Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Moral decisions vary in the extent to which they are expected to be justified. We investigate whether normative expectations for justification influence how effectively people articulate decision strategies that others can use. In a two-phase study (N = 573), participants made moral decisions in either a kidney allocation domain or a personal forgiveness domain (high vs. low justification expectations), providing written explanations of their reasoning. New participants either used these explanations to predict the original decisions or made independent decisions, establishing baseline agreement. Participants perceived greater reliance on structured processes in kidney allocation, baseline agreement was higher in kidney allocation, and explanations increased prediction accuracy in both domains, with a larger effect in forgiveness. Despite these differences, matching accuracy converged across domains when explanations were provided, suggesting that moral explainability is fundamentally about communicability rather than introspective accuracy.