Using conflict negativity to index psychological tension between impartiality and status-upholding principles

ABSTRACT

People often endorse the moral principle that all human lives are equally valuable. At the same time, people often privilege high-status individuals over low-status individuals. These two inclinations come into conflict in a scenario involving the potential killing of a high-status person to save the lives of multiple low-status people. In the present study, participants viewed a series of sacrificial dilemmas in which the social status of the victims and beneficiaries was varied. We measured participants’ choice (sacrifice vs. don’t sacrifice), response time, and electroencephalographic activity, with an emphasis on conflict negativity (CN). Overall, we found no effects of victim/beneficiaries status on choice and response time. However, participants displayed a more pronounced CN effect when contemplating a high-status victim/low-status beneficiaries tradeoff than a low-status-victim/high-status beneficiaries tradeoff. Further analyses revealed that this effect was primarily driven by participants who endorsed deontological principles (e.g., “Some rules must never be broken, no matter the consequences”). In contrast, those who endorsed utilitarian principles displayed equivalent levels of conflict negativity, regardless of the social status of victims and beneficiaries. These findings shed light on the role of conflict in the phenomenology of moral decision making.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral dilemmas
• conflict negativity

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that no financial interest or benefit has arisen from the direct application of this research.

Data availability statement.

All data are available upon request to the corresponding author.

Notes

¹ We acknowledge that theorists have occasionally used utilitarian principles to justify the favoring of high-status people. For example, Godwin (1798/2020) argued that some people furnish more benefit to society than others. Therefore, according to Godwin, if you could rescue only one person from a burning building, a wealthy philanthropist or your own child, you should rescue the philanthropist. This perspective is not widely endorsed.

² These questionnaires were the Attitude-Based Political Orientation scale (Xu et al., 2021), and the Warmth and Competence Scale (Fiske et al., 2002). In addition, to test hypotheses beyond the scope of the present paper, participants also viewed versions of each scenario involving a one-for-one (rather than one-for-many) tradeoff.

³ Note that this pattern runs contrary to (Greene et al., 2001).

⁴ In previous studies (Robinson et al., 2015, 2019), a relationship between the Consequentialism Scale and participants’ choice has been documented in studies with much larger samples (ns ranging from 488 to 2,131). Thus, the present sample may not possess adequate power to detect such an effect.

⁵ We thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.