Research Post: Motivated Moral Reasoning

Article Link:
http://www.peezer.net/storage/Pizarro%20PublicationsChaptersDitto%20Pizarro%20Tannenbaum%20.pdf

In my last research post, I discussed an article that used the trolley problem to examine what moral philosophers called "framing."  A similar concept is something that Peter Ditto, David A. Pizarro, and David Tannenbaum call "priming."  In this paper, they describe a series of tests using a variation of the "trolley problem" and other moral thought experiments to test for the presence of social, political, and linguistic influences on the moral stances of various groups.  This includes both examining in-text and out-of-text factors, meaning that both how the moral dilemma is conveyed is as important of a consideration as where it is told and who it is told to.

The paper's conclusions point to understanding all moral decisions as being affected by social priming, in all its different forms. The first part of the study dealt with whether or not names and professions that inferred a certain racial identification within the trolley problem would effect the moral analysis of participants. The second part of the study examined whether or not the nationality of potential victims in a military setting would affect the moral decision making of those presented with a trolley-type moral dilemma. The final part of the study analyzed whether or not the presentation of written material slanted towards certain moral conclusions prior to the presentation of the trolley problem would affect the decisions. Additionally, all participants in all parts of the study were examined by comparing self-identified political affiliations. All the empirical portions of the study showed that these forms of "framing" and "priming" did influence moral decision making in statistically significant ways.

In a video game environment, this means that the visual, textual, or audio representations of avatars, NPCs, etc, will have substantial effects on the moral reasoning of the player, even if these effects are unintended/unnoticed by the game's developers.  This paper suggests that the innumerable unintended consequences of game design, including all its rhetorical components, simply because of the complexity of the task of representing a narrative in such a multifaceted medium, make it impossible to create a virtual environment that does not affect the decision making of the player. This, however, does not undermine the exercise of attempting moral thought experiments inside virtual environments because, as the studies presented in the paper show, every presentation of a moral dilemma will be affected by "priming" of one sort or another.  Yet, the care one must take to separate the apparent empirical conclusions from the intended and unintended "priming" effects of the medium will be critical in creating quality moral studies.

References:

Ditto, P.H., Pizarro, D.A., & Tannenbaum. (2009). Motivated moral reasoning. Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 50, 307-338. doi:10.1016/S0079-7421(08)00410-6.