The needs of the many: Exploring associations of personality with third-party judgments of public health-related utilitarian rule violations

• Published in: PloS one 2023-04, Vol.18 (4), p.e0284558-e0284558
• Main Authors: Behnke, Alexander, Armbruster, Diana, Strobel, Anja
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Altruism; Antisocial personality disorder; Biology and Life Sciences; Cognition; Cognitive ability; Cooperation; Decision making; Emotional factors; Emotions; Emotions - physiology; Empathy; Epidemics; Ethical aspects; Evaluation; Health care disparities; Humans; Immunization; Judgment - physiology; Laws, regulations and rules; Medicine and Health Sciences; Morality; Morals; Personality; Personality traits; Public Health; Public health administration; Punishment; Social behavior; Social Sciences; Third party; Vaccines; Violations
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0284558

Safeguarding the rights of minorities is crucial for just societies. However, there are conceivable situations where minority rights might seriously impede the rights of the majority. Favoring the minority in such cases constitutes a violation of utilitarian principles. To explore the emotional, cognitive, and punitive responses of observers of such utilitarian rule transgressions, we conducted an online study with 1004 participants. Two moral scenarios (vaccine policy and epidemic) were rephrased in the third-party perspective. In both public health-related scenarios, the protagonist opted against the utilitarian option, which resulted in more fatalities in total, but avoided harm to a minority. Importantly, in vaccine policy, members of the minority cannot be identified beforehand and thus harm to them would have been rather accidental. Contrariwise, in epidemic, minority members are identifiable and would have needed to be deliberately selected. While the majority of participants chose not to punish the scenarios' protagonists at all, 30.1% judged that protecting the minority over the interests of the majority when only accidental harm would have occurred (vaccine policy) was worthy of punishment. In comparison, only 11.2% opted to punish a protagonist whose decision avoided deliberately selecting (and thus harming) a minority at the cost of the majority (epidemic). Emotional responses and appropriateness ratings paralleled these results. Furthermore, complex personality × situation interactions revealed the influence of personality features, i.e., trait psychopathy, empathy, altruism, authoritarianism, need for cognition and faith in intuition, on participants' responses. The results further underscore the need to consider the interaction of situational features and inter-individual differences in moral decisions and sense of justice.