Do Moral Action and Moral Prediction Go Hand in Hand? Exploring Morality as a Function of Self-regulation

Psychologists have long been directing their energy to the domain of moral judgment or moral prediction, assuming that when extended to moral behaviour, results will prove consistent. The aim of this research was to explore the dissociation between moral prediction and moral behaviour. Pilot research suggests that people expect others to act less morally than they say they would. The results of two experiments, however, suggest the opposite. In both studies, participants were assigned to either a moral action condition, where they were placed in a moral dilemma, or a moral prediction condition, in which they had to predict their behavior in that dilemma. In Study 1, the Dictator Game was used to measure morality, whereas in Study 2, cheating behaviour was measured. In both experiments, participants acted more morally than they predicted they would. This research has implications for scrutinizing the applicability of previous work on moral self-prediction.MAS

Errors in Moral Forecasting: The Importance of Affect for the Relationship Between Moral Behaviours and Moral Forecasts

In recent years, the field of moral psychology has been heavily dominated by studies on moral judgment that have relied on hypothetical moral dilemmas. But how do individuals' responses to such dilemmas map on to real-life moral behaviour? The aim of this dissertation was to explore this association, as well as to explore the role that affective experience plays in the relationship between peoples' actual and forecasted moral behaviours. The results of five experiments suggest that people might act more morally than they would predict and that affective experience plays in important role in motivating moral behaviours, as well as accurate forecasts. In Studies 1 and 2, participants acted more morally than they predicted they would in a series of moral dilemmas including a one-shot Dictator Game (Study 1), as well as in a math task where they had the chance to cheat on a math test through either commission or omission (Study 2). In Study 3, participants who actually had the chance to cheat on this same math task displayed significantly more autonomic nervous system arousal than participants forecasting their behaviour in this same dilemma. Critically, the moral underestimation effect in this study was mediated by autonomic arousal. In Study 4, I found that inducing affective salience by providing false somatic feedback indicative of arousal increased forecasting accuracy among participants for the same math task dilemma. Finally, in Study 5, I found that individual differences in emotional awareness moderate moral forecasting accuracy in this same moral dilemma, such that individuals low in emotional awareness exhibit exacerbated forecasting errors. 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. Given that the majority of moral psychologists rely on hypothetical scenarios and self-report to study the nature of morality, I propose that investigating the way in which affective experience interacts with and shapes individuals' moral forecasts is an important and meaningful pursuit.Ph.D

People Overestimate their Willingness to Reject Potential Romantic Partners by Overlooking their Concern for Others

Mate preferences often fail to correspond with actual mate choices (e.g., Eastwick & Finkel, 2008). The present research presents a novel mechanism for why this phenomenon occurs: people overestimate their willingness to reject unsuitable romantic partners. Across two studies, single individuals were given the opportunity to either accept or decline advances from potential dates who were either physically unattractive (Study 1) or incompatible with their dating preferences (Study 2). We found that participants were significantly less willing to reject these unsuitable potential dates when they believed the situation to be real rather than hypothetical. Across studies, this effect was partially explained by other-focused motives: participants for whom the scenario was hypothetical anticipated less motivation to avoid hurting the potential date’s feelings than participants for whom the situation was real. Thus, other-focused motives appear to exert an influence on mate choice that has been overlooked by researchers and laypeople alike