ArticleNature human behaviour2026
Learning from outcomes shapes reliance on moral rules versus cost-benefit reasoning.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Intention-Outcome Trade-Off in Moral Character Learning.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- The Decision Process Scale (DPS): Self-report measures of reliance on rules, cost-benefit reasoning, intuition, and deliberation in (moral) decision-making.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- No Evidence of Experimenter Demand Effects in Three Online Psychology Experiments.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Large language models show amplified cognitive biases in moral decision-making.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Many controversies arise from disagreements between moral rules and 'utilitarian' cost-benefit reasoning (CBR). Here we show how moral learning from consequences can produce individual differences in people's reliance on rules versus CBR. In a new paradigm, participants (total N = 2,328) faced realistic dilemmas between one choice prescribed by a moral rule and one by CBR. The participants observed the consequences of their decision before the next dilemma. Across four experiments, we found adaptive changes in decision-making over 13 choices: participants adjusted their decisions according to which decision strategy (rules or CBR) produced better consequences. Using computational modelling, we showed that many participants learned about decision strategies in general (metacognitive learning) rather than specific actions. Their learning transferred to incentive-compatible donation decisions and moral convictions beyond the experiment. We conclude that metacognitive learning from consequences shapes moral decision-making and that individual differences in morality may be surprisingly malleable to learning from experience.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.