A brief assessment tool for investigating facets of moral judgment from realistic vignettes

Abstract

Humans make moral judgments every day, and research demonstrates that these evaluations are based on a host of related event features (e.g., harm, legality). In order to acquire systematic data on how moral judgments are made, our assessments need to be expanded to include real-life, ecologically valid stimuli that take into account the numerous event features that are known to influence moral judgment. To facilitate this, Knutson et al. (in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 5(4), 378-384, 2010) developed vignettes based on real-life episodic memories rated concurrently on key moral features; however, the method is time intensive (~1.4-3.4 h) and the stimuli and ratings require further validation and characterization. The present study addresses these limitations by: (i) validating three short subsets of these vignettes (39 per subset) that are time-efficient (10-25 min per subset) yet representative of the ratings and factor structure of the full set, (ii) norming ratings of moral features in a larger sample (total N = 661, each subset N = ~220 vs. Knutson et al. N = 30), (iii) examining the generalizability of the original factor structure by replicating it in a larger sample across vignette subsets, sex, and political ideology, and (iv) using latent profile analysis to empirically characterize vignette groupings based on event feature ratings profiles and vignette content. This study therefore provides researchers with a core battery of well-characterized and realistic vignettes, concurrently rated on key moral features that can be administered in a brief, time-efficient manner to advance research on the nature of moral judgment.

Evaluating the efficacy of a vignette-based approach to measuring online/offline discrepancies in moral decision making among social media users

“…Designing hypothetical scenarios containing clear, realistic, and ecologicallyvalid moral behaviours is an important aspect of all vignette-based approaches to moral cognition research (Kahane, 2015;Knutson et al, 2010;Kruepke et al, 2018). Given this project's focus on comparing moral judgement across two different social contexts (online vs offline), a primary concern was also developing online/offline variants of a…”

Online/Offline discrepancies in moral judgement among social media users: A mixed methods study

“…The need for online/offline equivalence Designing hypothetical scenarios containing clear, realistic, and ecologically-valid moral behaviours is an important aspect of all vignette-based approaches to moral cognition research (Kahane, 2015;Knutson et al, 2010;Kruepke et al, 2018). Given this project's focus on comparing moral judgement across two different social contexts (online vs offline), a primary concern was also developing online/offline variants of a given scenario which would be as closely equivalent as possible in the minds of participants.…”

“…Generally speaking, an individual's capacity to make informed moral judgements is proportionate to their capacity to readily imagine the details of a hypothetical scenario (Kahane, 2015). Ensuring that participants are able to readily imagine the details of a vignette is therefore an important consideration in vignette-based studies of morality (Kruepke et al, 2018). This challenge is further compounded when every offline scenario must have an online equivalent which is comparably imaginable for the average participant.…”