Journal
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Volume 72, Issue 4, Pages 943-954Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
DOI: 10.1177/1747021818772045
Keywords
Actions; depletion; moral fatigue; moral judgement; outcomes
Funding
- John Templeton Foundation [48054]
- Trinity College Dublin Graduate Scholarship
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We report two experiments that show a moral fatigue effect: participants who are fatigued after they have carried out a tiring cognitive task make different moral judgements compared to participants who are not fatigued. Fatigued participants tend to judge that a moral violation is less permissible even though it would have a beneficial effect, such as killing one person to save the lives of five others. The moral fatigue effect occurs when people make a judgement that focuses on the harmful action, killing one person, but not when they make a judgement that focuses on the beneficial outcome, saving the lives of others, as shown in Experiment 1 (n=196). It also occurs for judgements about morally good actions, such as jumping onto railway tracks to save a person who has fallen there, as shown in Experiment 2 (n=187). The results have implications for alternative explanations of moral reasoning.
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