MORAL DECISION MAKING UNDER MONETARY CONSIDERATIONS

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MORAL DECISION MAKING UNDER MONETARY CONSIDERATIONS

Abstract

A moral decision does not always mean rational decision. The moral decision is a choice made based on a person’s feeling and what they believe is proper behavior. We use monetary choices to explore how group size is correlated with the amount of benefit gained by the subject compared to the harm that their decision inflicts on others. To test this behavior, we measure how Amazon Mechanical Turk workers make choices in a game similar to the Dictator Game where their decisions affect simulated participants.

Preliminary work shows that people are more likely to accept inflicting costs to the group if they are offered more money or if the group loses less money per person. My thesis explores how people evaluate the morality of gaining money at a cost to others depending on the amount of personal gain, the cost to others, and the number of people affected. Our experiments will also reveal how individuals behave when making decisions about different sized groups.

We conduct a series of experiments using Amazon Mechanical Turk and Qualtrics while each experiment kept one of the independent variables constant. To the data from each experiment, I fit classification model, multiple logistic regression model and generalized linear mixed model.

Chapter 1  

Introduction

A rational model is usually with respect to an entire goal. Based on models of decision making, a decision maker trying to maximize personal benefit should ignore the fact that they would be harming others at all times for the sake of their own personal gain. My research seeks to answer the following questions: If an individual is presented with the opportunity to give or take certain amounts of money from a group, will the individual engage in the same thought process as if that individual were not an individual, but a group? Will the individual make a different decision if they are affecting only one other individual? Is it possible that the size of the group results in a different decision made on the part of the individual?

It is important to note that the test subjects do not know the identity of the individuals in the group affected by their decisions. We know that people who know each other are less likely to take money from others. In our experiments, we want to investigate how people make decisions when people do not know each other. This is acceptable since previous research has shown that, when presented with the choice to harm or benefit different groups whose members were unknown to the test subjects, it was found that the choices were random (Baron, 1995). This previous research was not concerned with different sizes of groups; therefore, our study will reveal how group size is correlated with the amount of harm or benefit, which is monetary in this case.

This research explores how people make decisions when facing monetary considerations that pit the interests of the group against benefit for oneself. For example, given a choice to either earn $100 at a cost of $1 to five other people, or to earn nothing but cost those five people nothing, most people would probably choose to earn $100. On the other hand, given an offer to earn $1, while the other five people lose $100, most people would probably refuse the offer. Our major interest is in determining the impact of individual versus group loss and correlation of personal gain and the victim’s losses. Does a decisionmaker prefer to inflict monetary losses on others for a monetary gain that is less, equal, or more than the loss of the victims? Do decision makers prefer to inflict monetary harm on individuals or prefer to harm a group?

The experiment, which will be described in more detail in subsequent sections of this thesis, examines the tradeoffs involved in profiting from other people’s losses. Our experiment will ask a number of participants whether they were willing to tax a group of people that would lose a variable amount of money for one’s own gain. The experiment we describe here examines the tradeoffs involved in profiting from other people’s losses. We will model the acceptability of such tradeoffs in face of changing group size. Is it more acceptable to tax many people a little, or to tax few individuals a lot, in order to derive a personal gain? This experiment will quantify the amount of possible money for which individuals are willing to take or give money to others and reveal how individuals behave when their decision affect different-sized groups.

[1] Some of chapter 1 is from a term paper for IST 597 Special Topics: Decision making, which was coauthored with David Reitter, Chaoran Chen, Jessika Kinley Turner, Jiadi Liu, Nasim Motalebi, Jacob Oury, Sayali Phadke, Yasmin Tantawi.

MORAL DECISION MAKING UNDER MONETARY CONSIDERATIONS

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