Navigating moral trade-offs

Kai Barron, Robert Stüber and Roel van Veldhuizen

Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Economics of Change from WZB Berlin Social Science Center

Abstract: An extensive literature documents that people are willing to sacrifice personal material gain to adhere to a moral motive. However, less is known about the psychological mechanisms that operate when two moral motives come into conflict. We hypothesize that individuals adhere to the moral motive that aligns with their self-interest. We test this hypothesis using experiments that induce a conflict between two of the most-studied moral motives: fairness and truth-telling. Consistent with our hypothesis and across experiments, our results show that individuals do prefer to adhere to the moral motive that is more aligned with their self-interest.

Keywords: Moral dilemmas; Dictator game; Lying game; Motives; Motivated reasoning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D01 D63 D90 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/306849/1/1909523631.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:wzbeoc:306849

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Economics of Change from WZB Berlin Social Science Center Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().