More Utilitarian or Less Deontological? A Process Dissociation Approach

More Utilitarian or Less Deontological? A Process Dissociation Approach

Alvin Sherman Library

It is well known in consumer behavior research that normatively equivalent tasks can elicit different preferences. Recent work has extended this finding to moral judgments, showing that matching tasks elicit stronger utilitarian preferences than choice or rating tasks. However, the processes driving these reversals remain unclear. According to the reflective utilitarian view, deeper processing increases utilitarian tendencies (i.e., the perceived importance of the outcome increases relative to the intrinsic moral value of the action). The intuitive deontologist view posits that deeper processing decreases deontological tendencies (i.e., the moral value of an action becomes less important). Finally, the reflective minimalist view predicts that deeper processing would lead to increases in both deontological and utilitarian thinking. Using a process dissociation technique, we assessed the effect of choice, rating, and matching tasks on the comparative judgments of moral dilemmas. By eliciting moral preferences in scenario pairs where utilitarian and deontological thinking were aligned and in scenario pairs where they were opposed, we were able to calculate separate parameters for utilitarian and deontological thinking for each participants. Consistent with the reflective utilitarian view, we found that participants who were presented with matching tasks were more utilitarian than those who were presented with choice or rating tasks, but nor more deontological. This finding supports the claim that increased reflective processing (as is required in the matching task) increases sensitivity to utilitarian moral concerns but does not affect sensitivity to deontological concerns. Additionally, this work indicates that moral beliefs can be influenced by otherwise irrelevant factors.