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Labusch M, Perea M, Sahuquillo-Leal R, Bofill-Moscardó I, Carrasco-Tornero Á, Cañada-Pérez A, García-Blanco A. Development of Moral Judgments in Impersonal and Personal Dilemmas in Autistic Spectrum Disorders from Childhood to Late Adolescence. J Autism Dev Disord 2024; 54:691-703. [PMID: 36436146 PMCID: PMC10821967 DOI: 10.1007/s10803-022-05795-6] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Accepted: 10/12/2022] [Indexed: 11/28/2022]
Abstract
A potential underlying mechanism associated with the difficulties in social interactions in Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) concerns the abnormal development of moral reasoning. The present study examined utilitarian and deontological judgments in impersonal and personal moral dilemmas, comparing 66 individuals with ASD and 61 typically developing (TD) individuals between 6 and 18 years. Utilitarian judgments decreased with age. This decline was much more gradual for personal dilemmas in the ASD than in the TD group. ASD individuals rated utilitarian judgments as more appropriate but felt less calm, consistent with the Empathy Imbalance hypothesis. Utilitarian judgments were associated with social interaction difficulties in ASD. These findings identify possible social therapeutic targets for more efficient coping strategies in individuals with ASD.
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Affiliation(s)
- Melanie Labusch
- Center for Research in Cognition, Nebrija University, Madrid, Spain
| | - Manuel Perea
- Center for Research in Cognition, Nebrija University, Madrid, Spain
- Department of Methodology, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain
| | - Rosa Sahuquillo-Leal
- Neonatal Research Unit, Health Research Institute La Fe, Avda de Fernando Abril Martorell, 106, 46026, Valencia, Spain
| | - Isabel Bofill-Moscardó
- Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology, University and Polytechnic Hospital La Fe, Valencia, Spain
| | - Ángel Carrasco-Tornero
- Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology, University and Polytechnic Hospital La Fe, Valencia, Spain
| | - Antonio Cañada-Pérez
- Biostatistics and Data Science Unit, Health Research Institute La Fe, Valencia, Spain
| | - Ana García-Blanco
- Neonatal Research Unit, Health Research Institute La Fe, Avda de Fernando Abril Martorell, 106, 46026, Valencia, Spain.
- Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology, University and Polytechnic Hospital La Fe, Valencia, Spain.
- Department of Personality, Evaluation and Psychological Treatment, Valencia, Spain.
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Rosas A, Hannikainen I, Lam J, Aguiar F. Individual attitudes towards moral costs and benefits drive responses to moral dilemmas. EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 2023. [DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.2935] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/26/2023]
Affiliation(s)
- Alejandro Rosas
- Philosophy Department Universidad Nacional de Colombia Bogotá Colombia
| | | | - Jason Lam
- Department of Applied Social Sciences The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Hong Kong China
| | - Fernando Aguiar
- Instituto de Filosofía Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas Madrid España
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Koenig S, Gao Y. Moral decision making in adolescents: The effects of peer attachment, interpersonal affect, and gender. J Adolesc 2022; 94:166-175. [DOI: 10.1002/jad.12015] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/22/2021] [Revised: 01/18/2022] [Accepted: 01/20/2022] [Indexed: 11/10/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Scott Koenig
- Psychology Program The Graduate Center of the City University of New York New York New York USA
- Department of Psychology Brooklyn College of the City University of New York Brooklyn New York USA
| | - Yu Gao
- Psychology Program The Graduate Center of the City University of New York New York New York USA
- Department of Psychology Brooklyn College of the City University of New York Brooklyn New York USA
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Rosas A, Bermúdez JP, Martínez Cotrina J, Aguilar-Pardo D, Caicedo Mera JC, Aponte-Canencio DM. Perceiving utilitarian gradients: Heart rate variability and self-regulatory effort in the moral dilemma task. Soc Neurosci 2021; 16:391-405. [PMID: 34061717 PMCID: PMC8352378 DOI: 10.1080/17470919.2021.1929459] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/04/2022]
Abstract
It is not yet clear which response behavior requires self-regulatory effort in the moral dilemma task. Previous research has proposed that utilitarian responses require cognitive control, but subsequent studies have found inconsistencies with the empirical predictions of that hypothesis. In this paper, we treat participants’ sensitivity to utilitarian gradients as a measure of performance. We confronted participants (N = 82) with a set of five dilemmas evoking a gradient of mean utilitarian responses in a 4-point scale and collected data on heart rate variability and utilitarian responses. We found positive correlations between tonic and phasic HRV and sensitivity to the utilitarian gradient in the high tonic group, but not in the low tonic group. Moreover, the low tonic group misplaced a scenario with a selfish incentive at the high end of the gradient. Results suggest that performance is represented by sensitivity correlated with HRV and accompanied with a reasonable placement of individual scenarios within the gradient.
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Affiliation(s)
- Alejandro Rosas
- Departamento de Filosofía, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia
| | - Juan Pablo Bermúdez
- Institut de Philosophie, Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Université de Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland.,Centro de Investigaciones sobre Dinámica Social (CIDS), Salud, Conocimiento Médico y Sociedad, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas, Universidad Externado de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia
| | - Jorge Martínez Cotrina
- Centro de Investigaciones sobre Dinámica Social (CIDS), Salud, Conocimiento Médico y Sociedad, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas, Universidad Externado de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia
| | | | - Juan Carlos Caicedo Mera
- Centro de Investigaciones sobre Dinámica Social (CIDS), Salud, Conocimiento Médico y Sociedad, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas, Universidad Externado de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia
| | - Diego Mauricio Aponte-Canencio
- Centro de Investigaciones sobre Dinámica Social (CIDS), Salud, Conocimiento Médico y Sociedad, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas, Universidad Externado de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia
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Spring T, Saltzstein HD, Siegel L. Gender Differences in Moral Influences on Adolescents' Eyewitness Identification. The Journal of Genetic Psychology 2020; 182:47-59. [PMID: 33210580 DOI: 10.1080/00221325.2020.1844131] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/22/2022]
Abstract
In this study, 232 (89 11- to 12-year-olds, 71 13- to 14-year-olds; 72 15- to 16-year-olds) students recruited from grades 6th-11th in an urban public high school participated in a study of eyewitness identification. The focus of this study was on the effects of age, gender and moral orientation on decisional bias and, as a secondary outcome, on accuracy (using signal detection analysis).The primary purpose of this and previous studies in this series is to uncover implicit moral decision-making in decisional bias. In this study the perpetrator, the bystanders and the foil were all females. Prior to completing the eyewitness identification task, participants were given instructions that emphasized either (a) fairness and crime prevention, or (b) neither. These instructions had no discernible effect on accuracy but, as in past studies, younger participants (below the age of 13) had lower decisional criteria, resulting in a higher rate of false alarms/positives. Further, those who judged the transgression as worse had a lower decisional criterion, indicating more false alarms. Females were more accurate than the males in identifying the female perpetrator and scored significantly higher on how bad they would feel if they were the victim than did the males.
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Affiliation(s)
- Toni Spring
- Department of Psychology, Queens College, CUNY, Flushing, New York, USA
| | | | - Leeann Siegel
- Department of Communication, Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
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Translation and validation of the Moral Foundations Vignettes (MFVs) for the Portuguese language in a Brazilian sample. JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING 2020. [DOI: 10.1017/s1930297500006963] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/04/2023]
Abstract
AbstractThe Moral Foundations Vignettes (MFVs) – a recently developed set of brief scenarios depicting violations of various moral foundations – enables investigators to directly examine differences in moral judgments about different topics. In the present study, we adapt the MFV instrument for use in the Portuguese language. To this end, the following steps were performed: 1) Translation of the MFV instrument from English to Portuguese language in Brazil; 2) Synthesis of translated versions; 3) Evaluation of the synthesis by expert judges; 4) Evaluation of the MFV instrument by university students from Sao Paulo City; 5) Back translation; and lastly, 6) Validation study, which used a sample of 494 (385f) university students from Sao Paulo city and a set of 68 vignettes, subdivided into seven factors. Exploratory analyses show that the relationships between the moral foundations and political ideology are similar to those found in previous studies, but the severity of moral judgment on individualizing foundations tended to be significantly higher in the Sao Paulo sample, compared to a sample from the USA. Overall, the present study provides a Portuguese version of the MFV that performs similarly to the original English version, enabling a broader examination of how the moral foundations operate.
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Dworazik N, Kärtner J, Lange L, Köster M. Young Children Respond to Moral Dilemmas Like Their Mothers. Front Psychol 2019; 10:2683. [PMID: 31866898 PMCID: PMC6909973 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02683] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/03/2019] [Accepted: 11/13/2019] [Indexed: 11/16/2022] Open
Abstract
There is a large scientific interest in human moral judgments. However, little is known about the developmental origins and the specific role of the primary caregivers in the early development of inter-individual differences in human morality. Here, we assess the moral intuitions of 3- to 6-year-old children and their mothers (N = 56), using child-friendly versions of five trolley dilemmas and two control scenarios. We found that children responded to moral dilemmas similar to their mothers, revealed by correlations between the responses of mothers and their children in all five moral dilemmas and a highly similar overall response pattern between mother and child across all judgments. This was revealed by a high agreement in the response pattern of children and their mothers. Furthermore, children’s overall response tendencies were similar to the response tendencies of adults. Thus, similar moral principles (e.g., the Doctrine of the Double Effect) which have been identified in adults, and describes as a universal moral grammar, may guide the moral intuitions in early childhood already. Taken together, the present findings provide the first evidence that children’s moral intuitions are closely associated with the moral intuitions of their mother.
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Affiliation(s)
- Niklas Dworazik
- Developmental Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Münster, Münster, Germany
| | - Joscha Kärtner
- Developmental Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Münster, Münster, Germany
| | - Leon Lange
- Differential Psychology and Personality Research, Department of Psychology, Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, Germany
| | - Moritz Köster
- Cross-Cultural Developmental Psychology, Department of Psychology, Free University Berlin, Berlin, Germany
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Rosas A, Aguilar-Pardo D. Extreme time-pressure reveals utilitarian intuitions in sacrificial dilemmas. THINKING & REASONING 2019. [DOI: 10.1080/13546783.2019.1679665] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/25/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Alejandro Rosas
- Department of Philosophy, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Sede Bogotá, Ciudad Universitaria, Bogotá, Colombia
| | - David Aguilar-Pardo
- Psychology Program, Universidad Católica de Colombia, Bogotá, Cundinamarca, Colombia
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Decision conflict drives reaction times and utilitarian responses in sacrificial dilemmas. JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING 2019. [DOI: 10.1017/s193029750000485x] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/04/2023]
Abstract
AbstractIn the sacrificial moral dilemma task, participants have to morally judge an action that saves several lives at the cost of killing one person. According to the dual process corrective model of moral judgment suggested by Greene and collaborators (2001; 2004; 2008), cognitive control is necessary to override the intuitive, deontological force of the norm against killing and endorse the utilitarian perspective. However, a conflict model has been proposed more recently to account for part of the evidence in favor of dual process models in moral and social decision making. In this model, conflict, moral responses and reaction times arise from the interplay between individually variable motivational factors and objective parameters intrinsic to the choices offered. To further explore this model in the moral dilemma task, we confronted three different samples with a set of dilemmas representing an objective gradient of utilitarian pull, and collected data on moral judgment and on conflict in a 4-point scale. Collapsing all cases along the gradient, participants in each sample felt less conflicted on average when they gave extreme responses (1 or 4 in the UR scale). They felt less conflicted on average when responding to either the low- or the high-pull cases. The correlation between utilitarian responses and conflict was positive in the low-pull and negative in the high-pull cases. This pattern of data suggests that moral responses to sacrificial dilemmas are driven by decision conflict, which in turn depends on the interplay between an objective gradient of utilitarian pull and the moral motivations which regulate individual responsiveness to this gradient.
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Hao J, Liu Y. A Mind-Reader Does Not Always Have Deontological Moral Judgments and Prosocial Behavior: A Developmental Perspective. Front Psychol 2016; 7:1261. [PMID: 27602011 PMCID: PMC4993753 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01261] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.9] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/10/2016] [Accepted: 08/09/2016] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
The rationalistic theories of morality emphasize that reasoning plays an important role in moral judgments and prosocial behavior. Theory of mind as a reasoning ability in the mental domain has been considered a facilitator of moral development. The present study examined whether theory of mind was consistently positively associated with morality from middle childhood to late adulthood. Two hundred and four participants, including 48 elementary school children, 45 adolescents, 62 younger adults, and 49 older adults, completed theory of mind, moral judgment and prosocial behavior tasks. Theory of mind was measured with strange stories that tapped into an understanding of lies, white lies, double bluffs, irony, and persuasion. Moral judgments were measured with variants of the trolley dilemma. Prosocial behavior was measured through participants' performance in an interactive situation in which a helping request was made. The results indicated specific rather than similar developmental trajectories of theory of mind, moral judgments, and prosocial behavior. There was a quadratic trend in theory of mind, a combination of quadratic and cubic trends in deontological moral judgments and a linear decline in helping behavior. It is thus suggested that theory of mind may not be associated with morality in an unchanging way during development. Further results indicated that theory of mind and deontological moral judgments were negatively correlated for children, adolescents, and older adults but positively correlated for younger adults. Theory of mind and helping behavior were positively correlated for children but negatively correlated for adolescents. However, the relationships disappeared in adulthood. In sum, the present study reveals that theory of mind may be a nice tool for its facilitation of deontological moral judgments and prosocial behavior, but it may also be a nasty tool for its blocking of deontological moral judgments and prosocial behavior. Moreover, theory of mind may be a permanent tool for moral judgment development but a temporary tool for prosocial behavior development. Thus, the present study enriches the rationalistic theories of morality from a developmental perspective. Different relationships between theory of mind and morality from middle childhood to late adulthood are discussed.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jian Hao
- Beijing Key Laboratory of Learning and Cognition, Department of Psychology, College of Education, Capital Normal University Beijing, China
| | - Yanchun Liu
- Youth Work Department, China Youth University of Political Studies Beijing, China
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