5 research outputs found

    Temporal variability in moral value judgement

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    Moral judgments are known to change in response to changes in external conditions. But how variable are moral judgments over time in the absence of environmental variation? The moral domain has been described in terms of five moral foundations, categories that appear to capture moral judgment across cultures. We examined the temporal consistency of repeated responses to the moral foundations questionnaire over short time periods, fitted a set of mixed effects models to the data and compared them. We found correlations between changes in participant responses for different foundations over time, suggesting a structure with at least two underlying stochastic processes: one for moral judgments involving harm and fairness, and another for moral judgments related to loyalty, authority, and purit

    Models of morality value integration and inference

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    Our sense of what is right and wrong plays a main role in all important decisions we make. In the context of human societies, shared sets of such values and norms encourage cooperative behaviour and help groups thrive. This thesis seeks to understand the dynamics and interplay of individual human moral values, looking at moral decision-making through the lens of mathematical modelling. Using data collected in a first experiment which captures multiple sequential snapshots of people’s values with measurements based on Moral Foundations Theory, a set of models captures different possible patterns of temporal consistency in people’s values. A Bayesian model comparison shows that people’s values over time resemble samples from two distinct, stochastic processes. For a subsequent experiment, a small set of charities is constructed to be as diverse as possible with respect to their agreement with these two types of moral values. Data is gathered using a donation allocation task among pairs of charities from this set, and shows that while some people tend to allocate their donation fully to their top choice, presumably maximising some combined version of their underlying values, others opt to allocate nonzero amounts to both options, thereby choosing a mix of the different available value combinations. In a follow-up study, a fixed cost associated with donation splitting is introduced for some participants, allowing a comparison of the extent to which it discourages donation splitting. A selection of models of each individual’s decisions shows that while people substantially dier in their preference to split their choice, that tendency persists even when doing so comes at a cost. Moreover, their underlying moral values inuence not only the allocated total amount, but also the choice pattern they exhibit: The noisy values which encompass our beliefs of what is right and wrong have an effect on the way that these values are combined when a decision is made. Linking properties of human moral decisions to artificial intelligence research on value alignment, the thesis concludes with a proposed research agenda, introducing the design of an interactive game framework that can be used to study intention attribution in human and artificial agents

    Value integration in charitable giving

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    The aim of this project is to find out how different moral values are integrated in the process of making moral decisions. For instance, we do not know what happens if different moral values suggest different courses of action. How do we make a decision if all options are somewhat right
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