Decision-making in everyday moral conflict situations: Development and validation of a new measure

Abstract

In everyday life, we are often confronted with morally conflicting social interaction situations. Therefore, the main objective of the present set of studies was the development and validation of a new measure to assess decision-making in everyday moral conflict situations. All vignettes required a decision between an altruistic versus an egoistic behavioral response alternative. In three independent surveys ( N = 200), we developed a 40-items measure with preferable mean rates of altruistic decisions (Study 1), clear representation of altruistic and egoistic response classes (Study 2), unambiguousness of social closeness classifications (socially close vs. socially distant protagonists; Studies 1 and 2), and high similarity to reality ratings (Studies 1 and 2). Additionally, we developed two parallelized item sets for future use in within-subjects design studies and investigated the measurement properties of our new scale (Studies 1 and 3). Results of Rasch model analyses and classical test theory fit indices showed unidimensionality and confirmed the appropriateness of the fragmentation into two parallelized item sets. Notably, in our data, there were neither effects of social closeness nor gender on the percentage of altruistic decisions. In sum, we propose the Everyday Moral Conflict Situations (EMCS) Scale as a promising new measurement tool that may facilitate further research in different research areas due to its broad applicability.

Desire thinking promotes decisions to game: The mediating role between gaming urges and everyday decision-making in recreational gamers

“…On the basis of the first evaluation of conflicting activities and focus group discussions, an initial pool of 36 hypothetically conflicting situations that likely occur in the daily lives of gamers was created on the basis of consideration. For the purpose of comparability, each scenario follows a three-sentence structure (cf., Singer, Kreuzpointner, Sommer, Wüst, & Kudielka, 2019 ) and contains two forced-choice options (gaming vs. conflicting activity). It was made sure that frequently occurring conflicting activities are represented by several scenarios in the catalogue.…”

The Relationship of Shopping-Related Decisions with Materialistic Values Endorsement, Compulsive Buying-Shopping Disorder Symptoms and Everyday Moral Decision Making

“…The shopping-related dilemmas developed in study 1 were not validated before using them in study 2. By analogy with moral dilemmas [ 40 , 41 , 57 ], they should be examined with regard to arousal, valence, item difficulty, reliability, ambiguity, lengths, and expression style in further studies. It is also important to emphasize that all assumptions from study 2 can only be made for the present web-based convenience sample.…”

Neural correlates of everyday moral decision-making: An exploratory ScanSTRESS study.

“…Second, we aimed to investigate behavioral effects and neural correlates of everyday moral decision-making after exposure to the two ScanSTRESS versions. For the everyday moral decision-making paradigm, we used 20 scenarios of our recently developed Everyday Moral Conflict Situations (EMCS) scale (Singer et al, 2019), which additionally allows for the investigation of the impact of social closeness by manipulating the distance of the protagonists in the conflicts (Margittai et al, 2015;Singer, Binapfl, et al, 2021;Zhan et al, 2018). The scenarios of the EMCS scale were adapted to the fMRI environment and contrasted with 20 stories with neutral social content (similar to Sommer et al, 2010Sommer et al, , 2014.…”