Affective basis of judgment-behavior discrepancy in virtual experiences of moral dilemmas

Abstract

Although research in moral psychology in the last decade has relied heavily on hypothetical moral dilemmas and has been effective in understanding moral judgment, how these judgments translate into behaviors remains a largely unexplored issue due to the harmful nature of the acts involved. To study this link, we follow a new approach based on a desktop virtual reality environment. In our within-subjects experiment, participants exhibited an order-dependent judgment-behavior discrepancy across temporally separated sessions, with many of them behaving in utilitarian manner in virtual reality dilemmas despite their nonutilitarian judgments for the same dilemmas in textual descriptions. This change in decisions reflected in the autonomic arousal of participants, with dilemmas in virtual reality being perceived more emotionally arousing than the ones in text, after controlling for general differences between the two presentation modalities (virtual reality vs. text). This suggests that moral decision-making in hypothetical moral dilemmas is susceptible to contextual saliency of the presentation of these dilemmas.

Keywords:

• Moral judgment
• Virtual reality
• Moral dilemmas
• Decision making
• Skin conductance

We are thankful to the three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Eva-Maria Seidel for providing the Matlab script to analyze the skin conductance data and Riccardo Sioni for supervision during SCR recordings. The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Notes

¹ In addition to other differences mentioned in the Introduction section, our study also differed in this crucial aspect from the study of Navarrete et al. (2012), since in their study participants did not witness death of any virtual agent: “Screams of distress from either one or five agents became audible depending on the direction of the boxcar and the placement of the agents. Screaming was cut short at the moment of impact, and the visual environment faded to black” (p. 367).