金钱刺激和决策者角色对个体道德决策的影响——基于过程分离范式

The Effect of Monetary Incentives and Decision Maker's Roles on Moral Decision-Making: Based on Process Dissociation Approach

以大学生为被试,采用3(金钱刺激:无金钱刺激、金钱奖励、金钱惩罚)×2(决策者角色:决策者、旁观者)的被试间实验设计,利用过程分离范式分别计算被试道德决策中的功利主义倾向和道义论倾向,从而探讨金钱刺激和决策者角色对个体道德决策的影响。结果发现:(1)无论是决策者还是旁观者,金钱刺激都不会影响其道义论倾向;(2)决策者的道义论倾向大于旁观者;(3)只在有金钱奖励时决策者的功利主义倾向才大于旁观者。

Dual-process theory of moral judgment suggests that responses to moral dilemmas are guided by two moral principles： the principle of deontology states that the morality of an action depends on the intrinsic nature of the action（e.g., harming others is wrong regardless of its consequences）; the principle of utilitarianism implies that the morality of an action is determined by its consequence（e.g., harming others is acceptable if it increases the well-being of a greater number of people）. Recently, many studies supposed the two moral inclinations are independent. Therefore, studies began to use Jacoby’s（1991） Process Dissociation procedure to independently quantify the strength of deontological and utilitarian inclinations within individuals.Studies on moral decision demonstrated that money would influence human’s moral decision-making, such as lie, hypocrisy, and duplicity. However, few studies examined whether money influence human’s moral decision principle. What’s more, studies revealed that actor-observer differences existed in moral judgments. What remained to be explored was the mechanism of this difference. Therefore, using PD approach, the purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of monetary incentives and decision maker’s roles on moral decision-making. A three（monetary incentive： no monetary incentive, monetary reward, monetary punishment） × two（decision maker’s role： actor, observer） experiment was designed. 275 undergraduate（66 males; Mage = 21.20） took part in this experiment. The basic moral dilemmas were adapted from Conway ＆ Gawronski（2013）. In addition, the moral dilemmas involved monetary benefits and harms. The dependent variables were the strength of deontological and utilitarian inclinations within individuals. The results were as follow：（1） Monetary incentives had no significant effect on actor and observer’s deontological inclination.（2） The decision maker’s deontological inclination was higher than that of observers.（3） Moreover, the decision maker’s utilitarian inclination was higher than that of observers only in the condition of monetary reward. This indicated that monetary incentives and decision maker’s roles indeed influenced moral decision-making.This experiment verified that the two moral inclinations were indeed independent, which was consistent with previous research outcome. Moreover, the results of this experiment can be explained by Greene’s（2001, 2004, 2008） Dual-process theory of moral judgment. As such, utilitarian inclination is assumed to be the product of controlled cognitive process which is slow, cognitive, and effortful. Deontological inclination is assumed to stem from automatic emotional process which is fast, affective, and resource-independent. When participants make utilitarian judgments, he will trade off the advantage and disadvantage. So this process will be influenced by money. But deontological judgments will not. The study also indicated that there was actor-observer difference in moral decision-making, which attested to the Construal Level theory.