Out-group/in-group personal moral dilemmas in the Kogi worldview

Abstract

This research report studies how Kogi people (a small-scale society located in Northern Colombia, South America) answer personal moral dilemmas (PMD), specifically a cultural adaptation of the Footbridge scenario when the characters in the stories are in-group or out-group. Four moral scenarios were designed in which the indigenous had to judge the possibility of saving either one person or five (1 in-group or 5 out-group; 1 out-group or 5 in-group; 1 and 5 in-group, and 1 and 5 out-group). The main findings were: the participants opted for choices closer to the consequentialist than to the deontological option, and that the group bias allowed them to go from a consequentialist option to a deontological one. Our research suggests that moral judgment in the resolution of personal moral dilemmas is not unitary even within the same human group; it also suggests that moral judgment depends on two contextual factors: the group membership and the social relationship of the experiment’s subjects with the characters of the story.