Moral psychology
Problems Measuring Utilitarian and Deontological Moral Thinking
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
A popular method for measuring individual differences in moral decision-making relies on mathematically flawed formulas and produces highly unreliable scores.
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Role on claims
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The moral Process Dissociation Procedure (PDP), designed to isolate individual differences in deontological and utilitarian inclinations, suffers from mathematical flaws and exhibits critically low reliability for the deontological parameter.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
The Process Dissociation Procedure (PDP), which is widely used to measure individual differences in utilitarian and deontological reasoning, is highly unreliable at the individual level due to mathematically flawed formulas.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
The reliance on hypothetical, written scenarios across moral psychology research limits our ability to confidently generalize these findings to real-life, high-stakes moral crises.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Other — Simulation of PDP formulas plus an online empirical PDP/high-conflict dilemma battery; reliability of U and D parameters
- N
- N=1010 · 1,043 Prolific recruits minus 33 failed attention checks; plus 10,000 simulated responders per simulation
- Population
- Prolific Academic adults completing moral PDP dilemma pairs
- Outcome
- Internal reliability of process-dissociation utilitarianism and deontology scores (about 0.30 and 0.33) and their correlation with a high-conflict dilemma battery (0.51)
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Problems Measuring Utilitarian and Deontological Moral Thinking
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10,000 simulated responders in Simulation 1
We simulated 10,000 responders with completely random response patterns with R (version 3.6.3) for the simulation.
10,000 simulated responders in Simulation 2
Again, we simulated 10,000 responders with 20 binary values representing 10 C and 10 IC dilemmas.
Key findings
The simulations revealed that the mathematical formulas of the PDP generate strong, expected correlations with traditional moral scores even when using completely random data. In the empirical data, participants accepted harm 56.8% of the time in incongruent dilemmas and 23.9% of the time in congruent dilemmas. However, the reliability estimates for the calculated moral parameters were critically low, averaging just 0.30 for utilitarianism and 0.33 for deontology. Furthermore, the correlation between the PDP's traditional score and the alternative high-conflict moral dilemma battery was only 0.51, suggesting they do not reliably measure the same concept.
Methodology
The researchers evaluated the moral Process Dissociation Procedure (PDP) using both simulations and empirical data. They ran simulations with 10,000 simulated responders each to check if the mathematical formulas themselves create artificial patterns. Additionally, they collected online survey data from 1,043 participants, excluding 33 for failing attention checks, to analyze actual response consistency. Participants completed 9 moral PDP dilemma pairs (containing both congruent and incongruent moral dilemmas) and 12 high-conflict moral dilemmas from an alternative battery.
Limitations
This study does not show that process dissociation is entirely useless for group-level experimental research, as aggregate data can cancel out individual errors. It also does not prove that the dual-process model of moral psychology is wrong, but only that this specific tool fails to measure its components at the individual level. Lastly, because the empirical data was collected through online self-reports, it does not demonstrate how participants would behave in real-world, high-stakes moral dilemmas.
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