Journal
COGNITION
Volume 121, Issue 1, Pages 154-161Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.05.010
Keywords
Morality; Judgment; Decision making; Psychopathy; Values; Ethics; Intuition; Utilitarianism; Machiavellianism; Emotions; Reasoning; Moral rules; No Meaning; Moral dilemmas
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Researchers have recently argued that utilitarianism is the appropriate framework by which to evaluate moral judgment, and that individuals who endorse non-utilitarian solutions to moral dilemmas (involving active vs. passive harm) are committing an error. We report a study in which participants responded to a battery of personality assessments and a set of dilemmas that pit utilitarian and non-utilitarian options against each other. Participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of Psychopathy, machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness. These results question the widely-used methods by which lay moral judgments are evaluated, as these approaches lead to the counterintuitive conclusion that those individuals who are least prone to moral errors also possess a set of psychological characteristics that many would consider prototypically immoral. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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