A method for studying cognitive conflicts using the repertory grid technique is presented. By means of this technique, implicative dilemmas can be identified, cognitive structures in which a personal construct for which change is wished for implies undesirable change on another construct. We assessed the presence of dilemmas and the severity of symptoms in 46 participants who met criteria for d...

People with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) have difficulties with mentalizing, empathy, and narrative comprehension. A new test of social and narrative cognition, the Moral Dilemmas Film Task, was developed to probe individuals' spontaneous understanding of naturalistic film scenes. Twenty-eight individuals with ASC and 28 neurotypical controls, matched for age, sex, and IQ, watched four shor...

Recent studies in the field of neuropsychological decision-making as well as moral psychology emphasize the role of emotions in decision-making. The current study examines whether stress affects moral decision-making. We induced stress in 20 participants with the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) and also examined 20 participants in a control condition (Placebo TSST). The level of stress was asse...

The aim of this study is to develop understanding of moral issues in project-based IT companies. Three corporate moral dilemmas, the dirty hands dilemma (balancing between the corporation’s efficiency needs and stakeholder interests), the many hands dilemma (integrating individual members’ actions into a cohesive whole), and the entangled hands dilemma (individual members’ responsibility for gi...

Recent research with moral dilemmas supports dual-process model of moral decision making. This model posits two different paths via which people can endorse utilitarian solution that requires personally harming someone in order to achieve the greater good (e.g., killing one to save five people): (i) weakened emotional aversion to the prospect of harming someone due to reduced empathic concern f...

Researchers have recently argued that utilitarianism is the appropriate framework by which to evaluate moral judgment, and that individuals who endorse non-utilitarian solutions to moral dilemmas (involving active vs. passive harm) are committing an error. We report a study in which participants responded to a battery of personality assessments and a set of dilemmas that pit utilitarian and non...

Moral psychologists have shown that people’s past moral experiences can affect their subsequent moral decisions. One prominent finding in this line of research is that when people make a judgment about the Trolley dilemma after considering the Footbridge dilemma, they are significantly less likely to decide it is acceptable to redirect a train to save five people. Additionally, this ordering ef...

Moral judgments are elicited using dilemmas presenting hypothetical situations in which an agent must choose between letting several people die or sacrificing one person in order to save them. The evaluation of the action or inaction of a human agent is compared to those of two artificial agents – a humanoid robot and an automated system. Ratings of rightness, blamefulness and moral permissibil...

Inspired by Pen&Paper Role Playing principles, I intend to design and formalize a Conflict Manager for generating moral dilemmas in digital games, with the aim of intensifying the emotional-involvement of players. Based on previous work, where I formalized a character model endowed with moral values and driven by moral emotions, in this paper I sketch my proposal for a Conflict Manager.