► Participants high in psychopathy gave more utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas. ► Participants with traits indicative of negative moral character were more utilitarian. ► Researchers should not ...equate utilitarian responses to dilemmas with optimal morality.
Researchers have recently argued that utilitarianism is the appropriate framework by which to evaluate moral judgment, and that individuals who endorse non-utilitarian solutions to moral dilemmas (involving active vs. passive harm) are committing an error. We report a study in which participants responded to a battery of personality assessments and a set of dilemmas that pit utilitarian and non-utilitarian options against each other. Participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of Psychopathy, machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness. These results question the widely-used methods by which lay moral judgments are evaluated, as these approaches lead to the counterintuitive conclusion that those individuals who are least prone to moral errors also possess a set of psychological characteristics that many would consider prototypically immoral.
Three studies test eight hypotheses about (1) how judgment differs between people who ascribe greater vs. less moral relevance to choices, (2) how moral judgment is subject to task constraints that ...shift evaluative focus (to moral rules vs. to consequences), and (3) how differences in the propensity to rely on intuitive reactions affect judgment. In Study 1, judgments were affected by rated agreement with moral rules proscribing harm, whether the dilemma under consideration made moral rules versus consequences of choice salient, and by thinking styles (intuitive vs. deliberative). In Studies 2 and 3, participants evaluated policy decisions to
knowingly do harm to a resource to mitigate greater harm or to
merely allow the greater harm to happen. When evaluated in isolation, approval for decisions to harm was affected by endorsement of moral rules and by thinking style. When both choices were evaluated simultaneously, total harm – but not the do/allow distinction – influenced rated approval. These studies suggest that moral rules play an important, but context-sensitive role in moral cognition, and offer an account of when emotional reactions to perceived moral violations receive less weight than consideration of costs and benefits in moral judgment and decision making.
•Some personal changes are consistent with the self-concept while others disrupt identity.•In general, improvement is less disruptive to self-continuity than worsening.•Moral and personality ...characteristics are viewed as less mutable than memories or preferences.•Changes that match expectations and desires are less disruptive than changes that do not.
Five studies explore how anticipating different types of personal change affects people’s perceptions of their own self-continuity. The studies find that improvements are seen as less disruptive to personal continuity than worsening or unspecified change, although this difference varies in magnitude based on the type of feature being considered. Also, people’s expectations and desires matter. For example, a negative change is highly disruptive to perceived continuity when people expect improvement and less disruptive when people expect to worsen. The finding that some types of change are consistent with perceptions of self-continuity suggests that the self-concept may include beliefs about personal development.
How does the anticipated connectedness between one’s current and future identity help explain impatience in intertemporal preferences? The less consumers are closely connected psychologically to ...their future selves, the less willing they will be to forgo immediate benefits in order to ensure larger deferred benefits to be received by that future self. When consumers’ measured or manipulated sense of continuity with their future selves is lower, they accept smaller-sooner rewards, wait less in order to save money on a purchase, require a larger premium to delay receiving a gift card, and have lower long-term discount rates.
Reducing spending in the present requires the combination of being both motivated to provide for one’s future self (valuing the future) and actively considering long-term implications of one’s ...choices (awareness of the future). Feeling more connected to the future self—thinking that the important psychological properties that define your current self are preserved in the person you will be in the future—helps motivate consumers to make far-sighted choices by changing their valuation of future outcomes (e.g., discount factors). However, this change only reduces spending when opportunity costs are considered. Correspondingly, cues that highlight opportunity costs reduce spending primarily when people discount the future less or are more connected to their future selves. Implications for the efficacy of behavioral interventions and for research on time discounting are discussed.
A large literature implicates time preference (i.e., how much an outcome retains value as it is delayed) as a predictor of a wide range of behaviors, because most behaviors involve sooner and delayed ...consequences. We aimed to provide the most comprehensive examination to date of how well laboratory-derived estimates of time preference relate to self-reports of 36 behaviors, ranging from retirement savings to flossing, in a test-rest design using a large sample (N = 1,308) and two waves of data collection separated by 4.5 months. Time preference is significantly-albeit modestly-associated with about half of the behaviors; this is true even when controlling for 15 other demographic variables and psychologically relevant scales. There is substantial variance in the strengths of associations that is not easily explained. Time preference's predictive validity falls in the middle of these 16 possible predictors. Finally, we ask time preference researchers (N = 55) to predict the variation in the relationship between time preference and behaviors, and although they are reasonably well-calibrated, these experts tend to overestimate the predictive power of time preference estimates. We discuss implications of invoking time preference as a predictor and/or determinant of behaviors with delayed consequences in light of our findings.
Public Significance StatementMultiple scientific fields describe people's future-oriented decisions in terms of time preference-how much value an outcome retains or loses as it is delayed from the present. Time preferences are assumed to predict people's behaviors with future consequences across various domains (e.g., finance, health). To that end, several papers have reported correlations of time preference with a few focal behaviors, and a smaller subset of these papers have examined such correlations for several behaviors. The current investigation is a more comprehensive accounting of how well time preference predicts behavior-(a) examining more behaviors than existing literature, (b) involving a large sample, as well as (c) using a test-retest design. We find correlations that are mostly modest and highly heterogeneous across behaviors. In addition, experts studying time preference can predict some of this heterogeneity in correlations but tend to systematically overestimate their size. This research underscores the need for greater understanding of the moderators that influence the relationship between time preference and behaviors with future consequences.
Using capture-recapture analysis we estimate the effective size of the active Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) population that a typical laboratory can access to be about 7,300 workers. We also ...estimate that the time taken for half of the workers to leave the MTurk pool and be replaced is about 7 months. Each laboratory has its own population pool which overlaps, often extensively, with the hundreds of other laboratories using MTurk. Our estimate is based on a sample of 114,460 completed sessions from 33,408 unique participants and 689 sessions across seven laboratories in the US, Europe, and Australia from January 2012 to March 2015.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
CEKLJ, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
People often make tradeoffs between current and future benefits. Some research frameworks suggest that people treat the future self as if it were another person, subordinating future needs to current ...ones just as they might subordinate others' needs to their own. Although people make similar choices for future selves and others in some contexts, it remains unclear whether these behaviors are governed by the same decision policies. So, we identify and compare the unique influence of four relevant factors (need, deservingness, liking, and similarity) on monetary decisions in both the interpersonal and intrapersonal domains. Do people treat the future self and others similarly? Yes and no. Yes, because the influence of these factors on allocations is similar for both types of targets. No, because monetary allocations to the future self are consistently higher than allocations to others. Although the future self is treated like others in some ways, important differences remain that are not fully captured by this analogy.
People tend to attach less value to a good if they know a delay will occur before they obtain it. For example, people value receiving $100 tomorrow more than receiving $100 in 10 years. We explored ...one reason for this tendency (due to
Parfit, 1984
): In terms of psychological properties, such as beliefs, values, and goals, the decision maker is more closely linked to the person (his or her future self) receiving $100 tomorrow than to the person receiving $100 in 10 years. For this reason, he or she prefers his or her nearer self to have the $100 rather than his or her more remote self. Studies 1 and 2 showed that the greater the rated psychological connection between 2 parts of a participant's life, the less he or she discounted future monetary and nonmonetary benefits (e.g., good days at work) over that interval. In Studies 3-5, participants read about characters who undergo large life-changing (and connectedness-weakening) events at different points in their lives and then made decisions about the timing of benefits on behalf of these characters. All 5 studies revealed a relation between perceived psychological connectedness and intertemporal choice: Participants preferred benefits to occur before large changes in connectedness but preferred costs to occur after these changes.
Personal identity is an important determinant of behavior, yet how people mentally represent their self-concepts and their concepts of other people is not well understood. In the current studies, we ...examined the age-old question of what makes people who they are. We propose a novel approach to identity that suggests that the answer lies in people's beliefs about how the features of identity (e.g., memories, moral qualities, personality traits) are causally related to each other. We examined the impact of the causal centrality of a feature, a key determinant of the extent to which a feature defines a concept, on judgments of identity continuity. We found support for this approach in three experiments using both measured and manipulated causal centrality. For judgments both of one's self and of others, we found that some features are perceived to be more causally central than others and that changes in such causally central features are believed to be more disruptive to identity.
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