Pushing moral buttons: the interaction between personal force and intention in moral judgment.

By Joshua D. Greene, Fiery Cushman, Lisa Stewart, K. Lowenberg, Leigh E. Nystrom, J. Cohen. Cognition, 2009

605 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In some cases people judge it morally acceptable to sacrifice one person's life in order to save several other lives, while in other similar cases they make the opposite judgment. Researchers have identified two general factors that may explain this phenomenon at the stimulus level: (1) the agent's intention (i.e. whether the harmful event is intended as a means or merely foreseen as a side-effect) and (2) whether the agent harms the victim in a manner that is relatively "direct" or "personal". Here we integrate these two classes of findings. Two experiments examine a novel personalness/directness factor that we call personal force, present when the force that directly impacts the victim is generated by the agent's muscles (e.g., in pushing). Experiments 1a and b demonstrate the influence of personal force on moral judgment, distinguishing it from physical contact and spatial proximity. Experiments 2a and b demonstrate an interaction between personal force and intention, whereby the effect of personal force depends entirely on intention. These studies also introduce a method for controlling for people's real-world expectations in decisions involving potentially unrealistic hypothetical dilemmas.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d20eb29f6cc4d4ecb323f2afbf9603bb06918424

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Citations in the corpus

Expertise in Moral Reasoning? Order Effects on Moral Judgment in Professional Philosophers and Non-Philosophers (2012, background): “To take the familiar example of the trolley problem, it has been proposed that the ‘push’ version engages an automatic, affective response that the ‘switch’ case does not (Cushman, Young and Greene, 2010; Greene et al., 2001; Greene et al. 2009).”
The Dark Triad of personality and utilitarian moral judgment: The mediating role of Honesty/Humility and Harm/Care (2014, background): “The fact that utilitarianism stems from controlled processes has led some scientist to contend that it is the optimal moral judgment (see Greene et al., 2009).”
Order effects in moral judgment (2012, background): “…explored by Lanteri and colleagues (2008) differ on a number of these dimensions, including physical contact (Cushman et al., 2006), personal force (Greene et al., 2009), locus of intervention (Waldmann & Dieterich, 2007), and whether the victim constitutes a means or a side-effect in rescuing the…”
The strategic moral self: Self-presentation shapes moral dilemma judgments (2018, background): “being to kill another is more aversive than employing a mechanical mediator (Greene et al., 2009).”
Mapping the Moral Domain (2011, background): “…include decision making about runaway trolleys, in which participants must make tradeoffs between harm and rights (Cushman, Young, & Hauser, 2006; Greene et al., 2009); economic games, which pit fairness against selfinterest (Fehr & Gachter, 2002); and the perennially popular topic of altruism…”
Revisiting External Validity: Concerns About Trolley Problems and Other Sacrificial Dilemmas in Moral Psychology (2014, methodology): “Greene et al. (2009), for example, asked participants to © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Social and Personality Psychology Compass 8/9 (2014): 536–554, 10.1111/spc3.”
When Employees Do Bad Things for Good Reasons: Examining Unethical Pro-Organizational Behaviors (2011, methodology): “" In fact, moral dilemmas have been shown to heighten activity in regions of the brain associated with emotion (Greene et al. 2004, 2008 ).”
What Dilemma? Moral Evaluation Shapes Factual Belief (2013, background): “Study 1 Researchers note that many participants reject assumptions embedded in artificial moral dilemmas (e.g., that a man can be large enough to stop a trolley; Greene et al., 2009).”
Away from Trolley Problems and Toward Risk Management (2016, background): “(In surveys, respondents indicated that use of force rather than mere physical contact seems to make the action slightly less moral (Greene et al. 2009).)”
Dirty Work, Clean Hands: The Moral Psychology of Indirect Agency (2009, neutral): “…examines the roles played by various forms of physical indirectness in the evaluation of harmful actions (Royzman & Baron, 2002; Waldmann & Dieterich, 2007; Cushman, Young, & Hauser, 2006; Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley & Cohen, 2001; Greene, Lindsell, Clarke, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2008).”
Trait psychopathy and utilitarian moral judgement: The mediating role of action aversion (2015, background): “This is exactly what is observed (Cushman, Young, & Hauser, 2006; Gleichgerrcht & Young, 2013; Greene et al., 2001, 2004, 2008, 2009; Hauser, Cushman, Young, Jin, & Mikhail, 2007; Mikhail, 2007).”
Intermediation Reduces Punishment (and Reward) (2011, positive): “Going back to the trolley scenario, it has since been shown that pulling a trap door from underneath the large man may be okay, but pushing him with a pole over the edge is not (Greene et al 2008a).”