EMOTIONS AS HEURISTICS: A DUAL APPROACH MODEL TO MORAL DECISION-MAKING UNDER RISK

Abstract

When facing moral dilemmas that involve risk, people may have different approaches to tackling the moral problem depending on the level of moral transgression involved. It was hypothesized that both moral intuitions and risk aversion would play a role in the decision-making process for scenarios that involve strong transgressions of moral norms, and that participants would also be susceptible to framing effects of non-moral outcomes. A novel experimental paradigm that manipulated level of transgression, pairing of ethical decision with safe and risky non-moral outcomes and framing of non-moral prospects was designed to test these hypotheses. It was found that for scenarios that feature risky ethical decisions and evoke strong moral emotions, participants displayed a risk aversion bias, contrary to existing literature that suggests that risks associated with non-moral outcomes would be ignored following a priority heuristic model. However, no effects of framing were found. Following these results, a dual approach model to moral decision-making under risk was proposed as an alternative to the priority heuristic model. Implications of the model and directions for future research are further discussed.