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...

Moral dilemmas often pose dramatic and gut-wrenching emotional choices. It is now widely accepted that emotions are not simply experienced alongside people's judgments about moral dilemmas, but that our affective processes play a central role in determining those judgments. However, much of the evidence purporting to demonstrate the connection between people's emotional responses and their judg...

BACKGROUND Recent studies of moral reasoning in patients with alcohol use disorders have indicated a "utilitarian" bias, whereby patients are more likely to endorse emotionally aversive actions in favor of aggregate welfare (e.g., throwing a dying person into the sea to keep a lifeboat of survivors afloat). Here, we investigate the underlying psychological and neuropsychological processes. ME...

Traditional theories of moral psychology emphasize reasoning and "higher cognition," while more recent work emphasizes the role of emotion. The present fMRI data support a theory of moral judgment according to which both "cognitive" and emotional processes play crucial and sometimes mutually competitive roles. The present results indicate that brain regions associated with abstract reasoning an...

Information technology (IT) professionals have countless opportunities to engage in inappropriate, negligent, and unethical behavior in the development and use of IT. This study explores how different levels of professionalism and Machiavellianism influence the ethical decision making (EDM) involving (IT) issues. Two-hundred and forty graduate students are surveyed using two vignettes depicting...

The present study aims to examine the relationship between the cortical midline structures (CMS), which have been regarded to be associated with selfhood, and moral decision making processes at the neural level. Traditional moral psychological studies have suggested the role of moral self as the moderator of moral cognition, so activity of moral self would present at the neural level. The prese...

Adult psychopaths have deficits in emotional processing and inhibitory control, engage in morally inappropriate behavior, and generally fail to distinguish moral from conventional violations. These observations, together with a dominant tradition in the discipline which sees emotional processes as causally necessary for moral judgment, have led to the conclusion that psychopaths lack an underst...

Present study examines the effect of incidental haptic sensations on acceptance of utilitarian judgment—seeking greater happiness in exchange for a few victims—under personal and impersonal moral dilemmas. Recently, Nakamura et al. (2014) indicated that physical coldness reduced empathic concern and facilitated utilitarian judgment in personal moral dilemma. It is also shown that tactile sensat...

Many moral psychologists have proposed that the difference between people’s moral judgments about the Trolley and Footbridge dilemmas can be explained by their differing emotional responses to the dilemmas. In two experiments, we tested this explanation by presenting the dilemmas and measuring participants’ reactions using a self-report emotion measure (PANAS-X). As might be expected, participa...

Evaluations of analogous situations are an important source for our moral intuitions. A puzzling recent set of findings in experiments exploring transfer effects between intuitions about moral dilemmas has demonstrated a striking asymmetry. Transfer often occurred with a specific ordering of moral dilemmas, but not when the sequence was reversed. In this article we present a new theory of trans...