Fickle Judgments in Moral Dilemmas: Time Pressure and Utilitarian Judgments in an Interdependent Culture

Abstract

In the trolley problem, a well-known moral dilemma, the intuitive process is believed to increase deontological judgments, while deliberative reasoning is thought to promote utilitarian decisions. Therefore, based on the dual-process model, there seems to be an attempt to save several lives at the expense of a few others in a deliberative manner. This study examines the validity of this argument. To this end, we manipulate decision-making time in the standard trolley dilemma to compare differences among 119 Japanese female undergraduates under three conditions: intuitive judgment, deliberative judgment, and judgment after a group discussion. The current results demonstrate that utilitarian judgments decreased from 52.9% in the intuition condition to 43.7% in the deliberation condition and 37.0% after the discussion. Additional analysis suggests that the decrease in utilitarian judgments may be related to psychological unwillingness to assume responsibility for the lives of others rather than to an increase in deontological judgments. Finally, these results are discussed from an adaptationist perspective.

Potential influence of decision time on punishment behavior and its evaluation

“…It is noteworthy that our participants were asked to make a judgment about punishment behavior under time pressure (intuition condition) and then make the same judgment again with no time limit (deliberation condition). This procedure has much in common with the “two-response paradigm” that has been developed to distinguish and compare intuitive and deliberative judgments (e.g., Thompson et al, 2011 ; Bago and De Neys, 2019 ; Hashimoto et al, 2022 ). Although the findings are interesting, there is a potential limitation in that the deliberation condition always follows the intuitive one.…”

Mercy Killing or Murder: A Moral Dilemma Regarding the Death of Lennie in Of Mice and Men

“…The trolley problem, a familiar moral dilemma, involves the use of deontology and utilitarianism as a basis for the justification of moral decisions, either via intuitive thinking process or deliberative reasoning process. For those inclining to the intuitive thinking process, they have more tendency to make deontological judgments; for those inclining to the deliberative reasoning is thought to make utilitarian and consequential judgments (Hashimoto, Maeda, & Matsumura, 2022). Utilitarianism, a version of consequentialism, emphasizes that the consequences of any action on people is to bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people and that is the only criterion to justify the rightness and wrongness of the action.…”