New PSA Study! On the universality of moral thinking: Cross-cultural variation in the influence of personal force and intention in moral dilemma judgments.

We are excited to announce that we have selected “On the universality of moral thinking: Cross-cultural variation in the influence of personal force and intention in moral dilemma judgments” as our next official PSA study! This proposal was submitted by Bence Bago (Toulouse School of Economics, France) and Balazs Aczel (Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary). Congratulations! The project focuses on people’s reasoning in moral dilemmas in which deontological perspectives (emphasizing individual rights) are in conflict with consequentialist reasoning (following the greater good). In an important and central experiment, Greene et al. (2009) investigated whether people are sensitive to the intention of agents when evaluating moral actions. They found that this is only the case when people have to apply personal force to do so. Yet, their work could not explore the effect of a potentially important component: culture. Therefore, the goal of the present project is to empirically test the universality of the effect of intention on utilitarian and deontological responding by directly replicating Greene et al.’s experiments in non-WEIRD samples as well. You can read the accepted proposal here: https://osf.io/d2ptq/ Stay tuned for more information on lab recruitment and project planning soon! If you already know you would like to join this project, please email us (psysciaccelerator@gmail.com) to express your interest.