Predicting Moral Judgments of Corporate Responsibility with Formal Decision Heuristics

We address the questions (1) how moral decision-making can be formally modeled using established decision models and (2) which of these models are the most accurate in predicting moral judgments. We conducted an experiment with a comparison task in which people had to decide which of two companies behaved more fairly in dealing with the consequences of the current financial crisis. We modeled these judgments of fairness (i) using a compensatory weighted additive model (WADD), (ii) a unit weight linear heuristic (UWL), and (iii) a noncompensatory decision rule (LEX). All strategies could predict people's actual decisions above chance level for a majority of the subjects. This lends support to the modeling approach to moral decision-making.