Moral judgments are value-based decisions driven by culturally stable valuations and culturally variable decision biases

Dale Cohen; Philip Thomas Quinlan; Xingyu Liu

doi:10.1177/19485506231199527

Moral judgments are value-based decisions driven by culturally stable valuations and culturally variable decision biases

Dale Cohen^*, Philip Thomas Quinlan, Xingyu Liu

^*Corresponding author for this work

Psychology

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

Many theorize that cultural similarities in moral judgments arise from a specialized cognitive system devoted to morality. We claim, in contrast, that people make moral judgments using a general-purpose, value-based decision-making process. We present a computational cognitive model to predict response time and response choice to moral dilemmas using valuations as input. Cultural similarities in moral judgment are explained by a culturally stable set of valuations that drives choices that aid survival. Corresponding cultural differences are explained by changes in a decisional bias parameter that accounts for differences in the perceived costs of making various kinds of decisional errors. The model accurately predicts the timed choices of both UK and Chinese respondents from values collected from USA respondents.

Original language	English
Number of pages	11
Journal	Social Psychological and Personality Science
Early online date	25 Sept 2023
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506231199527
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 25 Sept 2023

Bibliographical note

Keywords

Cross Culture
Moral Judgment
Psychological Values
Social Cognition

Access to Document

10.1177/19485506231199527

PVTcrossCulture2022_r3
© The Author(s) 2023. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the University’s Research Publications and Open Access policy.
Accepted author manuscript, 748 KBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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