2011/03/17 by Rimma Teper, Michael Inzlicht, Elizabeth Page‐Gould · 1 citation
Neuroscience · Decision Sciences · Social Sciences · Psychology · #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Ethics in Business and Education #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Psychology #Moral dilemma #Arousal #Dilemma #Social psychology #Skin conductance #Action (physics) #Moral disengagement #Moral psychology #Cognitive psychology #Epistemology
paper · doi:10.1177/0956797611402513
openalex publication_date 2011/03/17 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/19
Can people accurately predict how they will act in a moral dilemma? Our research suggests that in some situations, they cannot, and that emotions play a pivotal role in this dissociation between behavior and forecasting. In the current experiment, individuals in a moral action condition cheated significantly less on a math task than participants in a forecasting condition predicted they themselves would cheat. Furthermore, we found that participants in the action condition displayed significantly more physiological arousal, as measured by preejection period, skin conductance response (SCR), and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), and that the underestimation effect was mediated by SCR and RSA together. This research suggests that the affective arousal present during real-life moral dilemmas may not be fully engaged during moral forecasting, and that this may account for the moral forecasting errors that individuals make. This research has the potential to inform past work in the field of moral psychology, which has largely ignored actual behavior.