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An Examination of Mind Perception and Moral Reasoning in Ethical Decision-Making: A Mixed-Methods Approach

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Abstract

Taking an abductive, mixed-methods approach, we explore the content of people’s moral deliberations. In Study 1, we gather qualitative data from small groups of graduate business students discussing moral dilemmas. We analyze their conversations with a focus on how participants perceive others’ thoughts, opinions, and evaluations about the dilemmas and incorporate them into their reasoning. Ascribing such capacities to think and feel to others—i.e., mind perception—is central to morality. We use the conversations in Study 1 to identify whose minds participants perceive. Study 1 also identifies how particular elements of deliberation—including the exploration of consequences, acknowledging ambivalence, seeking alternative options, the development of deep feelings, and the search for a moral compass—are linked to these perceptions of others’ minds. In Study 2 (an exploratory, online experiment with 378 participants), we find that priming individuals with specific forms of mind perception can influence the elements of moral reasoning they employ, and we find evidence that the presence of elements of reasoning are linked to participants’ final choices in a business-related ethical dilemma.

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Notes

  1. Throughout this paper we make a descriptive distinction between “moral reasoning,” which in Haidt’s (2001) work is linked causally to outcomes, “moral thinking,” which Haidt and Kesebir (2010) use to denote reasoning without a strong causal link, and “moral deliberation,” which we use in the research described here to denote the articulation of participants’ thinking about a moral situation (e.g., our scenarios). It is important to note, however, that we are advancing this difference only as a practical way of distinguishing existing points of view in the literature. We avoid making a stronger conceptual claim because some authors concerned with the intricacies of thinking, reasoning, and deliberation would argue that making such distinctions cannot be fully justified (e.g., Mercier and Sperber, 2011) and a detailed consideration of these issues is beyond the scope of our work.

  2. Our overall sample includes 13 groups, of which 2 were pilot groups and 2 groups were incomplete (i.e., where one person failed to show up). These four groups are not included in the analysis presented here.

  3. The instruction to arrive at a collective choice was provided as a way to generate discussion and deliberation. In this study we were not specifically concerned with decision outcomes, as we are interested in individual reasoning rather than group choice.

  4. A useful analog is to consider “thought units” (Budd et al., 1967; Butterfield et al., 1996; Gioia and Sims, 1986), which are used to capture a single idea, item of information, or clear meaning, and need to be explicitly separated when a single expression includes multiple ideas, but our approach operates in reverse. Unlike “thought units,” our “deliberation episodes” were seldom as short as a single sentence or utterance, and the analysis involved expanding to include several sentences.

  5. The development of the final prompts for each condition involved incremental changes in the way responses were elicited, using iterative pilot studies, continuing until the vast majority of participants in the pilot studies responded to them accurately. It is important to note that the pilot studies (conducted on MTurk) evaluated the responses to the initial prompts but did not evaluate the effects of these responses. In other words, the point of the pilot studies was only to establish the effectiveness of the priming manipulation.

  6. Interestingly, participants in the past experience condition were more likely to be excluded from our final sample (31%) for not following instructions compared to the other three conditions (1.8–24.1%). One plausible explanation for this is that it was difficult for people to recall past experiences relevant to the situation at hand.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Marriott School of Business, Brigham Young University, 579 TNRB, Provo, UT, 84602, USA

    Isaac H. Smith

  2. University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Oshkosh, USA

    Andrew T. Soderberg

  3. Bocconi University, Milan, Italy

    Ekaterina Netchaeva

  4. Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, USA

    Gerardo A. Okhuysen

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  1. Isaac H. Smith
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  4. Gerardo A. Okhuysen
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Correspondence to Isaac H. Smith.

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This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval for Study 1 was granted by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Utah. Approval for Study 2 was granted by the Institutional Review Board of Cornell University (Protocol ID# 1902008568).

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Smith, I.H., Soderberg, A.T., Netchaeva, E. et al. An Examination of Mind Perception and Moral Reasoning in Ethical Decision-Making: A Mixed-Methods Approach. J Bus Ethics 183, 671–690 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-05022-9

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