How we make moral decisions | Social Sciences - Phys.org

Imagine that one day you're riding the train and decide to hop the turnstile to avoid paying the fare. It probably won't have a big impact on the financial well-being of your local transportation system Anne Trafton, Writer at MIT. 

But now ask yourself, "What if everyone did that?" The outcome is much different—the system would likely go bankrupt and no one would be able to ride the train anymore.

Moral philosophers have long believed this type of reasoning, known as universalization, is the best way to make moral decisions. But do ordinary people spontaneously use this kind of moral judgment in their everyday lives?

In a study of several hundred people, MIT and Harvard University researchers have confirmed that people do use this strategy in particular situations called "threshold problems." These are social dilemmas in which harm can occur if everyone, or a large number of people, performs a certain action. The authors devised a mathematical model that quantitatively predicts the judgments they are likely to make. They also showed, for the first time, that children as young as four years old can use this type of reasoning to judge right and wrong...

The researchers also found that they could use their data to create a mathematical model that explains how people take different factors into account, such as the number of people who want to do the action and the number of people doing it that would cause harm. The model accurately predicts how people's judgments change when these factors change.

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Additional resources

Sydney Levine et al. The logic of universalization guides moral judgment, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2014505117

Source: Phys.org