Abstract:

Moral decision-making is operationalized by the final choice making after weighing the advantages and disadvantages of behaviors and their following outcomes, when an individual faces a moral dilemma with conflicting moral values or needs. The traditional moral dilemma is though a classical and established paradigm for studying moral decision, however, still has been widely criticized for its unrealistic scenarios and lack of effective indicators to quantify utilitarian and deontological response, which strongly affect the accurate interpretation of moral decision-making. To overcome the shortcomings of traditional moral dilemma paradigm, the CNI model of moral decision-making uses multinomial modeling to quantify the individual sensitivity regarding consequences and moral norms, and general behavioral preference, and therefore can more clearly identify the factors that affect moral decision-making. Future research should focus on further factors that affect moral decision-making, the ecological validity of moral scenarios, and cross-cultural generalisability to optimize the CNI model, and the investigation of the underlying psychological mechanism of moral decision-making.

Key words: moral decision, moral dilemma, CNI model, dual processing theory