultural differences in responses to real-

life and hypothetical trolley problems. Judgment and Decision Making, 9(1), 65.

Gold, N., Pulford, B. D., & Colman, A. M. (2013). Your money or your life: Comparing

judgements in trolley problems involving economic and emotional harms, injury and

death. Economics & Philosophy, 29(2), 213-233.

Greene, J. D. (2015). Beyond point-and-shoot morality: Why cognitive (neuro) science

matters for ethics. Law & Ethics of Human Rights, 9, 141–172.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/lehr-2015-0011


Greene, J. D., Cushman, F. A., Stewart, L. E., Lowenberg, K., Nystrom, L. E., & Cohen, J. D.

(2009). Pushing moral buttons: The interaction between personal force and intention in

moral judgment. Cognition, 111(3), 364-371.

Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An

fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, 293(5537),

2105-2108. doi:10.1126/science.1062872

Hannikainen, I. R., Machery, E., & Cushman, F. A. (2018). Is utilitarian sacrifice becoming

more morally permissible?. Cognition, 170, 95-101.

Kahane, G. (2015). Sidetracked by trolleys: Why sacrificial moral dilemmas tell us little (or

nothing) about utilitarian judgment. Social neuroscience, 10(5), 551-560.

doi:10.1080/17470919.2015.1023400

Kahane, G., Everett, J. A. C., Earp, B. D., Farias, M., & Savulescu, J. (2015).

‘Utilitarian’judgments in sacrificial moral dilemmas do not reflect impartial concern

for the greater good. Cognition, 134, 193-209. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2014.10.005

Kahane, G., & Shackel, N. (2010). Methodological issues in the neuroscience of moral

judgement. Mind & language, 25(5), 561-582.

Kahane, G., Wiech, K., Shackel, N., Farias, M., Savulescu, J., & Tracey, I. (2011). The neural

basis of intuitive and counterintuitive moral judgment. Social cognitive and affective

neuroscience, 7(4), 393-402.

Kant, I. (1956). Critique of practical reason (L. W. Beck, Trans.). Indianapolis, IN : Bobbs-

Merrill (Original work published 1788).

Koenigs, M., Kruepke, M., Zeier, J., & Newman, J. P. (2012). Utilitarian moral judgment in

psychopathy. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 7(6), 708-714.

doi:10.1093/scan/nsr048


Levenson, M. R., Kiehl, K. A., Fitzpatrick, C. M. (1995). Assessing psychopathic attributes in

a noninstitutionalized population. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68,

151-158. doi:10.1037//0022-3514.68.1.151

Millar, C., Starmans, C., Fugelsang, J., & Friedman, O. (2016). It's personal: The effect of

personal value on utilitarian moral judgments. Judgment and Decision Making, 11(4),

326.

Millar, J. C., Turri, J., & Friedman, O. (2014). For the greater goods? Ownership rights and

utilitarian moral judgment. Cognition, 133(1), 79-84.

Rom, S. C., & Conway, P. (2018). The strategic moral self: Self-presentation shapes moral

dilemma judgments. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 74, 24-37.

Stewart, G. B., Altman, D. G., Askie, L. M., Duley, L., Simmonds, M. C., & Stewart, L. A.

(2012). Statistical analysis of individual participant data meta-analyses: a comparison

of methods and recommendations for practice. PloS one, 7(10), e46042.

Trémolière, B., & De Neys, W. (2013). Methodological concerns in moral judgement

research: Severity of harm shapes moral decisions. Journal of Cognitive Psychology,

25(8), 989-993.

Vonk, J., Zeigler-Hill, V., Ewing, D., Mercer, S., & Noser, A. E. (2015). Mindreading in the

dark: Dark personality features and theory of mind. Personality and Individual

Differences, 87, 50-54. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2015.07.025

Wai, M., & Tiliopoulos, N. (2012). The affective and cognitive empathic nature of the dark

triad of personality. Personality and Individual Differences, 52(7), 794-799.

doi:10.1016/j.paid.2012.01.008

Wiech, K., Kahane, G., Shackel, N., Farias, M., Savulescu, J., & Tracey, I. (2013). Cold or

calculating? Reduced activity in the subgenual cingulate cortex reflects decreased


emotional aversion to harming in counterintuitive utilitarian judgment. Cognition,

126(3), 364-372. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2012.11.002


Tables

Table 1

Sample size and summary demographical statistics

Wave 1 Wave 2N (Female) Mean Age (SD) N (Female) Mean Age (SD)

Study 1 200 (119) 37.5 (12.8) 170 (102) 38.5 (13.0)Study 2 200 (137) 36.6 (12.0) 160 (109) 37.4 (12.7)Study 3 210 (124) 38.9 (11.9) 171 (104) 39.5 (11.9)Study 4 199 (118) 37.0 (13.6) 169 (101) 37.7 (13.5)


Table 2.

Regression estimates for a) the relationship between participants’ preference for

consequentialism (as measured by harm-centric trolley dilemmas) with consequentialist

decisions on the monetary trolley dilemma; b) the relationship of primary psychopathy with

preference for consequentialism (as measured by harm-centric trolley dilemmas); c) the

relationship of primary psychopathy with consequentialist decisions on the monetary trolley

dilemma.

Analysis: b se Test Stat. p

a) Consequentialist Choices (monetary dilemma) by Consequentialist Preference (harm dilemmas)

Meta 0.43 0.10 z = 4.50 <.001

Study 1 0.30 0.21 z = 1.43 .153

Study 2 0.23 0.22 z = 1.07 .287

Study 3 0.49 0.18 z = 2.73 .006

Study 4 0.52 0.18 z = 2.89 .003

b ) Consequentialist Preference (harm dilemmas) by Primary Psychopathy

Meta 0.22 0.06 t(76.3) = 3.60 <.001

Study 1 0.10 0.11 t(196) = 0.96 .339

Study 2 0.22 0.11 t(196) = 2.07 .039

Study 3 0.22 0.12 t(206) = 1.79 .075

Study 4 0.33 0.12 t(195) = 2.79 .006

c) Consequentialist Choices (monetary dilemma) by Primary Psychopathy

Meta 0.18 0.15 z = 1.24 .217

Study 1 -0.07 0.30 z = -0.23 .818

Study 2 0.48 0.33 z = 1.49 .136

Study 3 -0.06 0.29 z = -0.22 .827

Study 4 0.41 0.29 z = 1.41 .158

Note. All regressions are controlled for participants’ Age and Gender. The meta-

analytical mixed effect models included a random slope for the main predictor in analyses a)

and b) but only a random-intercept in analysis c) due to convergence issues.

biblio.ugent.be€¦ · web viewbeyond physical harm: how preference for consequentialism and...

Documents