Affective basis of judgment-behavior discrepancy in virtual experiences of moral dilemmas

Autor(en)
Indrajeet Patil, Carlotta Cogoni, Nicola Zangrando, Luca Chittaro, Giorgia Silani
Abstrakt

Although research in moral psychology in the last decade has relied heavily on hypothetical moral dilemmas and has been effective in understanding moral judgment, how these judgments translate into behaviors remains a largely unexplored issue due to the harmful nature of the acts involved. To study this link, we follow a new approach based on a desktop virtual reality environment. In our within-subjects experiment, participants exhibited an order-dependent judgment-behavior discrepancy across temporally separated sessions, with many of them behaving in utilitarian manner in virtual reality dilemmas despite their nonutilitarian judgments for the same dilemmas in textual descriptions. This change in decisions reflected in the autonomic arousal of participants, with dilemmas in virtual reality being perceived more emotionally arousing than the ones in text, after controlling for general differences between the two presentation modalities (virtual reality vs. text). This suggests that moral decision-making in hypothetical moral dilemmas is susceptible to contextual saliency of the presentation of these dilemmas.

Organisation(en)
Externe Organisation(en)
Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, Università degli Studi di Udine
Journal
Social Neuroscience
Band
9
Seiten
94-107
Anzahl der Seiten
14
ISSN
1747-0919
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/17470919.2013.870091
Publikationsdatum
01-2014
Peer-reviewed
Ja
ÖFOS 2012
501011 Kognitionspsychologie
Schlagwörter
ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete
Development, Social Psychology, Behavioral Neuroscience
Link zum Portal
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/9b7fd92c-1aec-4edc-ba6c-ec230ae204ee