Professor PUZZLE Moral Conflict

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It is the soccer world cup and the final match is on TV. I am a big soccer fan and very excited about the game. All of a sudden, a friend of mine who is not feeling well gives me a call and wants to meet up with me right now. What do I do?

The results section is structured into two main parts. In the first main part, we present analyses concerning the development and validation of our new 40-items EMCS Scale as well as the development of two parallelized 20-item sets (each ten scenarios with socially close and socially distant protagonists) for future use in within-subjects design studies. For the two parallelized sets A and B, we used Wilks L mvc tests to demonstrate parallelism [ 54]. The procedure by Wilks tests the hypothesis that the means are equal, the variances are equal, and the covariances are equal. The test statistic is based on the weighted differences of the subsample means with the grand mean and the ratio of subsample and complete sample (co)variances, which are shown to be chi 2-distributed when the data meets hypothesis (see [ 54], formula 1.4). Moreover, we report the measurement qualities based on Rasch model analyses and classical test theory fit indices of the complete 40-items EMCS Scale and its two subsets A and B. I have promised my partner to go to the company party with him/her. He/she has already signed both of us up. Now I realize that I would urgently need the time to prepare for an important exam. What do I do? I am running to catch a bus that is about to leave and that only runs once every hour. In front of me, several items drop out of the purse of a woman with two small children. Except for me, there is no one else around to help the woman. What do I do?Supplementary analysis: Influence of the actual existence of socially close protagonists in the lives of participants I want to sell my old car. I know that the car’s radiator actually needs to be exchanged urgently. A man who does not notice the problem with the radiator offers to pay a good price in cash right away. What do I do? In addition to scale development and validation, we aimed at investigating if everyday moral decision-making depends on the social closeness of the protagonists. As revealed in a recent review, the relatedness of the participant to the story characters is an important experimental design parameter in moral dilemma research [ 2]. Therefore, social closeness could be one further potential modulating factor of everyday moral decision-making (apart from the emotionality of a situation, which has already been examined in previous studies; see [ 22, 23]). Consistently, several studies have shown that both abstract and everyday moral decision-making differ depending on the closeness of the relationship with the target person (e.g., [ 5, 17, 28– 31]). With regard to everyday moral decision-making in laboratory settings, so far only Zhan and colleagues [ 31] investigated the impact of the social closeness of the protagonists. They observed that participants made less altruistic decisions, took more time for their decisions, and rated the situations as emotionally more negative if the moral conflicts involved strangers versus friends and acquaintances. Presuming that altruistic decisions are some kind of generous acts, this finding is also in line with studies in social psychology on social discounting, showing that generosity decreases hyperbolically with increasing social distance between the donor and the recipient [ 32– 37]. Thus, we experimentally varied the social closeness of the protagonists in our scenarios (socially close vs. socially distant) and hypothesized a lower percentage of altruistic decisions for scenarios involving socially distant protagonists as compared to stories involving socially close target persons. With regard to the test and measurement properties, our results showed that both the EMCS Scale and its two subsets A and B fitted the Rasch model, which implied that there was one underlying latent trait variable. Furthermore, the classical test theory fit index Cronbach’s alpha indicated reasonable internal consistencies for the total EMCS Scale as well as the two item sets A and B (0.60 ≤ α≥ 0.84). Even the fragmentation into four parts still resulted in a sufficient estimation by the Rasch model, although Cronbach’s alpha results spoke against an uncoupled use of only these 10-items parts. Thus, both the complete EMCS Scale and its two parallelized subsets A and B can be utilized as valid measures for decision-making in everyday moral conflict situations.

With regard to research in laboratory settings, several scholars (e.g., [ 16, 22, 23]) recently developed everyday moral dilemmas. Everyday moral dilemmas are short vignettes describing hypothetical everyday life situations. The vignettes require decisions between the fulfilment of a moral standard or social obligation towards another person versus a personal-oriented hedonistic behavior that would explicitly not cause serious bodily harm or legal consequences [ 16]. The given response alternatives are typically altruistic (e.g., helping an old woman who is in distress) versus egoistic (e.g., catching the waiting bus home; see [ 23] or [ 24] for further examples). Furthermore, we did not explicitly control for socially desirable responding in our surveys. Nevertheless, we tried to keep the potential impact of social desirability as low as possible by ensuring strict anonymity to all our participants. Moreover, we excluded all items with extremely high percentages of altruistic decisions. For the remaining items, we observed statistical variance both within participants and across items, which probably speaks against highly socially desirable responding. Interestingly, we also did not observe gender differences in our surveys, which, on the one hand, is not uncommon for hypothetical moral dilemmas [ 43], but, on the other hand, is in sharp contrast to early moral reasoning research [ 42] and current abstract moral decision-making studies [ 7, 38– 41]. This inconsistent result could potentially be explained by the fact that our new EMCS Scale measures altruistic and egoistic response tendencies, which are behavioral measures that rather reflect outcomes of morality, but not moral attitudes itself [ 43]. Altogether, in combination with the social closeness results, our data therefore point to the idea that everyday moral decision-making with altruistic versus egoistic response options seems to be quite a different construct than abstract moral decision-making with utilitarian versus deontological response alternatives.For humans and most animals, the social interaction with conspecifics is a common everyday life activity [ 1]. Thereby, we humans are often confronted with morally conflicting social interaction situations. According to Christensen and colleagues [ 2], moral conflicts are situations in which someone is pulled in contrary directions by rival moral reasons. They can, amongst others, occur when deciding between a personal interest versus an accepted moral value.