Simulating Moral Actions: An Investigation of Personal Force in Virtual Moral Dilemmas

The Utilitarian Virtual Self - Using Embodied Personalized Avatars to Investigate Moral Decision-Making in Semi-Autonomous Vehicle Dilemmas

Embodied personalized avatars are a promising new tool to investigate moral decision-making by transposing the user into the "middle of the action" in moral dilemmas. Here, we tested whether avatar personalization and motor control could impact moral decision-making, physiological reactions and reaction times, as well as embodiment, presence and avatar perception. Seventeen participants, who had their personalized avatars created in a previous study, took part in a range of incongruent (i.e., harmful action led to better overall outcomes) and congruent (i.e., harmful action led to trivial outcomes) moral dilemmas as the drivers of a semi-autonomous car. They embodied four different avatars (counterbalanced - personalized motor control, personalized no motor control, generic motor control, generic no motor control). Overall, participants took a utilitarian approach by performing harmful actions only to maximize outcomes. We found increased physiological arousal (SCRs and heart rate) for personalized avatars compared to generic avatars, and increased SCRs in motor control conditions compared to no motor control. Participants had slower reaction times when they had motor control over their avatars, possibly hinting at more elaborate decision-making processes. Presence was also higher in motor control compared to no motor control conditions. Embodiment ratings were higher for personalized avatars, and generally, personalization and motor control were perceptually positive features. These findings highlight the utility of personalized avatars and open up a range of future research possibilities that could benefit from the affordances of this technology and simulate, more closely than ever, real-life action.

Predictors and motives for mask-wearing behavior and vaccination intention

Containing a pandemic requires that individuals adhere to measures such as wearing face-masks and getting vaccinated. Therefore, identifying predictors and motives for both behaviors is of importance. Here, we study the decisions made by a cross-national sample in randomized hypothetical scenarios during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results show that mask-wearing was predicted by empathic tendencies, germ aversion, and higher age, whilst belief in misinformation and presentation of an interaction partner as a family member lowered the safety standards. The main motives associated with taking the mask off included: rationalization, facilitating interaction, and comfort. Vaccination intention was positively predicted by empathy, and negatively predicted by belief in misinformation and higher costs of the vaccine. We found no effect of immunization status of the surrounding social group. The most common motive for vaccination was protection of oneself and others, whereas undecided and anti-vaccine groups reported doubts about the effectiveness and fear of side effects. Together, we identify social and psychological predictors and motives of mask-wearing behavior and vaccination intention. The results highlight the importance of social context for mask-wearing, easy access to vaccines, empathy, and trust in publicly distributed information.

The needs of the many: Exploring associations of personality with third-party judgments of public health-related utilitarian rule violations

Safeguarding the rights of minorities is crucial for just societies. However, there are conceivable situations where minority rights might seriously impede the rights of the majority. Favoring the minority in such cases constitutes a violation of utilitarian principles. To explore the emotional, cognitive, and punitive responses of observers of such utilitarian rule transgressions, we conducted an online study with 1004 participants. Two moral scenarios (vaccine policy and epidemic) were rephrased in the third-party perspective. In both public health-related scenarios, the protagonist opted against the utilitarian option, which resulted in more fatalities in total, but avoided harm to a minority. Importantly, in vaccine policy, members of the minority cannot be identified beforehand and thus harm to them would have been rather accidental. Contrariwise, in epidemic, minority members are identifiable and would have needed to be deliberately selected. While the majority of participants chose not to punish the scenarios' protagonists at all, 30.1% judged that protecting the minority over the interests of the majority when only accidental harm would have occurred (vaccine policy) was worthy of punishment. In comparison, only 11.2% opted to punish a protagonist whose decision avoided deliberately selecting (and thus harming) a minority at the cost of the majority (epidemic). Emotional responses and appropriateness ratings paralleled these results. Furthermore, complex personality × situation interactions revealed the influence of personality features, i.e., trait psychopathy, empathy, altruism, authoritarianism, need for cognition and faith in intuition, on participants' responses. The results further underscore the need to consider the interaction of situational features and inter-individual differences in moral decisions and sense of justice.

Assessing reactive violence using Immersive Virtual Reality

Assessing levels of aggression–specifically reactive violence–has been a challenge in the past, since individuals might be reluctant to self-report aggressive tendencies. Furthermore, experimental studies often lack ecological validity. Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) offers a reliable, ethically safe environment, and is the most realistic virtual simulation method currently available. It allows researchers to test participants’ aggressive responses to realistic provocations from virtual humans. In the current study, 116 participants completed our IVR aggression task, in which they encountered avatars who would either approach them in a friendly or provocative fashion. Participants had the option either to shake hands or hit the virtual human, in congruent and incongruent trials. In congruent trials, the response required of the participant matched the approach with the avatar (e.g., hitting the avatar after provocation). In incongruent trials there was a mismatch between the avatars approach and the participants required response. Congruent trials were designed to measure the immediate reaction towards the virtual human, and incongruent trials to assess response inhibition. Additionally, participants also completed traditional questionnaire-based measures of aggression, as well as reporting their past violent behaviour. We found that the immediate aggressive responses in the IVR task correlated with the established questionnaire measures (convergent validity), and we found that the IVR task was a stronger predictor of past violent behaviour than traditional measures (discriminant validity). This suggests that IVR might be an effective way to assess aggressive behaviour in a more indirect, but realistic manner, than current questionnaire assessment.

Hunt-Vitell's General Theory of Marketing Ethics Predicts "Attitude-Behaviour" Gap in Pro-environmental Domain

The inconsistency between pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours, known as the “attitude-behaviour” gap, is exceptionally pronounced in scenarios associated with “green” choice. The current literature offers numerous explanations for the reasons behind the “attitude-behaviour” gap, however, the generalisability of these explanations is complex. In addition, the answer to the question of whether the gap occurs between attitudes and intentions, or intentions and behaviours is also unknown. In this study, we propose the moral dimension as a generalisable driver of the “attitude-behaviour” gap and investigate its effectiveness in predicting attitudes, pro-environmental intentions and subsequent behaviours. We do so by using Hunt–Vitell’s moral philosophy-based framework of ethical decision-making, which conceptualises morality as the central decision-making parameter. The results from 557 US MTurk participants revealed that the manipulation of moral dimensions, specifically deontology and teleology, impacted ethical evaluation of presented dilemmas, however, failed to translate into subsequent intentions and behaviours. This finding suggests (i) that the moral dimension has an effect in shaping attitudes toward environmental issues, and (ii) that gap occurs between attitudes and intentions rather than intentions and behaviours. Further investigation of what strengthens and/or overrides the effects of the moral dimension would help understand the reasons why moral attitudes do not always translate into subsequent intentions and behaviours in the pro-environmental domain.

Pretensive Shared Reality: From Childhood Pretense to Adult Imaginative Play

Imaginative pretend play is often thought of as the domain of young children, yet adults regularly engage in elaborated, fantastical, social-mediated pretend play. We describe imaginative play in adults via the term “pretensive shared reality;” Shared Pretensive Reality describes the ability of a group of individuals to employ a range of higher-order cognitive functions to explicitly and implicitly share representations of a bounded fictional reality in predictable and coherent ways, such that this constructed reality may be explored and invented/embellished with shared intentionality in an ad hoc manner. Pretensive Shared Reality facilitates multiple individual and social outcomes, including generating personal and group-level enjoyment or mirth, the creation or maintenance of social groups, or the safe exploration of individual self-concepts (such as alternative expression of a players sexual or gender identity). Importantly, Pretensive Shared Reality (both within the specific context of table-top role-playing games, and other instances) are primarily co-operative and co-creative. We draw on multiple examples, and focus on Table-Top Role Playing games (TTRPG) – and specifically, the most popular and enduring table-top role-playing games, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) – as a primary example of such play. Our conception of “pretensive shared reality” links the widespread existence and forms of adult imaginative play to childhood pretense, places it within a developmental and evolutionary context, and argues that pretensive shared realities – which underpin many forms of imaginative culture – are an important topic of study unto themselves, and may be utilized to provide methodological insight into a variety of psychological domains.

Moral Judgment as Categorization (MJAC)

Observed variability and complexity of judgments of "right" and "wrong" cannot be readily accounted for within extant approaches to understanding moral judgment. In response to this challenge, we present a novel perspective on categorization in moral judgment. Moral judgment as categorization (MJAC) incorporates principles of category formation research while addressing key challenges of existing approaches to moral judgment. People develop skills in making context-relevant categorizations. They learn that various objects (events, behaviors, people, etc.) can be categorized as morally right or wrong. Repetition and rehearsal result in reliable, habitualized categorizations. According to this skill-formation account of moral categorization, the learning and the habitualization of the forming of moral categories occur within goal-directed activity that is sensitive to various contextual influences. By allowing for the complexity of moral judgments, MJAC offers greater explanatory power than existing approaches while also providing opportunities for a diverse range of new research questions.

Moral dynamics: Grounding moral judgment in intuitive physics and intuitive psychology

When holding others morally responsible, we care about what they did, and what they thought. Traditionally, research in moral psychology has relied on vignette studies, in which a protagonist's actions and thoughts are explicitly communicated. While this research has revealed what variables are important for moral judgment, such as actions and intentions, it is limited in providing a more detailed understanding of exactly how these variables affect moral judgment. Using dynamic visual stimuli that allow for a more fine-grained experimental control, recent studies have proposed a direct mapping from visual features to moral judgments. We embrace the use of visual stimuli in moral psychology, but question the plausibility of a feature-based theory of moral judgment. We propose that the connection from visual features to moral judgments is mediated by an inference about what the observed action reveals about the agent's mental states, and what causal role the agent's action played in bringing about the outcome. We present a computational model that formalizes moral judgments of agents in visual scenes as computations over an intuitive theory of physics combined with an intuitive theory of mind. We test the model's quantitative predictions in three experiments across a wide variety of dynamic interactions.

Trolleys, triage and Covid-19: the role of psychological realism in sacrificial dilemmas

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, frontline medical professionals at intensive care units around the world faced gruesome decisions about how to ration life-saving medical resources. These events provided a unique lens through which to understand how the public reasons about real-world dilemmas involving trade-offs between human lives. In three studies (total N = 2298), we examined people's moral attitudes toward the triage of acute coronavirus patients, and found elevated support for utilitarian triage policies. These utilitarian tendencies did not stem from period change in moral attitudes relative to pre-pandemic levels-but rather, from the heightened realism of triage dilemmas. Participants favoured utilitarian resolutions of critical care dilemmas when compared to structurally analogous, non-medical dilemmas-and such support was rooted in prosocial dispositions, including empathy and impartial beneficence. Finally, despite abundant evidence of political polarisation surrounding Covid-19, moral views about critical care triage differed modestly, if at all, between liberals and conservatives. Taken together, our findings highlight people's robust support for utilitarian measures in the face of a global public health threat, and illustrate how the dominant methods in moral psychology (e.g. trolley cases) may deliver insights that do not generalise to real-world moral dilemmas.

Untangling Decision Routes in Moral Dilemmas: The Refugee Dilemma

It is sometimes considered that there are 2 routes to moral choice, deontological and utilitarian (with debate as to whether each of these routes uniquely reflect emotional vs. analytic components). Yet in moral judgments we are often faced with a third route to choice, based on rules imposed by an outside agency (most typically the legal framework of a country). Whether we agree with these rules or not, we can choose to guide moral choice in this way. Moreover, depending on the situation, we can sometimes choose to prioritize such external rules or not. Sometimes external rules coincide with either deontological or utilitarian biases. But what happens when they do not? Using a novel paradigm for moral judgment, the refugee dilemma, we provide evidence for such a route to moral choice based on external rules. We show in 3 experiments that participants with high scores on a cognitive reflection test or under cognitive load were more likely to adopt utilitarian or rule-based responses, as opposed to emotional ones. We also found that rule-based respondents reported the highest average psychological distance. These findings extend the predominant approach of dual process models. Supplemental materials are available here: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/ajp/media/untangling_decision_routes_in_moral_dilemmas/index.html

Design Bioethics: A Theoretical Framework and Argument for Innovation in Bioethics Research

Empirical research in bioethics has developed rapidly over the past decade, but has largely eschewed the use of technology-driven methodologies. We propose "design bioethics" as an area of conjoined theoretical and methodological innovation in the field, working across bioethics, health sciences and human-centred technological design. We demonstrate the potential of digital tools, particularly purpose-built digital games, to align with theoretical frameworks in bioethics for empirical research, integrating context, narrative and embodiment in moral decision-making. Purpose-built digital tools can engender situated engagement with bioethical questions; can achieve such engagement at scale; and can access groups traditionally under-represented in bioethics research and theory. If developed and used with appropriate rigor, tools motivated by "design bioethics" could offer unique insights into new and familiar normative and empirical issues in the field.

Moral Decision-Making, Stress, and Social Cognition in Frontline Workers vs. Population Groups During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Explorative Study

On March 9, 2020, Italy has gone into "lockdown" because of COVID-19 pandemic, with a national quarantine. All non-essential working activities and schools of all levels have been temporarily closed: consequently, the entire population have been forced to dramatically change their daily habits. The pandemic raised important psychological, moral, social, and economic issues. Our research focused on the moral decision-making of people during an emergency. This paper reports two studies. The aim of Study 1 was to evaluate moral decision-making, level of perceived stress, ability of mentalizing and empathy in university students and Italian workers. 224 front-line workers (FLW), 413 second-line workers (SLW), and 663 university students (US), during Italian Phase 1 of lockdown, completed an online questionnaire. The results of Study 1 showed that participants in the FLW group are more likely to choose utilitarian solutions and judge as morally acceptable actions finalized to saving lives of more people if this requires sacrificing a low number of individuals. At the same time, decision-making was experienced as less unpleasant and less arousing with respect to the other two groups, demonstrating a greater ability to keep emotional control under pressure. In Study 2, we compared the same variables used in Study 1, selecting two professional categories from the FLW group engaged in emergency during COVID-19, namely healthcare providers (n = 82) and public safety personnel (n = 117). Our results showed that healthcare providers were more stressed and emotionally involved than public safety personnel, with higher empathic concern and arousal in moral decision-making. We suggest it is essential providing immediate psychological support and monitoring physical and emotional well-being for workers in the front-line during emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to prevent experiences of moral distress or mental health problems.

When the killing has been done: Exploring associations of personality with third-party judgment and punishment of homicides in moral dilemma scenarios

Killing people is universally considered reprehensible and evokes in observers a need to punish perpetrators. Here, we explored how observers' personality is associated with their cognitive, emotional, and punishing reactions towards perpetrators using data from 1,004 participants who responded to a set of fifteen third-party perspective moral dilemmas. Among those, four scenarios (architect, life boat, footbridge, smother for dollars) describing deliberate killings were compared to investigate the role of the content features "motive for killing" (selfish vs. utilitarian) and "evitability of victims' death". Participants' moral appropriateness ratings, emotions towards perpetrators, and assigned punishments revealed complex scenario-personality interactions. Trait psychopathy was associated with harsher punishments in all scenarios but also with less concern about killing in general, an increased moral appreciation of utilitarian motives for killing, and a reduced concern about the killing of avoidable victims. Need for cognition was associated with considering a utilitarian motive for killing as a mitigating factor, while intuitive/authority-obedient thinking was linked to a strong focus on avoidability of harm as an aggravating factor when assigning punishments. Other-oriented empathy, trait anxiety, and justice sensitivity did not account for differences in third-party punishments. Our explorative findings highlight the importance of inter-individual differences for moral decision making and sense of justice.

When Push Comes to Shove—The Moral Fiction of Reason-Based Situational Control and the Embodied Nature of Judgment

It is a common socio-moral practice to appeal to reasons as a guiding force for one’s actions. However, it is an intriguing possibility that this practice is based on fiction: reasons cannot or do not motivate the majority of actions—especially moral ones. Rather, pre-reflective evaluative processes are likely responsible for moral actions. Such a view faces two major challenges: (i) pre-reflective judgments are commonly thought of as inflexible in nature, and thus they cannot be the cause of the varied judgments people rely on in everyday life, and (ii) if reflective reason-based judgments do not play a strong causative role in judgment, why do people rely on the articulation of reasons in their moral practices? And how is moral agency and moral theorizing possible without it? We argue that the pre-reflective judgments motivating moral actions are embodied in nature. The experience of the rightness of an action that drives a person to act depends on the sensorimotor interactions that have cultivated an agent’s perspective on the world. These interactions are embedded in relational contexts, relative to which judgments are individuated. Because of this relational embeddedness, they are more flexible than they are commonly thought to be, enabling us to explain the variety of human behavior by appealing to them. The Anglo-European practice of appealing to reason as if they were propositional belief-statements motivating actions can be accounted for as nothing more than an idiosyncratic way of constructing narratives to clarify and express the relational context of intentional actions.

Pointing fingers at others: The neural correlates of actor-observer asymmetry in blame attribution

People tend to describe others' immoral behaviors as intentional and dispositional, and their own as unintentional events. The actor-observer asymmetry might reflect at least true attitudes potentially free from intentional faking. Implicit attitudes - i.e., automatic evaluation of the rightness or wrongness of actions - play a central role in guiding moral decision-making. Yet, little research has investigated how value computations are associated with actor-observer asymmetry of moral decision-making. In this fMRI study, we developed the morally-laden implicit association test (mIAT) to examine the extent to which implicit attitudes are predictive of online neural response when participants mentally simulate or passively observe morally-laden behaviors such as helping or harming others. Results showed that the scores on the mIAT were predictive of actor-observer asymmetry when attributing blame for immoral behavior, associated with neural responses in the orbitofrontal cortex and temporal pole. The asymmetry between first-hand experiencing and passive viewing moral behavior recruited the activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and right temporoparietal junction. These findings indicate that implicit moral attitudes can predict moral evaluation and neural responses to asymmetry between experiencing and observing injustice. They provide important knowledge regarding the individual differences involved in the computational mechanisms underlying how implicit attitudes guide moral decision-making.

Tracing Physical Behavior in Virtual Reality: A Narrative Review of Applications to Social Psychology

Virtual reality (VR) offers unique benefits to social psychological research, including a high degree of experimental control alongside strong ecological validity, a capacity to manipulate any variable of interest, and an ability to trace the physical, nonverbal behavior of the user in a very fine-grained and automated manner. VR improves upon traditional behavioral measurement techniques (e.g., observation and coding) on several fronts as data collection is covert, continuous, passive, and occurs within a controlled context. The current review synthesizes extant methods for tracing physical behavior in VR, such as gaze tracking and interpersonal distance measurement, and describes how researchers have applied these methods to understand important phenomena within the context of social psychology. To date, primary areas of application have included the assessment of social approach and avoidance, social evaluation and bias, and engagement. The limitations of behavioral tracing methods in VR, as well as future directions for their continued application and extension, are discussed. This narrative review equips readers with a thorough understanding of behavioral tracing methods that can be implemented in VR, their benefits and drawbacks, the insight they may offer into social processes, and future avenues of work for applying emergent technologies to research questions in social psychology.

Ethical and Statistical Considerations in Models of Moral Judgments

This work extends recent advancements in computational models of moral decision making by using mathematical and philosophical theory to suggest adaptations to state of the art. It demonstrates the importance of model assumptions and considers alternatives to the normal distribution when modeling ethical principles. We show how the ethical theories, utilitarianism and deontology can be embedded into informative prior distributions. We continue to expand the state of the art to consider ethical dilemmas beyond the Trolley Problem and show the adaptations needed to address this complexity. The adaptations made in this work are not solely intended to improve recent models but aim to raise awareness of the importance of interpreting results relative to assumptions made, either implicitly or explicitly, in model construction.

To Brake or Not to Brake? Personality Traits Predict Decision-Making in an Accident Situation

Many situations require decisions to be made in very little time—in emergency or accident situations such decisions will carry potentially harmful consequences. Can we predict how people react in such situations from their personality traits alone? Since experimental tests of accident situations are not possible in the real world, existing studies usually employ text-based surveys or post-situation assessments, making predictions and generalization difficult. In the present study, we used virtual reality to create a more life-like situation in order to study decision-making under controlled circumstances. In our experiment, participants trained in an immersive car simulation to complete a race-course as fast as possible. In the testing phase, pedestrians appeared on the course without warning, forcing participants to react. The experiment used a one-shot design to avoid pre-meditation and to test naïve, rapid decision-making. Participants' reactions could be classified into two categories: people who tried to brake, and people who potentially endangered pedestrians by not braking or conducting hazardous evasion maneuvers. Importantly, this latter group of participants scored significantly higher on psychopathy-related traits among a set of personality-related factors. Additional personality factors, as well as age, gender, gaming expertise, and driving experience did not significantly influence participants' decision-making. This result was true for both a Korean sample (N = 94) and an independently-tested German sample (N = 94), indicating cross-cultural stability of the results. Overall, our results demonstrate that decision-making in an extreme, simulated accident situation is critically influenced by personality traits.

Alcohol, empathy, and morality: acute effects of alcohol consumption on affective empathy and moral decision-making

RATIONALE

Hypothetical moral dilemmas, pitting characteristically utilitarian and non-utilitarian outcomes against each other, have played a central role in investigations of moral decision-making. Preferences for utilitarian over non-utilitarian responses have been explained by two contrasting hypotheses; one implicating increased deliberative reasoning, and the other implicating diminished harm aversion. In recent field experiments, these hypotheses have been investigated using alcohol intoxication to impair both social and cognitive functioning. These studies have found increased utilitarian responding, arguably as a result of alcohol impairing affective empathy.

OBJECTIVES

The present research expands existing investigations by examining the acute effects of alcohol on affective empathy and subsequent moral judgments in traditional vignettes and moral actions in virtual reality, as well as physiological responses in moral dilemmas.

METHODS

Participants (N = 48) were administered either a placebo or alcohol in one of two dosages; low or moderate. Both pre- and post intervention, participants completed a moral action and moral judgment task alongside behavioural measures of affective empathy.

RESULTS

Higher dosages of alcohol consumption resulted in inappropriate empathic responses to facial displays of emotion, mirroring responses of individuals high in trait psychopathy, but empathy for pain was unaffected. Whilst affective empathy was influenced by alcohol consumption in a facial responding task, both moral judgments and moral actions were unaffected.

CONCLUSIONS

These results suggest that facets, beyond or in addition to deficits in affective empathy, might influence the relationship between alcohol consumption and utilitarian endorsements.

Pathological Personality Traits and Utilitarian Moral Judgments

Recent research has highlighted important individual differences in moral judgment. The present study extends these findings by examining the associations between pathological personality traits and utilitarian moral judgments. This was accomplished by asking 2,121 Israeli community members to complete self-report measures concerning their pathological personality traits and evaluate the acceptability of utilitarian moral judgments in various sacrificial dilemmas (is it acceptable to intentionally kill one person in order to save several other people?). The results showed that the pathological personality traits of antagonism and disinhibition were positively associated with the endorsement of personal utilitarian moral judgments (i.e., those decisions requiring the individual to directly inflict harm on the would-be sacrificed individual), whereas negative affectivity was negatively associated with personal utilitarian moral judgments. Antagonism was the only pathological personality trait associated with impersonal utilitarian moral judgments (i.e., those decisions that did not require the individual to directly inflict harm on the would-be sacrificed individual). Discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for understanding the associations between pathological personality traits and moral judgments.

Virtual morality in the helping professions: Simulated action and resilience

Recent advances in virtual technologies have allowed the investigation of simulated moral actions in aversive moral dilemmas. Previous studies have employed diverse populations to explore these actions, with little research considering the significance of occupation on moral decision-making. For the first time, in this study we have investigated simulated moral actions in virtual reality made by professionally trained paramedics and fire service incident commanders who are frequently faced with and must respond to moral dilemmas. We found that specially trained individuals showed distinct empathic and related personality trait scores and that these declined with years of experience working in the profession. Supporting the theory that these professionals develop resilience in moral conflict, reduced emotional arousal was observed during virtual simulations of a distressing dilemma. Furthermore, trained professionals demonstrated less regret following the execution of a moral action in virtual reality when compared to untrained control populations. We showed that, contrary to previous research, trained individuals made the same moral judgements and moral actions as untrained individuals, though showing less arousal and regret. In the face of increasing concerns regarding empathy decline in health care professionals, we suggest that the nature of this decline is complex and likely reflects the development of a necessary emotional resilience to distressing events.