The psychology of moral dilemmas

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Michael R. Waldmann
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2009 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 167159114

As part of the predecessor project (The psychology of moral dilemmas; WA 621/21-1) we have published a review of the current state of the art of research on moral judgments (Waldmann, Nagel, & Wiegmann, 2012). One key conclusion of this review was that there is a shortage of testable cognitive theories of the processes underlying the generation of moral judgments about specific situations. The existing theories describe processes on a very general level. Our goal of the present project is to overcome this problem in part, and develop and test more specific theories of moral judgments. We plan to follow up on previous research by testing theoretical models of some of the phenomena we have started to investigate in the predecessor project (e.g., moral dilemmas; order and transfer effects; the role of distance). In this project we have also developed some new ideas that were not part of the initial proposal , which we also would like to include in the planned project. Part 1 of the new project further focuses on the transfer of moral intuitions from analogous dilemmas to new related dilemmas. We have developed a theory of moral transfer, which we plan to test in further experimental studies. Part 2 applies this theory to situations in which moral dilemmas are manipulated by adding or deleting possible options for interventions. The main goal of Part 3 is to study the role of victim categories (e.g., gender, status, etc.) for our intuitions about legitimate tradeoffs between human lives. Part 4 follows up on our research on the role of spatial distance on moral judgments. In particular, we would like to focus on the spatial distance between means of help and victims. Finally, in Part 5, we plan to investigate the processes underlying basic intuitive judgments. We have developed a novel theory that bases elementary moral intuitions on basic semantic intuitions about force dynamics, which we intend to test using various experimental paradigms.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants