The role of social presence on moral decision-making : realistic settings for the understanding of utilitarian and deontological preferences

In our modern societies, moral situations often refer to saving, hurting, condemning, or sparing peers.

The direction of our moral preferences (e.g., utilitarian, deontological) is inherently shaped by social norms and social context. However, current experimental research on moral cognition suffers from two main limitations.

First, while a wealth of research has examined individuals moral preferences in single settings, no research to our knowledge has examined individuals moral preferences in real-life social settings.

Second, because of the long-standing paradigm involving the use of hypothetical and sacrificial dilemmas to measure decision-making (i.e., save or sacrifice lives), we assume there is a discrepancy between hypothetical and realistic moral decision-making.

Compared to the current state-of-the-art, YourMORALS will allow for the first time to assess the role of social presence on individuals moral preferences, shedding light on both cognitive and neural processes underlying responses to realistic scenarios.

This research will combine behavioural and neurophysiological paradigms by using a unique experimental system allowing to mimic social context through dyadic interactions.

The proposed experiments will permit to clarify the role of social presence through, 1) indirect exposition to others moral choices (single setting), 2) direct presence of other (social setting). The latest innovative EEG-based hyperscanning techniques will be used to measure multiple brains activity.

We will also construct an open, standardized and realistic moral dilemmas dataset.

As well as opening new perspectives in social neuroscience and psychology, this project will add theoretical and methodological expertise to my skill-set by providing the most suitable research environment for my career development, at the Moral and Social Brain Lab, in one of the top-ranking universities of Europe (Ghent University), under Prof.

Emilie Caspar supervision.