Is saving lives your task or God’s? Religiosity, belief in god, and moral judgment
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2017, Vol 12, Issue 3
Abstract
Should a Catholic hospital abort a life-threatening pregnancy or let a pregnant woman die? Should a religious employer allow his employees access to contraceptives or break with healthcare legislation? People and organizations of faith often face moral decisions that have significant consequences. Research in psychology found that religion is typically associated with deontological judgment. Yet deontology consists of many principles, which may, at times, conflict. In three studies, we design a conflict between moral principles and find that the relationship between moral judgment and religiosity is more nuanced than currently assumed. Studies 1 and 2 show that, while religious U.S. Christians and Israeli Jews are more likely to form deontological judgments, they divide between the deontological principles of inaction and indirectness. Using textual analysis, we reveal that specific beliefs regarding divine responsibility and human responsibility distinguish inaction from indirectness deontologists. Study 3 exploits natural differences in religious saliency across days of the week to provide causal evidence that religion raises deontological tendencies on Sundays and selectively increases the appeal of inaction deontology for those who believe in an interventionist and responsible God.
Authors and Affiliations
Netta Barak-Corren and Max Bazerman
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678294
- DOI -
- Views 146
- Downloads 0
The Maximization Inventory
We present the Maximization Inventory, which consists of three separate scales: decision difficulty, alternative search, and satisficing. We show that the items of the Maximization Inventory have much better psychometric...
Divergence between individual perceptions and objective indicators of tail risks: Evidence from floodplain residents in New York City
This study provides the first comprehensive analysis of individual perceptions of tail risks. It focuses not only on the probability, as has been studied by Nicholas Barberis and others, but also on anticipation of damag...
On the perception and operationalization of risk perception
We compare and critique two measures of risk perception. We suggest that a single question — “How risky is the situation?” — captures the concept of risk perception more accurately than the multiple-item measure used by...
Dishonest helping and harming after (un)fair treatment
People experience fair and unfair treatment daily, and at times may react by breaking ethical rules and lying. Here, we assess the extent to which individuals engage in dishonest behavior aimed at helping or harming othe...
Observing others’ behavior and risk taking in decisions from experience
This paper examines how observing other people’s behavior affects risk taking in repeated decision tasks. In Study 1, 100 participants performed experience-based decision tasks either alone or in pairs, with the two memb...