Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The focus of the present work concerns the nature ofdeontological decisions. We test the hypothesis that it ispossible to specify deontological moral choices based on anunemotional rule, norm or principle and that such moralchoices can be distinguished from emotion-driven ones.Using a novel paradigm for moral choice that we call TheRefugees’ Dilemma, we provide evidence for such a rule-based route to moral choice. We show that participants withhigh scores in a Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) were morelikely to adopt utilitarian or rule-based responses, as opposedto emotional ones. We also found that rule-based respondentsreported the highest average psychological distance, more sothat even utilitarian respondents. These findings show howemotional and rule-based influences can be separated with theappropriate scenario and challenges the approach of assumingboth influences can be combined into a single deontologicalroute in dual-process models.