Harm to others outweighs harm to self in moral decision making.

ABSTRACT: Concern for the suffering of others is central to moral decision making. How humans evaluate others' suffering, relative to their own suffering, is unknown. We investigated this question by inviting subjects to trade off profits for themselves against pain experienced either by themselves or an anonymous other person. Subjects made choices between different amounts of money and different numbers of painful electric shocks. We independently varied the recipient of the shocks (self vs. other) and whether the choice involved paying to decrease pain or profiting by increasing pain. We built computational models to quantify the relative values subjects ascribed to pain for themselves and others in this setting. In two studies we show that most people valued others' pain more than their own pain

SUBMITTER: Crockett MJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4260587 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature