The Influence of Moral Considerations on the Perceived Consequences of an Action

Abstract

It is proposed that the need to believe in a just world influences the subjective probabilities a person assigns to various outcomes. That is, moral actions will be thought likely to receive rewards, and immoral actions will be thought likely to be punished. This was tested with both survey data and an experiment. The survey data showed that respondents who saw civil rights tactics as violent (immoral) saw them as self-defeating, while those who saw them as peaceful (moral) saw them as useful. In the experiment, subjects were exposed to one of two two-person matrix games and were asked to specify the economically optimal strategy. The two games had the same strategic structure, but different equitable choices. In one set of conditions subjects thought both players were people (here equity should be regarded as morally required), while in the other set, subjects thought one player was a computer (here equity should be morally irrelevant). As predicted, (1) in the person conditions, the equitable strategy was regarded as more economically rational; (2) in the computer conditions, equity had no influence on the subjects' assessment of the economically rational strategy.