Measuring the Decision Process in (Moral) Dilemmas: Self-Report Measures of Reliance on Rules, Cost-Benefit Reasoning, Intuition, & Deliberation

Moral decision-making is a topic of great interest in the growing field of moral psychology. Yet, to our knowledge, there are no existing self-report scales for measuring the process of decision-making in individual moral dilemmas (as opposed to general moral attitudes or beliefs about moral decision-making in general), nor are there any equivalent self-report measures of meta-decision-making. We fill these gaps in the methodological toolbox of moral psychology by devising new self-report measures of several of the processes by which people make moral decisions and validate them using realistic moral dilemmas, including six new vignettes that we developed. The resulting scales can be used to measure how much people rely on rules versus cost-benefit reasoning, how much they rely on intuition versus deliberation and whether they integrate these different considerations in the specific moral dilemmas they face in your task or the real world.