The Influence of Associative Learning on Moral Decision-Making

Moral decision- making involving a trade-off between the lives of humans in hypothetical moral dilemmas is a widely-researched topic in psychology. Much research has focused on influences on utilitarian moral decision-making such as personal involvement (Greene et al., 2001), uncertainty (Kusev et al. 2016), and the numbers of people’s lives involved (Nakamura, 2012). However, despite the vast amount of literature claiming that moral behaviour is learned (Mikhail, 2007), no experimental research has investigated how moral decision-making is influenced by associative learning. Therefore, the present research implemented moral rules within an associative learning task, and revealed that moral rules (i) can be learned (ii), are transferred and used in moral decision-making tasks without feedback. The results also revealed that learning accuracy, but not transfer accuracy is influenced by the moral decision- making frame (save/not-save). Based on these findings, future research should investigate whether learned rules or normative utilitarian rules dominate the decision-making process