Are Morally-Motivated 1 Running Head: MORALLY-MOTIVATED DECISION MAKING Are Morally-Motivated Decision Makers Insensitive to the Consequences of their Choices?

Is morally motivated decision making different from others kinds of decision making? There is evidence that when people have sacred or protected values (PVs) they reject tradeoffs for secular values (e.g.” You can’t put a price on a human life.”) and tend to employ deontological rather than consequentialist decision principles. People motivated by PVs appear to show “quantity insensitivity.” That is, in tradeoffs situations they are less sensitive to the consequences of their choices than people without PVs. The current study shows that the relationship between PVs and quantity insensitivity varies across contexts: in one design previous results are replicated; in a second, PVs are related to increased quantity sensitivity. These and other findings call into question important properties of PVs. Are Morally-Motivated 3 If we want to comprehend people’s commonplace and extraordinary actions, we must understand the values that inspire them. “Extreme” actions (e.g., selfless heroism, suicide terrorism) show that strong values may motivate behavior and some researchers suggest that “all attitudinal and behavioral decisions should be traceable to personal value priorities” (Rohan, 2000, p. 270). Recently, researchers have begun to examine morally motivated decision making, and it appears to have distinctive properties. Our focus is on decisions involving protected values (PVs). The PV framework developed by Baron and colleagues (Baron & Spranca, 1997) argues that for problems entailing the exchange of a cherished resource (a PV), people tend to reason differently (deontologically) than when reasoning about resources not tied to one’s moral values (consequentially). Deontological reasoning is focused on means—some acts are wrong in themselves, and are morally unacceptable means to any ends (Davis, 1993). In contrast, consequentialist reasoning is focused on outcomes; means are irrelevant—whatever values are adopted, this perspective mandates bringing about the best consequences (Pettit, 1993). Contemporary ethics treats deontology and consequentialism as distinct modes of ethical reasoning. PVs are associated deontological rules—rules that concern actions, like “do no harm”(Baron, 1996), but not the consequences of those actions. This gives rise to a number of testable properties of PVs. First, by definition, PVs are associated with tradeoff avoidance. For example, when offered a secular value (something that can be purchased or sold) in exchange for a PV [e.g., auctioning body parts, or selling futures that bet on the likelihood of acts of terrorism; (Medin et al., 1999; Tetlock, 2002)], people refuse tradeoffs on moral grounds (Tetlock et al., 2000). Two further properties of PVs are “omission bias” and “quantity insensitivity” (Baron & Spranca, 1997). Omission bias is a preference for indirect harm caused by omissions (i.e., failure to act) over equal or lesser harm caused by acts (Spranca et al., 1991). Baron and his colleagues have amassed evidence that PVs are associated with a large omission bias (Baron & Greene, 1996; Baron & Leshner, 2000; Ritov & Baron, 1990, 1999). Consider the following item from Ritov and Baron (1999): Are Morally-Motivated 4 As a result of a dam on a river, 20 species of fish are threatened with extinction. By opening the dam for a month each year, you can save these species, but 2 species downstream will become extinct because of the changing water level. Would you open the dam? Y/N What is the largest number of species made extinct by the opening at which you would open the dam?__________ In this situation, some participants say they would not open the dam, saying that they would not want to cause the loss of a single species (even though not wanting to cause harm by opening the dam leads to the loss of all 20 species). The value participants supply to the probe is divided by the risk associated with omission (in this case, 20), yielding an index ranging from zero to one. The smaller this “threshold value”, the less quantity sensitive a participant is judged to be. Lower threshold values are interpreted as reflecting relative insensitivity to the consequences of one’s choice. Later, participants are presented with statements concerning the acceptability of tradeoffs for some value (e.g., fish species). This probe assesses whether participants hold a PV for this resource, as below: Causing the extinction of fish species. a) I do not object to this. b) This is acceptable if it leads to some sort of benefits (money or something else) that are great enough. c) This is not acceptable no matter how great the benefits. Participants who endorse “C” are said to have a PV for that resource (as defined by Baron & Spranca, 1997). Participants with PVs provide lower threshold values than participants without PVs, indicating less sensitivity to quantity (Ritov & Baron, 1999). PVs are an important construct in the study of decision making because this field has adopted utility theory (Savage, 1954; von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1947) as a normative model and adopted consequentialist theories as descriptive models (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979; Tversky & Kahneman, 1992). These theories assume quantity sensitivity: more of a good thing is preferable to less of a good thing, ceteris paribus. The properties of PVs discussed so far violate the assumptions of consequentialism and quantity sensitivity. Are Morally-Motivated 5 An alternative paradigm (adapted from Connolly and Reb, 2003) Recently, Connolly and Reb (2003) examined the effects of modest changes to the omission bias paradigm. In their Study 2, they varied the risks associated with act and omission in a repeated measures design. Consider an adapted version of the previous item (below): As a result of a dam on a river, 20 species of fish are threatened with extinction. By opening the dam for a month each year, you can save these species, but some species downstream will become extinct because of the changing water level. Would you open the dam if it would kill 2 species of fish downstream as a result? Y/N Would you open the dam if it would kill 6 species of fish downstream as a result? Y/N Would you open the dam if it would kill 10 species of fish downstream as a result? Y/N Would you open the dam if it would kill 14 species of fish downstream as a result? Y/N Would you open the dam if it would kill 18 species of fish downstream as a result? Y/N Note that the item above gives a range of options rather than asking participants to generate a threshold. It also does not begin with an anchor. Connolly and Reb (2003) examined decisions involving whether or not to vaccinate (the vaccine sometimes had bad side effects) and found no evidence for omission bias. Although opinions differ concerning the complexity and merits of the Ritov and Baron versus the Connolly and Reb procedure (Baron & Ritov, 2004; Connolly & Reb, 2004), we employed both methods as a means to clarify the nature of PVs and their role in decision making. The theoretical notion guiding our studies is that PVs involve attentional processes and that the two procedures may influence attention differently. Specifically, the Ritov and Baron procedure may direct attention to the question of whether one should act. In contrast, in the Connolly and Reb procedure, participants are asked the same question at different levels of act risk, which may shift their focus to balancing risks and consequences. Connolly and Reb (2003) did not assess PVs so it is unclear how people with PVs would respond in their paradigm. We predicted, however, that people with PVs would show less quantity sensitivity than people without PVs in the Ritov and Baron procedure but show greater quantity sensitivity than people without PVs in the Connolly and Reb procedure. If people who endorse PVs care more about the resource at risk (fish, in this example), one might expect even Are Morally-Motivated 6 more consideration of consequences (and more quantity sensitivity) compared to people without PVs (i.e., indifferent participants should care less about the consequences entailed in the scenario). There has been enough research on PVs and decision making to establish that this domain is theoretically and practically rich, but too little to establish generality across paradigms and social contexts. At a minimum, our study examines the generality of results across two closely related procedures. In the current study, we assessed the relationship between PVs and quantity sensitivity for three scenarios using two different procedures: one group participated in a replication of Ritov and Baron’s procedure, another group participated in a procedure inspired by Connolly and Reb’s Study. In addition to examining quantity sensitivity as expressed in two procedures, the current study assesses domain-general vs. domain-specific influences of PVs by collecting responses for three additional, unrelated PVs. If quantity sensitivity is predicted by endorsing many PVs then the relationship between PVs and quantity sensitivity may reflect individual differences in generalized deontology rather than using different reasoning processes when (un)cherished resources are at risk.