Reduced empathic concern leads to utilitarian moral judgments in trait alexithymia

Abstract

Recent research with moral dilemmas supports dual-process model of moral decision making. This model posits two different paths via which people can endorse utilitarian solution that requires personally harming someone in order to achieve the greater good (e.g., killing one to save five people): (i) weakened emotional aversion to the prospect of harming someone due to reduced empathic concern for the victim; (ii) enhanced cognition which supports cost-benefit analysis and countervails the prepotent emotional aversion to harm. Direct prediction of this model would be that personality traits associated with reduced empathy would show higher propensity to endorse utilitarian solutions. As per this prediction, we found that trait alexithymia, which is well-known to have deficits in empathy, was indeed associated with increased utilitarian tendencies on emotionally aversive personal moral dilemmas and this was due to reduced empathic concern for the victim. Results underscore the importance of empathy for moral judgments in harm/care domain of morality.

Is utilitarian sacrifice becoming more morally permissible?

“…On a pessimistic note, our results may indicate aberrant socialization in recent cohorts: Utilitarian judgment has been shown to correlate with Machiavellian and psychopathic traits (Bartels & Pizarro, 2011), and also with the reduced capacity to distinguish felt emotions (Patil & Silani, 2014). At the same time, leading theories credit highly-acclaimed instances of moral progress to the exercise of rational scrutiny over prevailing moral norms (Greene, 2014;Singer, 2005), and the persistence of parochialism and prejudice to the unbridled command of intuition (Bloom, 2017).…”

“…These changes may be expected to correspond to increasing support for utilitarian sacrifice because dispositional empathy predicts opposition toward personal harm (Gleichgerrcht & Young, 2013;Patil & Silani, 2014).…”

Reduced anticipation of negative emotional events in alexithymia

“…Results suggest that HA are less able to anticipate the coming emotional event and possibly its consequences, which would be crucial to allow rapid identification, response and regulation of the response to such event. This difference may represent a shared underlying mechanism contributing to the difficulties of this group in emotion processing, which are particularly evident in ambiguous contexts, such as the recognition of emotional stimuli during limited time constraints, decision making in moral dilemmas and emotional response regulation891820.…”

“…They also show impairments in emotional response regulation18 appearing less able to recur to reappraisal as a strategy to regulate emotions19. Furthermore, HA exhibit decreased empathic concern leading to more inclination towards utilitarian decisions in moral dilemmas20.…”

At the Heart of Morality Lies Neuro-Visceral Integration: Lower Cardiac Vagal Tone Predicts Utilitarian Moral Judgment

“…Accordingly, people with reduced awareness of their physiological states (i.e. alexithymia) make utilitarian judgments (Patil and Silani, 2014). People potentially acquire such physiological reactions via learning; the repeated pairing of a suffering person (an unconditioned aversive stimulus) with a specific action might lead to an automatic aversive response (Blair, 1995).…”