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Consistency and contrast effects in moral evaluation of euthanasia

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Abstract

Euthanasia is a highly controversial topic. One of the arguments against legalisation of euthanasia is that it would lead to an attitudinal slippery slope effect; that is, a shift in attitudes toward euthanasia even toward cases which were not legalised. The present study tested a possible mechanism which may lead to such shift in two experiments. Participants judged morality of euthanasia in two hypothetical scenarios describing patients requesting euthanasia. We found that participants who first evaluated a case of a non-terminally ill patient suffering from fatigue afterward considered euthanasia for a terminally ill patient suffering from pain more morally right than participants who evaluated euthanasia in the latter case first. Furthermore, we found that presenting the case of the patient suffering from fatigue before asking about attitudes toward legality of euthanasia led participants to oppose it more. The study suggests that public’s expressed attitudes toward legality of euthanasia might be easily influenced by a choice of illustrative examples. However, the change in attitudes predicted by the slippery slope effect was not observed.

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Notes

  1. Active euthanasia is defined as “intentionally administering medications or other interventions to cause the patient’s death [...]” with voluntary active euthanasia specifically limited to “[...] at the patient’s explicit request and with full informed consent” (Emanuel 1994, p. 1891). Some other possible definitions of euthanasia also specify the patient’s condition (e.g., World Health Organization 2004, p. 25) and some of the cases of euthanasia within the scope of definition used by Emanuel would fall outside of the scope of the definition by WHO.

  2. Based on the slippery slope argument we predicted that participants evaluating the pain scenario first (pain-fatigue group) should evaluate the fatigue scenario as less wrong and that participants evaluating the fatigue scenario first (fatigue-pain group) should evaluate the pain scenario as more wrong. These two order effects combined should result in generally higher wrongness ratings for the fatigue-pain group, which is tested by the predictor order.

  3. Participation in both studies was anonymous. Therefore, it is possible that some of the participants took part in both studies. Using a recent estimate by Stewart et al. (2015) that an average laboratory samples out of about 7300 MTurk workers, approximately 33 participants took part in both our studies. A recent study (Chandler et al. 2015) found reduced effect sizes when the same experiment was given twice to the same participants. However, given that the possible nonnaïveté of participants is likely only to reduce the effects studied in the present study and that the expected number of participants who took part in both studies is relatively low, we do not consider participants’ nonnaïveté a significant problem.

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Acknowledgements

This research has been supported by the Internal grant of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, ref. no. FF-VG2016-79, co-awarded to Marek Vranka.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Prague College of Psychosocial Studies, Hekrova 805, 149 00, Prague, Czech Republic

    Štěpán Bahník

  2. Charles University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Smetanovo nábřeží 6, 110 01, Prague, Czech Republic

    Marek A. Vranka

  3. Faculty of Arts, Charles University, nám. J. Palacha 2, 116 38, Prague, Czech Republic

    Marek A. Vranka

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  1. Štěpán Bahník
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Correspondence to Štěpán Bahník.

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The study was funded by the Internal grant of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University (ref no. FF-VG2016–79). All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Implicit informed consent was used in the study, which did not pose any risks to the participants.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest associated with publication of the manuscript.

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Bahník, Š., Vranka, M.A. Consistency and contrast effects in moral evaluation of euthanasia. Curr Psychol 40, 822–830 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-018-0012-7

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