Correlations of trait and state emotions with utilitarian moral judgements

ABSTRACT

In four experiments, we asked subjects for judgements about scenarios that pit utilitarian outcomes against deontological moral rules, for example, saving more lives vs. a rule against active killing. We measured trait emotions of anger, disgust, sympathy and empathy (the last two in both specific and general forms, the latter referring to large groups of people), asked about the same emotions after each scenario (state emotions). We found that utilitarian responding to the scenarios, and higher scores on a utilitarianism scale, were correlated negatively with disgust, positively (but weakly and inconsistently) with anger, positively with specific sympathy and state sympathy, and less so with general sympathy or empathy. In a fifth experiment, we asked about anger and sympathy for specific outcomes, and we found that these are consistently predictive of utilitarian responding.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral judgement
• utilitarianism
• deontology
• emotion
• anger
• disgust
• sympathy
• empathy

Acknowledgments

We thank to Wes Hutchinson for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Our usage follows that of Escalas and Stern (2003) and others. The term “perspective taking” as used in the emotion literature is more descriptive but has a different meaning in the literature on cognitive development, referring to a cognitive ability.

2. Conway and Gawronski found negative correlations of utilitarian judgment with both empathic concern and perspective taking. But they measured utilitarian responding as the difference between judged appropriateness of acting in the usual sacrificial dilemmas and appropriateness in a set of dilemmas designed to make the consequences of acting worse than those of doing nothing. Subjects often said that acting was appropriate in the latter dilemmas, so it is unclear what this difference means. The correlation between perspective taking and appropriateness judgements was not significant for the standard dilemmas only, or for the set of all dilemmas of both types. (We thank Bertram Gawronski for providing the data.)

3. See Kahane et al. (2012), for a similar argument.

4. Ong, Mullette-Gillman, Kwok, and Lim (2014) found that disgust priming increased utilitarian responding in one experiment (and not significantly in a second experiment), contrary to earlier results, which they discuss. Moreover, this increase was greater in subjects with greater trait disgust. But the effects were small, and the tests were done across subjects with no attention to item variance in the effect of disgust.

5. The sadness item did not correlate with anything. The conflict item tended to correlate with utilitarian responding, but this is irrelevant to our interest here.

6. The questions had “always” in them, and the responses ranged from “almost never” to “almost always”. Some subjects were giving nonsensical answers, saying “almost always” to one item and its opposite. (We included the opposites on purpose, just for this reason, e.g. “1. Some moral rules should always be followed, even if they lead to outcomes that are worse than those from breaking the rules. 2. If a moral rule leads to outcomes that are worse than those from breaking the rule, we should break the rule.”) We then eliminated subjects who gave “almost always” answers to both questions.

7. The non-significant negative results for general empathy may be related to the fact that general empathy was very low. People do not often experience empathic emotions for abstract groups of distant others, although it is possible to understand their situation. The means for the four traits were (on a 1–4 scale): 2.50 for general sympathy; 2.95 for specific sympathy; 1.88 for general empathy; and 2.34 for specific empathy.

8. The supplement contains an additional analysis of sex differences.

9. Bear in mind that the rule cases in Experiment 1 still confounded utilitarian responding with action, although, by design, not with emotion.