Reliability of Moral Decision Making: Evidence from the Trolley Dilemma

The application of framing effects in the field of moral judgment has offered a golden opportunity to assess the reliability of people’s moral judgments and decisions. To date, however, these studies are still scarce and they suffer from multiple methodological issues. Therefore, the present study aims to provide further insights into the reliability of moral judgments while fixing these methodological shortcomings. In the current study, we employed the classic trolley dilemma moral decision-making paradigm to determine the extent to which moral decisions are susceptible to framing effects. A total of 1040 participants were included in the study. The data revealed that choices of participants did not significantly differ between the two frames. Equivalence tests confirmed that the associated effect size was very small. Further exploratory analyses revealed an unplanned interaction between the framing effect and the target of the framing manipulation. This result became from marginally statistically significant to insignificant following different sensitivity analyses. The implications and limitations of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.