TITLE:
Moral Judgment: Truth, Order and Consequence
AUTHORS:
Magda Osman
KEYWORDS:
Moral Judgment, Consequentialism, Dynamics, Updating, Moral Dilemmas
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.6 No.5,
April
17,
2015
ABSTRACT: Often we make snap moral judgments based on limited information. For instance
upon reading a newspaper headline we very quickly decide on whether the implied
outcome is good or bad. However, in situations like this we are also likely to revise
our judgments when we read the main story and the conclusion of the article. One
question yet to be answered is whether we adjust our moral judgments in a systematic
way as we gain more details about a moral scenario. Two experiments (lab-based,
online) addressed this question along with the influence of other factors on moral
judgments (the origin of the moral scenario, the severity of the consequence of
the scenario). Across both experiments, moral judgments were: 1) generally adjusted
downwards as more information was presented; 2) more severe for headlines than the
main story or the conclusion; 3) more severe for scenarios that were fabricated
than real life stories; 4) more severe when the conclusion involved a severe consequence
than a non-severe consequence.