Moral fatigue: The effects of cognitive fatigue on moral reasoning

Abstract

We report two experiments that show a moral fatigue effect: participants who are fatigued after they have carried out a tiring cognitive task make different moral judgements compared to participants who are not fatigued. Fatigued participants tend to judge that a moral violation is less permissible even though it would have a beneficial effect, such as killing one person to save the lives of five others. The moral fatigue effect occurs when people make a judgement that focuses on the harmful action, killing one person, but not when they make a judgement that focuses on the beneficial outcome, saving the lives of others, as shown in Experiment 1 ( n = 196). It also occurs for judgements about morally good actions, such as jumping onto railway tracks to save a person who has fallen there, as shown in Experiment 2 ( n = 187). The results have implications for alternative explanations of moral reasoning.

The dual-process approach to human sociality: Meta-analytic evidence for a theory of internalized heuristics for self-preservation

“…In doing so, they found that participants in the hard-to-read-font condition are more likely to endorse utilitarian judgments. Timmons and Byrne (2018) used an ego-depletion task similar to the e-crossing task and found that depleted participants tend to be more deontological than non-depleted ones. Bago and De Neys (2018) implemented a tworesponse paradigm and, using several sacrificial dilemmas, found that about 70% of the utilitarian deliberative choices were already utilitarian under intuition.…”

The Dual-Process Approach to Human Sociality: A Review

“…In doing so, they found that participants in the hard-to-read-font condition were more likely to endorse utilitarian judgments in sacrificial dilemmas. Timmons and Byrne (2018) used an ego-depletion task similar to the e-crossing task and found that depleted participants tended to be more deontological than non-depleted ones in sacrificial moral dilemmas.…”

“…Load reduces utilitarian judgments, while leaving deontological judgments unaffected Conceptual primes studies Valdesolo & DeSteno (2006) Sacrificial dilemmas Affect induction increases deontological choices Kvaran et al (2013) Sacrificial dilemmas Emotional prime increases deontological choices Analytical prime increases utilitarian choices Spears et al (2018) Sacrificial dilemmas Attention prime increases utilitarian choices Capraro et al (2019) Oxford Utilitarianism Scale Priming intuition increases non-utilitarian judgments in the instrumental harm dimension, but not in the impartial beneficence dimension Ego depletion studies Trémolière et al (2012) Sacrificial dilemmas Depletion increases deontological choices Timmons & Byrne (2018) Sacrificial dilemmas Depletion increases deontological choices…”

Moral Judgment as Categorization (MJAC)

“…MJAC assumes that moral judgments are dynamical and context-dependent, and as such it is the approach that is best positioned to understand the diverse contextual influences on moral judgment. It is beyond the scope of the current paper to describe and account for all the known contextual influences on moral judgment (e.g., an incomplete list would include: Bostyn et al(e.g., an incomplete list would include: Bostyn et al, 2018;Christensen et al, 2014;Christensen & Gomila, 2012;Costa et al, 2014;Cushman et al, 2012;Everett et al, 2016Everett et al, , 2018Forbes, 2018;Francis et al, 2016Francis et al, , 2017Lee & Holyoak, 2020;Petrinovich & O'Neill, 1996;Rozin et al, 1999Rozin et al, , 2008Schein, 2020;Timmons & Byrne, 2019;Uhlmann et al, 2015;Valdesolo & DeSteno, 2006;Vasquez et al, 2001;Vasudev & Hummel, 1987). However, MJAC predicts understanding these diverse context effects depends on (a) accounting the learning history (e.g., in the cases of emotional influences and the foreign language effect) and, (b)…”