You’re heartless, I’m less: self-image and social norms in moral judgment

Abstract

Are moral judgments to sacrificial dilemmas shaped by a latent social norm? The present research addresses this issue. We report a set of six studies (plus a supplementary one) which question the existence of a social norm in the longstanding deontism/utilitarian debate by relying on two original tools, namely substitution technique and self-presentation paradigm. Study 1 showed that American participants asked to answer like most Americans would do gave more utilitarian responses than control participants who answered in their own name (Study 1). Study 2 showed that participants instructed to answer in a disapproval fashion were more utilitarian than both participants instructed to answer in an approval fashion and control participants. Importantly, no difference was observed between the approval and control conditions, suggesting that participants naturally align their moral judgments with a latent norm they think is the most socially desirable. Studies 3–5 explored in addition the effect of the activation of a deontism-skewed norm using the substitution instruction on subsequent impression formation. For the latter task, participants were instructed to evaluate a random participant selected from a previous study who gave utilitarian-like responses (Studies 3a–3b), or to evaluate a fictitious politician who endorsed either a deontic or utilitarian orientation (Studies 4–5). Although we consistently replicated the effect of substitution instruction, we failed to show that attempts to activate a norm in a given individual shaped their evaluation of other people who do not align with this norm. Finally, we report a mini meta-analysis targeting the pooled effect and homogeneity among our studies.

Keywords:

• moral utilitarianism
• self-presentation paradigm
• social norm
• substitution instruction

Acknowledgements

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Ethical approval

The university of the leading authors does not have institutional review boards for psychology or social science research. We thus applied the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments (2001), the ethical principles of the French Code of Ethics for Psychologists (2012), and the American Psychological Association Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (2017). Participants were informed about the purpose of the study and were assured that their data would remain confidential. Participants had to give explicit consent to access the study.

Disclosure statement

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

Disclosure and data availability statement

All measures, manipulations, and exclusions in the studies are disclosed. Full material and data are available as supplementary material on OSF (temporary anonymized link: https://osf.io/fdxh6/?view_only=90f8c4cf21c64a7ca5ff590235ea0054). For each study, data collection was completed before the analyses were conducted.

Notes

1 It is worth noting that, unlike Study 1, we do not run the analysis for the filler scenario, as the approval/disapproval procedure makes such an analysis irrelevant in this case.

2 A closer look at each evaluation taken separately showed no difference, all ps >.67.

3 At this stage, we want to warmly thank an anonymous reviewer for this relevant suggestion.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.