Poker-faced morality: Concealing emotions leads to utilitarian decision making

Fired Up by Morality: The Unique Physiological Response Tied to Moral Conviction in Politics

“…Finally, the close connection between arousal and conviction shown in this study raises several questions for future work. First, studies show that prompts to regulate or reduce emotional arousal encourage respondents to shift from deontological to utilitarian judgments (e.g., Feinberg, Willer, Antonenko, & John, ; Lee & Gino, ). Building on this idea, future research should investigate whether tactics like emotion reappraisal and suppression moderate the effects of moral conviction, encouraging rational deliberation, cooperation, and compromise.…”

In a moral dilemma, choose the one you love: Impartial actors are seen as less moral than partial ones

“…Moving away from philosophical theorizing, psychological evidence suggests that impartial, utilitarian ethics are rational. Studies show that utilitarian decisions are unemotional (Lee & Gino, 2015), rely on systematic processing (Bartels, 2008;Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001), and require more reflective thought and processing capacity than deontological decisions (Greene, Morelli, Lowenberg, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2008;Paxton, Ungar, & Greene, 2011;Suter & Hertwig, 2011). However, there is also evidence that utilitarian decisions are associated with a desire for power (Sussenbach & Moore, 2015) and low levels of empathetic concern (Gleichgerrcht & Young, 2013) and even correlated with psychopathy (Bartels & Pizarro, 2011;Kahane, Everett, Earp, Farias, & Savulescu, 2014;Koenigs, Kruepke, Zeier, & Newman, 2012).…”

Utilitarian preferences or action preferences? De-confounding action and moral code in sacrificial dilemmas

“…Although sacrificial dilemma responses are frequently still framed as "utilitarian" or "deontological" choices (Lee & Gino, 2015), recent studies suggest that responses to sacrificial dilemmas do not correlate with other variables in ways expected of a measure of utilitarian versus deontological preferences (Bartels & Pizarro, 2011;Bauman, McGraw, Bartels, & Warren, 2014;Duke & Bègue, 2015;Kahane, Everett, Earp, Farias, & Savulescu, 2015;Rosas & Koenigs, 2014). We aim to further this line of research by addressing a largely unexamined issue concerning the construct validity of sacrificial dilemmas: the confounding of the endorsement of utilitarian outcomes with the endorsement of action.…”

“…One of the most common methods used to study moral judgment entails presenting hypothetical sacrificial dilemmas in which participants choose whether to endorse harming one person in service of a greater good (e.g., Bartels, 2008;Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001). Responses to such dilemmas are frequently used to infer people's relative preferences for utilitarian (i.e., impartial welfare-maximizing) versus deontological (i.e., rights-or duty-based) moral codes (e.g., Lee & Gino, 2015). Such is the level of interest in sacrificial dilemma research that it has even penetrated debates in normative ethics on the relative merits of deontological and utilitarian moral codes (Berker, 2009;Greene, 2003;Singer, 2005).…”