Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We created practical moral dilemmas for which participantsrole-played witnessing a transgression by a target person. Theidentity of the transgressor was manipulated to be either astranger or the participant’s brother. Participants made factualand unethicality judgments regarding the incident andreported their willingness to report the transgressor to thepolice. When the factual situation was ambiguous,participants interpreted the facts in favor of the target personwhen that target was their brother. This family favoritism inturn led to partial moral judgments and decisions, whilecreating overall coherence. When it was made clear that theirbrother actually committed the transgression, partiality inunethicality judgment was reduced but partiality in thedecision to report persisted, even though overall coherencewas thereby reduced. Using path analyses, we show howstrong moral constraints such as family obligation can shiftmoral reasoning processes.