Moral Behavior

Today in morning meeting, Brad Thomas and Aaron Scherer presented a proposal for a study to investigate the moral behavior between VMPC patients and normals. The impetus for the study came from a social psych experiment in which participants where randomly assigned to three groups. In one group, the control, the members had to think about an average Tuesday. In the anger condition, the participants had to think about a time that they were angry. And in the last condition, the participants had to think about an instance of a moral violation. After the participants thought of their particular scenario, they were invited to participate in a 10 questions trivia test. There were two conditions, one with a reward of 20 cents per correct answer and the other with no reward. Be reminded that this study occurs on-line with participants participating in the safety of their own home. The way that participants were placed between the two conditions was through a flip of a coin, flipped by the participants themselves.

It is assumed that the with the flip of a coin you will land heads at a rate of 50% and tails at an equal rate. Deviation from chance (50%) would indicate some sort of outside influence. In the experiment there were the three conditions. In the control condition, 60% of the people ended up in the favorable condition, while in the anger condition a similar percentage of people were in the favorable condition. However, in the moral violation group over 75% of participants were in the favorable condition. A statistically significant and interesting result.

So what made these people cheat? That was the question and the supposed result of the study. These people are at home, receiving $4 dollars for initially participating in the study and then have the opportunity to make $2 more dollars if they end up in the favorable condition. Did the people in the moral violation group think that, "My cheating isn't as bad as that moral violation that I just thought of."

So the question is, how will the VMPCs perform in a similar situation. It has been shown before that these patients are impaired in decision making. It is the hypothesis of the researchers that there will be an increase in cheating behavior for developmental VMPC as compared to acquired VMPCs and normals.

The paradigm that they proposed was using a weighted die to decide what task patients would do. They proposed that 4 of the 6 side would be the unfavorable condition and 2 of the 6 favorable. However, with the weighted die, the favorable condition should only appear 2-4% of the time. A subject indicating a favorable toss would most likely be lying. However, a problem with studying these patients is the small sample size (n = ~10).

I proposed another way to investigate this question...

You have a task in which they are to complete some large number of difficult math problems, say 100.
It is assumed that these problems are difficult enough, yet small enough that they will get them wrong and also not take much time on them (they may even be multiple choice?).

The participants are then allowed to grade their answers with a flawed key. This is where the interesting part occurs. You could weight blocks of questions. Say you divide the test of 100 questions into 10 blocks of 10 questions and reward correct answers. However, with each block of 10 questions you increase the reward by a multiplier (perhaps also have a counterbalanced condition). In the first block the multiplier is small with incremental increases in the multiplier to the last block.

This design allows for investigation and interpretation from many facets. You can look at the raw number of instances of cheating, treating each problem as a moral situation (100 per subject!). You could also look at the blocks. Do people cheat at a higher rate in the blocks with higher reward as compared to the lower reward? Do the VMPC patients show consistently high levels of cheating across blocks? Similar to Chris's suggestion of the psychophysical measure, you could look to see if there is a certain break point in the multiplier which shows an increase in cheating. Does the break occur at 7 for normals as compared to 4 for VMPCs?

I don't know if this is actually showing morality or if people are just following the key...

I'm not sure, but it is something interesting to think about.

I think that this is an interesting but very difficult topic to study. Perhaps there will be some interesting follow ups and maybe some results.