Faculty Articles
ORCID
0000-0002-4082-9505, 0000-0002-7314-7244
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Judgment and Decision Making
ISSN
1930-2975
Publication Date
1-1-2023
Abstract
The act of suicide is commonly viewed as wrong in some sense, but it is not clear why this is. Based on past empirical research and philosophical theorizing, we test ten different explanations for why suicide is opposed on normative grounds. Using a within-subjects design, Study 1 showed that seven out of ten manipulations had significant effects on normative judgments of suicide: time left to live, lack of close social relationships, a history of prior immoral behavior, the manner in which the suicide is committed, painful, incurable medical issues, impulsive decision-making, and the actor’s own moral-religious background. However, in all cases, the act of suicide was still considered wrong, overall. Using a between-subjects design, Study 2 tested the combined effect of the seven significant manipulations from Study 1. In combination, the seven manipulations eliminated opposition to suicide, on average. Implications for moral psychology and suicide prevention are discussed.
DOI
10.1017/S1930297500009062
Volume
17
Issue
1
First Page
164
Last Page
188
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
NSUWorks Citation
Landy, J. F.,
Shah, P.
(2023). What drives opposition to suicide? Two exploratory studies of normative judgments. Judgment and Decision Making, 17(1), 164-188.
Available at: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cps_facarticles/2027
Comments
Copyright: © 2021.
We thank Ria Bajaria, Fatima Bahar, Rose-Arrielle Jerome, and Rebekah Sager for their assistance with this research, and Jonathan Baron, two anonymous reviewers, and the members of the Reasoning, PersonPerception, and Morality Lab for their helpful feedback on this paper. The two studies reported here represent the entirety of the research we have conducted on this topic. We report how we determined our sample sizes, all data exclusions, all manipulations, and all measures in both studies. Full materials, data, and analysis scripts for both studies are available on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/mjvgq