The Mismeasure of Morals: Antisocial Personality Traits Predict Utilitarian Responses to Moral Dilemmas
Daniel M. Bartels
University of Chicago - Booth School of Business
David A. Pizarro
July 16, 2011
Cognition, Vol. 121, p. 154, 2011
Columbia Business School Research Paper No. 11-10
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.
Number of Pages in PDF File: 8
Keywords: Morality, Judgment, Decision making, Psychopathy, Values, Ethics, Intuition, Utilitarianism, Machiavellianism, Emotions, Reasoning, Moral rules, No Meaning, Moral dilemmasAccepted Paper Series
Date posted: October 4, 2011
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