Moral preference reversals: Violations of procedure invariance in moral judgments of sacrificial dilemmas

Abstract

In this research, we examine whether moral judgments sometimes violate the normative principle of procedure invariance – that is, whether normatively equivalent elicitation tasks can result in different judgment patterns. Specifically, we show that the relative morality of two actions can reverse across evaluation modes and elicitation tasks, mirroring preference reversals in consumer behavior. Across six studies (five preregistered, total N = 719), we provide evidence of three reversals of moral judgments of sacrificial dilemmas. First, directly killing one person to save many others was rated as morally worse than indirectly killing one person via an intervening mechanism in order to save a few others in separate evaluation, but this difference reversed in joint evaluation, in both between-subjects (Studies 1a and 1b) and within-subjects (Study 2) designs. Next, directly killing one person to save many others was judged as morally better than indirectly killing one person to save a few others more often in matching than in choice (Study 3) and rating (Study 4), between-subjects. Lastly, we replicate the results of Studies 3 and 4 within-subjects and show that susceptibility to these moral preference reversals is correlated with Faith in Intuition (Study 5). The present research introduces a new methodological approach to moral psychology, demonstrates that moral judgments can fully reverse across tasks, and supports an emerging view that moral judgments, like consumer preferences, are at least sometimes constructed in the moment, relative to the context and task at hand.