Are we moral beings? Of course I am, but you're not: a study on our partial and incidental morality

The aim of the study is to investigate some of the affective mechanisms that come into play when we deal with a dilemmatic moral decision. Since we hypothesize a crucial role of the personal involvement, to elicit or obstruct its triggering, in a between-subjects experiment (n = 204) we manipulated two contextual variables within the classic trolley problem (Foot, 1967): on the one hand to favour or disfavour the perspective taking we phrased the same dilemma in the 1st person and in the 3rd person; on the other, as in Bleske-Rechek (2010), we manipulated the relatedness between the decision maker and the potential victim. The results confirm our hypothesis: the personal involvement is affected by our manipulations and it has a deep impact on participants’ choices and judgements. Analysing the attribution of emotions and the evaluations of the choices and of the agents’ behavior, the results show that they applied double standards tending to get rid both from responsibility and from bad feelings in the 1st person, while they over-attribute bad feelings and guilt to the third-party decision maker, possibly due to a self-serving bias.