Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Theses
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ItemUnderstanding process dynamics and individual differences in moral judgement updating( 2021)Moral judgements play an important role in society - they shape interpersonal relationships, group dynamics, and form the basis for our legal and political systems. Yet, moral judgements are not made in isolation, but in a complex informational context. Further, moral judgements often need to be updated as we learn new information. However, the moral judgement process in such dynamic environments, and individual differences in moral judgement across informational contexts, are poorly understood. In this thesis a new paradigm was developed for studying moral judgements of fairness-related actions, which was used across three studies to derive novel insights into these issues. In Study 1 we characterised moral judgement updating, showing that people flexibly switch between relying on context-independent to relying on context-dependent moral norms, as they learn contextual information. While doing so, participants remained stable with respect to broader moral virtues of generosity, balance and (condemning) selfishness. In Study 2, we showed that individual differences in importance people assign to norms when making their decisions differed according to their personality, for both context-independent and context-dependent norms. The importance people placed on selfishness- and generosity-based norms in their judgements correlated with Agreeableness, Extraversion, Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience, stably across two judgements with and without contextual information. In Study 3, we showed that people slow their moral judgements when expecting contextual updates and when judging negatively valenced actions. Using the Diffusion Decision Modelling (DDM) framework, we show that these slowing effects can be understood as changes in distinct aspects of the unfolding decision process – shifts in the boundary settings (for context expectancy) and shifts in the bias parameter and the drift rate parameter (for valence). Across these studies, the thesis presents a new understanding of moral judgement as a highly context-sensitive and dynamic decision process, and suggests that this context-sensitivity may be supported by decision-making processes related to caution (and confidence). Moreover, I discuss the potential usefulness of DDM framework to aid further investigations of moral judgement processes and inform our understanding of neural underpinnings of moral judgements in information-dynamic settings.