Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Moral decision-making research is currently dominated by experimental studies that employ dilemmas, situations where more than one course of action may be justifiable. Humans almost characteristically vacillate between options before reaching a conclusion while reasoning on such problems. Current experimental designs disregard this vital aspect of moral decisions by only measuring judgments produced at the end of reasoning. We present an experimental paradigm for measuring moral conflict as a function of vacillations experienced by participants while deliberating. We conducted two experiments to correlate our measure with two different definitions of conflict prevalent in the literature. Across both experiments, we found that people vacillate more on conflicting problems and that vacillations correlate with their subjective feeling of conflict and confidence. We also found that the pattern of deliberation uncovered by these vacillations is inconsistent with currently favored models of moral reasoning and more consistent with a single accumulation to threshold process.