Motivated Bayesians: Feeling Moral While Acting Egoistically

Abstract

Research yields ample evidence that individual's behavior often reflects an apparent concern for moral considerations. A natural way to interpret evidence of such motives using an economic framework is to add an argument to the utility function such that agents obtain utility both from outcomes that yield only personal benefits and from acting kindly, honestly, or according to some other notion of “right.” Indeed, such interpretations can account for much of the existing empirical evidence. However, a growing body of research at the intersection of psychology and economics produces findings inconsistent with such straightforward, preference-based interpretations for moral behavior. In particular, while people are often willing to take a moral act that imposes personal material costs when confronted with a clear-cut choice between “right” and “wrong,” such decisions often seem to be dramatically influenced by the specific contexts in which they occur. In particular, when the context provides sufficient flexibility to allow plausible justification that one can both act egoistically while remaining moral, people seize on such opportunities to prioritize self-interest at the expense of morality. In other words, people who appear to exhibit a preference for being moral may in fact be placing a value on feeling moral, often accomplishing this goal by manipulating the manner in which they process information to justify taking egoistic actions while maintaining this feeling of morality.

A little good is good enough: Ethical consumption, cheap excuses, and moral self-licensing

“…Another important follow-up focus could be market analyses because maybe for firms, offering products that fulfill exactly one ethical criterion, for example, ecological cotton in textile items, is a smart strategy for selling products to customers with easy-to-ease ethical concerns. A further possibility is that leaving moral wiggle room (see Dana et al [62], van der Weele [63], Bartling et al [64], Grossman [65], Grossman and van der Weele [66], Freddi [67], Serra-Garcia and Szech [68], and Golman et al [69] for a recent overview) and/or room for motivated reasoning [70,71] could further decrease morally responsible behavior in customers. This potential interaction of moral self-licensing and other well-known mechanisms providing moral excuses is also a topic for further research.…”

Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response

“…It's not certain whether social interactions will infect others. People may be less willing to make sacrifices for others when the benefits are uncertain 174,175 . For instance, in hypothetical scenarios about deciding whether to go to work while sick, American and British participants reported they would be less willing to stay home when it was uncertain they would infect a co-worker.…”

Modeling Morality in 3‐D: Decision‐Making, Judgment, and Inference

“…Moral hypocrisy occurs when people hold themselves to different moral standards than others, and it likely reflects a motivation to appear moral while behaving selfishly (Batson et al, 1997;Gino et al, 2016;Graham et al, 2015;Jordan, Sommers, Bloom, & Rand, 2017;Sharma et al, 2014;Szabados & Soifer, 2004). Researchers have operationalized hypocrisy in two complementary ways.…”

“…Thereafter, we describe how this approach may be able to illuminate the nature of complex moral phenomena that lie at the boundary of two areas of moral cognition: person-centered morality (Alicke, Mandel, Hilton, Gerstenberg, & Lagnado, 2015;Knobe, 2010;Tannenbaum, Uhlmann, & Diermeier, 2011;Uhlmann, Pizarro, & Diermeier, 2015), moral hypocrisy (Batson, Kobrynowicz, Dinnerstein, Kampf, & Wilson, 1997;Gino, Norton, & Weber, 2016;Graham, Meindl, Koleva, Iyer, & Johnson, 2015;Sharma, Mazar, Alter, & Ariely, 2014;Szabados & Soifer, 2004), and moral influence (Bandura, 1969;Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004;Hoffman, 1970;Gino, Ayal, & Ariely, 2009;Macaulay & Berkowitz, 1970;Staub, 1971). Although the illustrative examples provided in this paper are specific to just one domain of morality (i.e., harm), the approach we describe can potentially be applied to other moral domains as well.…”