Philosophers and observers of human behavior have noticed
that people often make moral claims that they cannot live up to. There are countless examples of scandals
involving religious and political leaders who talk publicly about living up to
high moral standards, but whose personal lives do not measure up. These observations have spurred a number of
lines of psychological research.
In 1997, Jonathan
Baron and Mark Spranca focused on a particular kind of moral statement
people make called a protected value. A protected value is a moral line that people
say they simply will not cross. For many
people, for example, abortion crosses a protected value of the sanctity of
human life. For these people, they
simply will not accept any violation of this value. A key sign that a protected value is
threatened is that people experience a sense of moral outrage.
This strong reaction to violations of a protected value are
felt most strongly when the value is challenged directly. In fact, research by Julie
Irwin and Jonathan Baron in 2001 suggests that even people who hold a
particular protected value will make tradeoffs related to it when they are not
asked about it directly.
In their studies, some participants were people who
expressed a protected value for saving the rainforest. When faced directly with the opportunity to
purchase furniture made from wood harvested from the rainforest, these
participants were unwilling to do so.
However, if participants with this protected value were asked about how
much money they would spend for a variety of pieces of furniture (some of which
contained wood from rainforests), almost all of them expressed a price that
they would actually be willing to pay.
So, when the protected value was not made overt in the choice, it had a
much weaker effect on people’s behavior.
Even in less extreme circumstances, people’s beliefs about
their behavior often do not match their actual behavior. An interesting paper by Oriel
FeldmannHall, Dean Mobbs, Davy Evans, Lucy Hiscox, Lauren Navrady, and Tim
Dalgleish published in Cognition
in 2012 explores this issue. They
compared performance in hypothetical and real moral situations.
The studies focused on a game called Pain vs. Gain. In this game, one participant is given £20. A second participant is strapped into a chair
where they will be given moderately painful electric shocks. On each of the 20 trials of the game, the
participant can pay up to £1 to minimize the severity of the shock. If they give up 1£, then the other
participant receives no shock at all. If
they give up nothing, then the participant receives the most painful
shock.
In the hypothetical
version, the game is described to people, and they are asked how much money
they would keep. In this condition, participants predict they will keep about £1.50. This prediction reflects people’s general
belief that they do not want to cause harm to other people.
In the real version of the game, participants actually
played the game. At the start of the
study, they met a second participant who was assigned to receive the
shocks. They got to experience a mild
shock to get a sense of what the other participant might feel. On each trial, they made responses on a
computer of how much money they would give up on that trial using a slider to
pick a value between £0 and £1. Then,
they saw the effects of the shock on the other participant by video. In actuality, the other participant was a
confederate who was never actually given a shock, but was acting as though they
had. In this version of the experiment,
participants actually kept about £12.50.
In this study, the data from a participant was only used if that
participant believed that the study was real and the other participant had
actually received the shocks.
So, people’s actual behavior differed quite a bit from what
they would predict they would do.
In a second study, the researchers explored ways to make
people’s predictions more accurate. They
reasoned that people have a hard time simulating what it is like to be faced
with this choice, and so they fall back on a general rule like “don’t harm
other people” to predict what they would do.
In this study, they created three other hypothetical versions of the
game.
In one, the game was described in great detail, and
participants were asked how much money they thought they would keep. In this case, participants thought they might
keep about £4. In another version, the
game was described, and participants actually played all 20 rounds of the
game. In this case, they kept about
£8. In a third condition, participants
went through the entire scenario of meeting another participant and getting a
sample shock, but then, they were told to imagine that the other participant
was connected to the shock. Then, they
played all 20 rounds of the game. In
this case, participants kept about £12, which is about what the participants
playing the real game kept.
This research is related to a lot of work on the consistency
between people’s attitudes and their behaviors.
In essence, it is hard to predict what you are going to do in a
situation if you are not experiencing that situation. When you say what you are going to do in a
situation, you are making your best guess about it. However, it is hard for you to simulate all
of the other factors that are going to influence your behavior. As a result, your predictions are often
inaccurate. So, if you want to be as
accurate as possible in predicting your future behavior, make the circumstances
in which you make the prediction as similar as possible to the situation in
which you will be acting.
