On Unconscious Morality: The Effects of Unconscious Thinking on Moral Decision Making

Social Cognition, Vol. 28, No. 1, 2010, pp. 74–83

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Jaap Ham, Department of Human-Technology Interaction, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Kees van den Bos, Department of Social and Organizational Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

The research reported in this article was supported by a VICI innovational research grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO, 453.03.603) awarded to Kees van den Bos. We want to thank Elisabeth J. M. Boesten, Anke A. L. van Bussel, and Rik A. Langerak for important contributions to the research project and running the experiment.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jaap Ham, Department of Human-Technology Interaction, Eindhoven University of Technology, IPO 1.36, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected].

HAM AND VAN DEN BOSUNCONSCIOUS MORALITY

ON uNCONSCiOuS MOraliTY: ThE EFFECTS OF uNCONSCiOuS ThiNkiNG ON MOral dECiSiON MakiNG

Jaap HamEindhoven University of Technology

kees van den bosUtrecht University

In this article, we argue that when making moral decisions, unconscious thought can lead to more utilitarian moral decisions (approving of harm-ful actions that maximize good consequences), compared to conscious thought and immediate decision making. Therefore, we presented partici-pants with a complex version of the well-known footbridge dilemma. In immediate decision conditions, participants made decisions what to do in this dilemma immediately. In conscious thought conditions, participants consciously thought about what to do for 3 minutes and then made their decisions. In unconscious thought conditions, participants were distracted for 3 minutes, and next made their decisions. As expected, participants who thought unconsciously about the dilemma were more willing to make utilitarian decisions than participants who thought consciously or who made an immediate decision. The current findings provide a new perspec-tive on the social psychology of moral decision making and further insight into unconscious thinking.

Since classical times, there have been arguments in moral philosophy and philo-sophical ethics that either rationalist or intuitionist conceptions of moral judgment are true (Beauchamp, 2001). Rationalistic and intuitionist models have different views on how people make moral decisions. Rationalistic approaches emphasize

uNCONSCiOuS MOraliTY 75

that people make moral judgments by using controlled cognition to make deliber-ate and conscious moral judgments (e.g., Kant, 1785; Kohlberg, 1973; Turiel, 1983). In contrast, intuitionist models of moral judgments emphasize the role of intui-tive, quick, and automatic processes (e.g., Haidt, 2001; Hume, 1739). More recent-ly, Greene and colleagues proposed that people make moral judgment through a combination of both types of processes, and that people need controlled cognitive processes to overcome their initial quick and automatic responses when making moral judgments (Greene & Haidt, 2002; Greene, Morelli, Lowenberg, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2008; Greene, Nystrom, Engell, Darley, & Cohen, 2004; Greene, Sommer-ville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001). In the current article, we build and extend on these models and present evidence for a new perspective on the way people make moral judgments. That is, we argue that giving your moral judgments after a few minutes of distraction and thereby not consciously but unconsciously pro-cessing the moral dilemma at hand can lead to overcoming your initial, quick, and automatic responses.

hOW pEOplE MakE MOral JudGMENTS

In modern moral psychology (e.g., Haidt, 2007), the two different perspectives on the way that people form moral judgments are characterized as “moral reasoning” and “moral intuition,” respectively. Thus, some researchers view moral judgments to be formed primarily by means of careful processes of conscious cognitive rea-soning (e.g., Kohlberg, 1973; Piaget, 1932; Turiel, 1983). This perspective is related to rationalistic ethical theories that attempt to deduce a foundation for ethics from the meaning of rationality itself (e.g., Kant, 1785). In contrast, other researchers argue that the way people make moral judgments is primarily through fast and unconscious social-cognitive processes (e.g., Haidt, 2001; Kagan, 1984; Wilson, 1993). For instance, Haidt (2001) argues that moral judgment “is generally the re-sult of quick, automatic evaluations (intuitions)” (p. 814) and moral intuitions are “the sudden appearance in consciousness of a moral judgment” (p. 818). From this perspective, scientists argue that moral judgments are derived from feelings rather than from reasoning (e.g., Hume, 1739), and/or that morality is a prime example of an essentially contested concept, a concept about which it is very difficult, if not impossible, to reach agreed meaning (e.g., Shotter, 1989).

These two perspectives are combined in Greene’s dual-process model (e.g., Greene et al., 2001; Greene et al., 2008). This model argues that both automatic responses and more controlled responses play crucial roles in understanding how people react to moral dilemmas. More specifically, Greene proposes that utilitarian moral judgments are driven by controlled cognitive processes, whereas nonutili-tarian moral judgments are driven by automatic and emotional responses (e.g., Greene et al., 2001). In this way Greene and colleagues argued that people use con-trolled cognitive processes to overcome their initial quick and automatic responses when making moral judgments. Utilitarian judgments are aimed at maximizing benefits and minimizing costs for affected individuals (Mill, 1861). In contrast, a moral judgment can also be based on other motives, as for example the deontolog-ical perspective (Kant, 1785) that views rights and duties as more important than utilitarian considerations. Various experiments support the hypothesized asym-metry between the cognitive processes that lead to utilitarian and nonutilitarian

76 haM aNd vaN dEN bOS

judgments: Controlled cognitive processes lead to more utilitarian judgments, whereas more automatic processes lead to nonutilitarian judgments, supporting Greene et al.’s (2001, 2004, 2008) theory.

A prototypical moral dilemma to which Greene’s model applies and in which utilitarian and nonutilitarian perspectives lead to contrasting moral judgments is the well-known footbridge dilemma (Thompson, 1986): A runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five people. You can save them by pushing a person standing in front of you off of a footbridge and into the trolley’s path. This will stop the trol-ley but kill the person you push. A typical utilitarian moral judgment would be to perform this action, and maximize utility for all individuals affected. A typical deontological moral judgment would be not to perform this action, but regard it as an unacceptable violation of rights and duties. Greene’s dual-process theory specifies that when responding to footbridge dilemmas automatic responses in-cline people to disapprove of pushing the person off of the footbridge, while con-trolled cognitive processes incline people to approve of this action, and that people need controlled cognitive processes to overcome their initial quick and automatic responses when making moral judgments (e.g., Greene et al., 2001).

Rationalistic and intuitionist models of morality differ in many ways (see, e.g., Beauchamp, 2001), and so do the moral reasoning and intuition approaches (see, e.g., Haidt, 2001, 2007). One way in which they differ is that whereas intuition perspectives focus on fast, unconscious processes, reasoning approaches empha-size slower, conscious processes. By exploring the possibility of slow unconscious processes in moral judgment, we propose a relatively new perspective on the way that moral judgments may be formed. That is, we argue that taking time to un-consciously think about your moral judgment may lead to more utilitarian moral judgments (approving of harmful actions that maximize good consequences in the moral dilemma). We build our line of reasoning on the basis of recent develop-ments in the social-cognitive literature on unconscious thinking.

ThE EFFECTS OF uNCONSCiOuS ThiNkiNG ON MOral dECiSiON MakiNG

Among other things, social cognition research has found that people can make various types of social judgments in unconscious ways (e.g., Ham & Van den Bos, 2008a, 2008b; Hassin, Aarts, & Ferguson, 2005). In these kinds of social-cognitive studies, spontaneous social inferences are often made about relatively simple situ-ation descriptions (see Uleman, Adil Saribay, & Gonzalez, 2008). For example, re-search indicates that people spontaneously draw the inference of “strong” when reading the situation description “John lifts the boulder” (Ham & Vonk, 2003). In contrast, many day-to-day moral dilemmas are relatively complex and contain many variables that need to be weighed against one another (see e.g., Chandler, Siegel, & Boyes, 1980; Krebs & Denton, 1997; Skoe, Eisenberg, & Cumberland, 2002; see also Van den Bos, 2003). Therefore, one could assume that in many cases the moral judgment process constitutes a complex psychological process.

Interestingly, recent research findings suggest that for complex judgments, un-conscious social-cognitive processes have merits (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006). Conscious thought “refers to the cognitive and/or affective task-relevant processes one is consciously aware of while attending to a task” (Dijksterhuis, 2004, p. 586).


For example, one can compare two apartments one could buy, and consciously compare the different aspects of both apartments and then make a decision. Un-conscious thought, on the other hand, “refers to cognitive and/or affective task-relevant processes that take place outside conscious awareness” (Dijksterhuis, 2004, p. 586). The saying “To sleep on it” characterizes this kind of processing and its merits (although, of course, unconscious thinking does not refer to sleeping). When deciding on one of two apartments for example, one can compare the two, distract the mind from the problem for some time, and only then the thought “I’ll choose apartment A” pops into mind. This thought itself is conscious, but the tran-sition from indecision to a preference some time later is the result of unconscious thought.

Dijksterhuis and colleagues (Dijksterhuis, 2004; Dijksterhuis, Bos, Nordgren, & Van Baaren, 2006) argue that, when solving complex problems, unconscious think-ing leads to judgments that encompass more properties of the problem at hand. Furthermore, Dijkstershuis and Nordgren (2006) argue that in the case of uncon-scious thinking a weighting principle holds, stating that in the judgment process the importance of each property is weighed better than is the case when people en-gage in conscious thinking. Dijksterhuis and colleagues argue so mainly because of the limits of conscious human processing capacity (Miller, 1956) whereas hu-man unconsciousness is very well able to integrate large amounts of information (Betsch, Plessner, Schwieren, & Gütig, 2001). Another relevant factor in this respect is that unconscious thinkers can continue to think about pressing matters in the absence of conscious attention. Thus, unconscious thought theory (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006) argues that unconscious thinkers can engage in more elaborate decision-making processes than both conscious thinkers and immediate decision makers.

Support has been obtained for predictions of unconscious thought theory on various decisions related to product choice (e.g., apartment choice, car choice; see Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006) and on decisions related to social justice (Ham, Van den Bos, & Van Doorn, 2009), but not on judgments pertaining directly to moral judgments. The present article intends to fill this void. More specifically, on basis of the literature briefly reviewed here we argue here that (1) many important moral dilemmas may involve complex decision problems that contain elements that need to be weighed to make a judgment (see e.g., Skoe et al., 2002; Chandler et al., 1980); (2) according to the weighting principle, the unconscious naturally weights the relative importance of various attributes, whereas conscious thought often leads to suboptimal weighting because it disturbs this natural process (Di-jksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006); and (3) that for unconscious thinkers, the utilitar-ian consequence of pushing the person outweights the initial negative feelings of persuing that rather gruesome option, and thereby, unconscious thinkers can overcome an immediate reaction in favor of a utilitarian one. Based on these argu-ments, we propose that unconscious thought can lead to more utilitarian moral judgments than conscious cognitive processes or immediate decision making.

We think that finding evidence indicating that unconscious thinking can lead to more utilitarian moral judgments would be important for several reasons. That is, if we would obtain evidence for this prediction, the current research would provide evidence for a new perspective on the way people make moral judgments, not em-phasizing slow conscious thought (e.g., Kant, 1785) or fast unconscious processes


(e.g., Haidt, 2001), but slow unconscious moral judgments. To our knowledge, this new perspective has not been applied to the literature of moral judgment before, so the union of the two lines of work (research of moral judgment and research of unconscious thinking) may be a strength of the current article and may give new insights into the psychological processes by which moral judgments are formed. Furthermore, investigating this issue can further extend research and theorizing on the new and exciting field of unconscious thinking research.

ThE CurrENT rESEarCh

In our experiment, we presented participants with a complex version of the well-known footbridge dilemma described earlier (Thomson, 1986). After the dilemma had been presented, some participants (the conscious thought condition) could think about their moral judgment for 3 minutes and then were asked to indicate their moral judgment. Other participants (the unconscious thought condition) per-formed a distractor task for 3 minutes which prevented conscious thought about the moral judgment they had to make, after which they were asked to indicate their moral judgment. The remainder of the participants were asked to make a moral judgment immediately (immediate judgment condition).

Participants made their moral judgments by answering five questions related to their approval of sacrificing the life of the large man on the railway bridge in order to save the lives of the five people on the railway track. Building our line of reasoning on unconscious thought theory (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006), we expected participants in the unconscious thought condition to give more utilitar-ian answers to these questions, that is, to approve more of pushing the large man off of the railway bridge in order to save the lives of the five others, compared to both participants in the conscious thought condition and participants who made an immediate judgment. Because earlier research of unconscious thinking did not indicate merits of conscious thought over immediate judgment for making com-plex judgments (Dijksterhuis, 2004; Dijksterhuis et al., 2006), we did not expect to find different moral judgments in the conscious thought and immediate decision conditions.

METhOd

PARTICIPANTs ANd dEsIgN

One-hundred fifty students (40 men and 110 women; average age, M = 22 years, SD = 3.5) at Utrecht University were randomly assigned to one of the three thought conditions.1 On average, the experiments lasted 40 minutes, for which participants were paid 4 Euros (approximately U.S. $5 at the time our experiment was con-ducted).

1. Gender or age did not affect the results presented here and hence were dropped from the analyses.


PRoCEdURE

The experiment took place in the individual cubicles of the psychology lab at Utrecht University. Participants were seated in front of a computer and the experi-ment was described as a study on moral judgment. After reading a general intro-duction to the experiment, participants were asked to read the following moral dilemma on their computer screens:

On a Wednesday afternoon you are at Utrecht Central Station. You have just come back from some shopping with friends. You bought some clothes and drank coffee together. Now you are on your way home. You walk toward the tram stop. You are a little late for the tram of 5 minutes past three o’clock. You look around and see the tram from Nieuwegein coming. You notice that it is driving way too fast. The driver is panicking and is making gestures behind his window. The brakes of the tram seem to malfunction. The tram is now approaching the tram stop at high speed. A little behind the tram stop you see five students walking to the train sta-tion. They are having an engaged discussion. They are about to cross over to the tram stop. They are not aware that the tram is speeding toward them. You look around, but nobody else seems to have notice the runaway tram. Also, there is no possibility to warn the five students. You have now reached the start of the tram stop. Right before you, a very large man is reading his newspaper. Thereby, he also does not notice the scenario. You realize that the only way to save the lives of the five students is to push this stranger off the tram stop and onto the tracks where his large body will stop the tram. The stranger will die if you do this, but the five students will be saved.

After reading these materials, participants continued the experiment by pressing a key on the keyboard. After this, participants in the immediate judgment condition were immediately asked for their moral judgments. Participants in the conscious thought condition were asked to “think about their moral judgments about this moral dilemma; specifically, think about whether it would be appropriate for you to push the large man on the tracks in order to save the five students.” For this, they were given 3 minutes. Participants in the unconscious thought condition were told that they would be asked for “their moral judgments about this moral di-lemma; specifically, think about whether it would be appropriate for you to push the large man on the tracks in order to save the five students,” but before giving their moral judgments they were first asked to do another task. This task was a dis-tractor task aimed at preventing conscious thought. For this purpose, we used the “2-back task” (Jonides, Schumacher, Smith, Lauber, Awh, Minoshima, & Koeppe, 1997), which has been used successfully in earlier research by Dijksterhuis (2004). This demanding task affects executive functioning quite severely and can there-fore be expected to successfully eliminate conscious thought. In this task, partici-pants are shown a new number (1 through 9) each second and they are asked to hit a response key each time the new number matches the number that was presented to them two numbers before the new number. The 2-back task lasted for 3 minutes (including an instruction screen that lasted 20 seconds).

Participants in all conditions were asked for their moral judgments using the following five questions: “Is it appropriate for you to push the large man onto the tracks in order to save the five students?”; “To what extent do you hesitate to save


the five students?”; “To what extent do you feel inhibited to sacrifice one person to save the lives of five others?”; “Are you inclined to let the five students die?”; and “Do you feel inclined to save the lives of the five students?” Each question was presented on a different screen, and participants could indicate their answer on a 7-point rating scale which used the same anchors for each question (1 = certainly not, 7 = definitely). Participants’ answers to these five questions were averaged to form a reliable measure for their moral judgments (alpha = .76). Higher scores on this measure indicate a more utilitarian moral judgment (stronger approval of sacrificing the large man in order to save the lives of the five others). At the end of the experiment, participants were thanked, paid for their participation, and thor-oughly debriefed.

rESulTS

Participants’ average answers to the five moral judgment questions were submit-ted to an analysis of variance in which our thought manipulation (unconscious thought vs. conscious thought vs. immediate judgment) served as the independent variable. This analysis showed a main effect of the thought manipulation, F(2, 147) = 4.82, p = .009. As predicted, participants in the unconscious-thought condition approved more of pushing the large man onto the track in order to save the five students (M = 4.2, SD = 0.8) than participants in the conscious thought condition (M = 3.7, SD = 0.9), F(1, 148) = 8.42, p = .004, and the immediate thought condition (M = 3.8, SD = 1.1), F(1, 148) = 5.75, p = .018. Participants’ answers in the conscious thought condition did not differ from participants’ judgments in the immediate judgment condition, F < 1. As expected, our findings indicate that participants in the unconscious thought condition approved more of pushing the large man onto the track in order to save the five students, than participants in conscious thought or immediate decision conditions. So, as predicted, participants in the unconscious thought condition made a more utilitarian moral judgment than participants in conscious thought or immediate decision conditions.

diSCuSSiON

As hypothesized, results indicated that participants who thought unconsciously about the moral dilemma were more willing to make a utilitarian decision than participants who thought consciously or who made an immediate decision. More specifically, we found that participants who were distracted for a few minutes which allowed them to think unconsciously approved more of sacrificing one life in order to save five lives as compared to participants who were asked to con-sciously think about their moral judgments for the same amount of minutes or who were asked to give their moral judgment immediately. Importantly, the cur-rent findings indicate that unconscious thought can lead to more utilitarian moral judgments than both conscious thought and immediate judgment can.

Furthermore, the current findings are in support of a new perspective on the way that moral judgments may be formed. That is, in addition to the perspec-tives that characterize the way people form moral judgments as “moral reason-ing” (e.g., Kohlberg, 1973; Piaget, 1932; Turiel, 1983) and “moral intuition” (e.g.,


Haidt, 2001; Kagan, 1984; Wilson, 1993) and supplementing the dual-process per-spective (Greene et al., 2001) which argues that both reasoning and intuition play crucial roles, the current findings suggest the following: People can also make a moral judgment by taking time to unconsciously think about it. So, it may be only conscious deliberation (see the moral reasoning approach) or fast unconscious processes (see the moral intuition approach) or a combination of both (see the dual-process approach) that people use to come to a moral judgment, but taking some time to unconsciously process information about moral issues might also be a cognitive process that people use to make a moral judgment. Future research may more fully explore the implications of this possibly new perspective on the social psychology of moral judgments.

The current findings also extend on the claim by the earlier dual-process per-spectives on moral decision making (e.g., Greene et al,. 2001) which argued that a conscious control process is needed to override people’s primary reaction to a moral dilemma. That is, the current findings support our suggestion that uncon-scious thought can overcome a first reaction through more elaborate, unconscious control processes, and lead to more utilitarian moral judgment than through con-scious cognitive processes. We argue that these unconscious control processes were able to override people’s primary reaction better than conscious control pro-cesses, because conscious thought is better able to weigh utilitarian consequence versus immediate negative feelings.

The current findings expand our knowledge on the social psychology of uncon-scious thinking, a new and largely unexplored research area (Dijksterhuis et al., 2006). The current findings can be seen as an important replication of unconscious thinking effects: We now know that also moral judgments can be made through unconscious thinking —judgments that might be ubiquitous in real life and im-portant to people. This is also important because in the moral psychology litera-ture suggestions can be found that there is something unique about making moral judgments in that some researchers view moral judgments to be formed primarily by means of careful processes of conscious cognitive reasoning (e.g., Kohlberg, 1973; Piaget, 1932; Turiel, 1983), a suggestion that seems to be countered by our findings. In addition, as described earlier, the current research also proposes the concept of unconscious control processes. Future research can now delve deeper into the characteristics of these control processes, and for example, compare con-scious control processes to unconscious control processes.

CoNCLUsIoNs

Of course, saving the greater number of lives in moral dilemmas at the cost of the life of another person should not be equated with acting in a morally good way. However, the fact that unconscious thinking about a footbridge dilemma can lead to more utilitarian reactions is a novel observation. The current research sug-gests that people can make a moral decision through avoiding thinking about a moral dilemma consciously and instead thereof to think about it unconsciously. Although the current research remains silent about what kind of thinking people actually use most in day-to-day life when forming moral judgments, it indicates that when you have to make a moral judgment, unconscious thinking seems to be the type of processing that leads to the most utilitarian moral decision. Therefore,


the next time you encounter a situation in which a moral judgment is required and you want to make a utilitarian decision, consider doing the following: Do not deliberate on the moral decision consciously, but rather do not think about it for a couple of minutes.

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On Unconscious Morality: The Effects of Unconscious Thinking on Moral Decision Making

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