Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Nowadays, several of the situations in which we have to makedecisions are in digital form. In a first experiment (N=1010)we showed that people’s moral judgments depend on theDigital Context (Smartphone vs. PC) in which a dilemma ispresented, becoming more utilitarian (vs. deontological) whenusing Smartphones. To provide additional evidence, we ran asecond (N=250) and a third experiment (N=300), where weintroduced time constraints and we manipulated timeinstructions. Our results provide an extended perspective onDual-Process Models of Moral Judgment, as we showed thatthe use of smartphones, often assumed to be hurried whichwould be consistent with gut-feeling decision-making,increased the likelihood of utilitarian responses and decreaseddeontological ones. This is the first study to look at theimpact of the digital age on moral judgments and the resultspresented have consequences for understanding moral choicein our increasingly virtualized world