ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Universals and variations in moral decisions made in 42 countries by 70,000 participants.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The effect of cognitive load, ego depletion, induction and time restriction on moral judgments about sacrificial dilemmas: a meta-analysis.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Pooled it
- How large language models judge and influence human cooperation.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Why moral judgements change across variations of trolley-like problems.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- Aristotle's intuitionist approach to morality guides a new direction in moral psychology.Humanities & social sciences communications · 2026Article
- Video games as stimuli in neuroimaging studies: a minireview.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Review
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- Digital pathways beyond Western-centric participants.Behavior research methods · 2025Review
- Adolescents Are More Utilitarian Than Adults in Group Moral Decision-Making.PsyCh journal · 2025Article
- Choosing between bad and worse: investigating choice in moral dilemmas through the lens of control.Cognitive processing · 2025Article
- Disparity in attitudes regarding assisted dying among physicians and the general public in Japan.BMC medical ethics · 2025Article
- Laws about bodily damage originate from shared intuitions about the value of body parts.Science advances · 2025Article
- Cross-cultural differences in resolving sacrificial dilemmas: choices made and how they relate to judgments of their social acceptability.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Culturally-attuned AI: Implicit learning of altruistic cultural values through inverse reinforcement learning.PloS one · 2025Article
- Fair allocation of resources in the moral dilemma of triage.Frontiers in sociology · 2025Article
- A spiking neuron model of moral judgment in trolley dilemmas.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Can large language models help augment English psycholinguistic datasets?Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Morality in the anthropocene: The perversion of compassion and punishment in the online world.PNAS nexus · 2024Review
- Foreign-language effects in cross-cultural behavioral research: Evidence from the Tanzanian Hadza.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
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5 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
When do people find it acceptable to sacrifice one life to save many? Cross-cultural studies suggested a complex pattern of universals and variations in the way people approach this question, but data were often based on small samples from a small number of countries outside of the Western world. Here we analyze responses to three sacrificial dilemmas by 70,000 participants in 10 languages and 42 countries. In every country, the three dilemmas displayed the same qualitative ordering of sacrifice acceptability, suggesting that this ordering is best explained by basic cognitive processes rather than cultural norms. The quantitative acceptability of each sacrifice, however, showed substantial country-level variations. We show that low relational mobility (where people are more cautious about not alienating their current social partners) is strongly associated with the rejection of sacrifices for the greater good (especially for Eastern countries), which may be explained by the signaling value of this rejection. We make our dataset fully available as a public resource for researchers studying universals and variations in human morality.
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