OS_36.2 - Mortality salience and morality: Thinking about death makes people less utilitarian

Trémolière, B. ¹ , De Neys, W. ^{1, 2} & Bonnefon, J. ^{1, 2}

1 CLLE. Toulouse. France
2 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Toulouse. France

According to the dual-process model of moral judgment, utilitarian responses to moral conflict draw on limited cognitive resources. Terror Management Theory, in parallel, postulates that mortality salience (being reminded of one’s own mortality) mobilizes these resources to suppress thoughts of death out of focal attention. Accordingly, we predicted that individuals under mortality salience would be less likely to give utilitarian responses to moral conflicts involving to harm one person in order to save several. A series of experiments shows that utilitarian responses to these non-lethal harm conflict scenarios are less frequent when participants are reminded of their mortality before reading the scenario. Effects of these reminders of death on utilitarian judgments are then analyzed in terms of cognitive processes by the use of a working memory load manipulation. Finally, these findings raise the question of whether private judgment and public debate about controversial moral issues might be shaped by mortality salience effects, since these issues (e.g., assisted suicide) often involve matters of life and death.