To do good or not to do good: How people decide what they think is the right thing to do by Rima-Maria Rahal
Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods
Your friend asks you how you like their outfit, and although you honestly hate it, you don’t want to hurt their feelings, so you consider telling them it’s great. A family member saves the last piece of cake for themselves, and you have to fight the temptation to snack it anyway. Your neighbor is moving out, but instead of helping them carry a few boxes, you consider pretending you’re not home that day. We’ve all been there – our everyday lives are full of situations in which we have to decide what we think is the morally right thing to do. Situations like these, where one has to make a tradeoff between two options, but neither is unambiguously desirable or undesirable, are what we refer to as dilemmas. Whether it’s about small things such as munching away on someone else’s cake, or about big decisions involving more delicate and significant moral goods, moral dilemmas loom in every corner of our lives.
But how do you actually make that decision about what to do? And specifically, how do you decide what’s right or wrong to do? Sometimes, it can feel like we listen to our gut feeling, but on other occasions, we might put much more effort into considering our options and weighing them to determine the best alternative to choose. Current debates in psychological research and ethics ask about these processes of constructing choices in moral dilemmas. One prominent theory, the dual process theory of moral judgment (Greene, 2012) suggests that when we follow moral rules about what is harmful or forbidden (deontological decisions), these types of choices are rather based on intuitive judgments. On the other hand, when we decide to make the best of the dilemma by trying to generate as many good outcomes as possible for as many people affected as possible (utilitarian decisions), this theory predicts that we deliberate more, and invest more effort into carefully weighing our options to determine which one produces better outcomes for the most people.
In my research, I use eye-tracking in behavioral laboratory experiments with human participants to answer similar questions. Eye-trackers are infrared cameras that capture where decision-makers look while they decide. I observe which information people consider before making their choices, which information they ignore, and to what degree they switch back and forth between the different pieces of information. This can help us understand the degree to which decision-makers deliberate their choices, and how much effort they invest in informing themselves, or if they choose quickly and without much deliberation. Eye-tracking is a great tool to use for this goal, because it records the decision process without interrupting the decision-makers to ask them what they are thinking about. We also use eye-tracking for many other research questions that deal with finding out how people decide, for instance with lay judges and people who decide if they want to help someone else or make the most of their own outcomes.
Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods
Regarding moral decisions, our research shows that the effort you invest in your decision also depends on what kind of a person you are. If you have clearer opinions about what’s right and wrong, it is probably easier for you to make a decision in a moral dilemma than it is for someone who is unsure about their opinions (Rahal, Hoeft & Fiedler, in preparation).
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