Dopamine, religiosity, and utilitarian moral judgment

ABSTRACT

Our goal was to examine the relationship between biological and sociocultural factors that predict utilitarian moral judgment. Utilitarian moral judgments occur when a specific action is based on the outcome rather than its consistency with social norms. We predicted that (1) individuals with higher levels of dopamine will make more utilitarian decisions and (2) individuals who express greater religiosity will make less utilitarian judgments. We measured dopamine using spontaneous eyeblink rate, an indirect measure associated with striatal dopaminergic transmission. A total of 96 participants completed a utilitarian moral judgment task where they made judgments regarding nonmoral, impersonal, personal low-conflict, and personal high-conflict moral dilemmas. Then, participants completed a questionnaire measuring religiosity. We found a negative relationship between religiosity and the proportion of “yes” judgments participants made in the high-conflict personal dilemmas, which was consistent with our second hypothesis. None of our other hypotheses were supported. Understanding biological and cultural factors that relate to utilitarian moral judgment may also help in developing artificial intelligence that more closely mimic human behavior.

KEYWORDS:

• Dopamine
• eyeblink rate
• judgment
• morality
• religiosity
• utilitarian

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the psychology department at UW-Platteville for their support. We would like to thank members of the Platteville Emotion and Decision-Making Lab for assistance with data reduction and thoughtful commentary on the design of this research. We would specifically like to thank Emma Dums for her assistance with data reduction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded in part by the Scholarly Activity Improvement Fund grant from UW-Platteville to K. H.; Undergraduate Research Scholarly and Creative Activity grant to D.M.; and Pioneer Summer Undergraduate Scholars Program grant to D.M.