Thank you for your participation.

The study you just completed investigated under what conditions individuals deviate from giving consistent judgments. In this study, you were first given a scenario where you had to judge the distance it would take a locomotive would stop if it hit a man or you were given a scenario where you had the judge the moral permissibility of pushing a man to his death to save five individuals. You then made judgments about the other scenario.

Our primary interest was how you responded to the second scenario based on your responses in the first scenario. There has been a lot of research demonstrating that we all have a propensity to seek consistency and order in the world. In fact, some research has demonstrated that when we are inconsistent it makes us uncomfortable, so we strive for consistency in order to not feel bad. However, work in other areas, particularly moral psychology, has demonstrated that we make inconsistent moral judgments across similar situations. In other words, there are some factors, such as moral intuition, that might lead us to make inconsistent judgments. In order to examine the impact of moral intuition on judgment consistency, we varied the order that individuals made their moral judgments.

If you have any further questions about this study, please contact Aaron Scherer at (319)335-0268, or e-mail: aaron-scherer@uiowa.edu.

For further reading: Mikhail, J. (2007). Universal moral grammar: Theory, evidence and the future. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(4), 143-152.

Event Judgments