Perspective-Taking Accessibility (and Not the Type of Psychological Processing) Informs People’s Utilitarian Moral Judgments

According to Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT; Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006) complex decisions options should be processed unconsciously (during a distraction period) rather than consciously, if one wants to make the optimal choice. Some authors (e.g., Ham & van den Bos, 2010) have applied this theory to moral decision-making and found that people are more utilitarian in response to the footbridge dilemma when they process the decision-making information unconsciously as opposed to consciously. However, throughout the moral decision-making literature, no authors have considered the importance of full perspective- taking (PT) accessibility (having access to multiple perspectives in moral scenarios) on people’s moral choices and judgments. Accordingly, we found that presenting full PT accessibility to participants resulted in consistent utilitarian judgments regardless of the type of psychological processing employed. Therefore, we argue that unbiased and accessible information is more important in producing normative decisions than the way in which people process information.