Poker-faced morality: : Concealing emotions leads to utilitarian decision making

This paper examines how making deliberate efforts to regulate aversive affective responses influences people’s decisions in moral dilemmas. We hypothesize that emotion regulation—mainly suppression and reappraisal—will encourage utilitarian choices in emotionally charged contexts and that this effect will be mediated by the decision maker’s decreased deontological inclinations. In Study 1, we find that individuals who endorsed the utilitarian option (vs. the deontological option) were more likely to suppress their emotional expressions. In Studies 2a, 2b, and 3, we instruct participants to either regulate their emotions, using one of two different strategies (reappraisal vs. suppression), or not to regulate, and we collect data through the concurrent monitoring of psycho-physiological measures. We find that participants are more likely to make utilitarian decisions when asked to suppress their emotions rather than when they do not regulate their affect. In Study 4, we show that one’s reduced deontological inclinations mediate the relationship between emotion regulation and utilitarian decision making. 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction coined the term ‘‘necessary evils’’ to refer to tasks in which a perIn the 2009 film Up in the Air (2009), the character Natalie Keener, played by Anna Kendrick, takes a job with Career Transition Corporation, a company that institutes layoffs on behalf of other companies. Kendrick proposes a plan to cut costs by conducting layoffs via videoconferencing. Piloting the virtual-firing program online, with no trace of emotion on her face, Natalie matter-of-factly informs Mr. Samuels, a 57-year-old employee, that he has been let go. Even as Mr. Samuels becomes upset and starts to cry, Natalie continues to suppress her emotional expressions, mechanically telling him to pack his belongings. In both our professional and personal lives, we often face moral dilemmas in which making a choice based on our principles of right and wrong (i.e., a deontological approach) conflicts with making a choice based on creating the greatest good (i.e., a utilitarian approach). More specifically, decision makers in various professional settings regularly engage in harmful actions toward others in pursuit of greater overall goals. Managers sometimes must fire employees to save their company, judges sometimes hand down capital punishment to uphold legal principles, and regulators often approve new drugs that can have dangerous side effects. Like Natalie, people often appeal to utilitarian logic to justify their decisions to harm others. Molinsky and Margolis (2005) son must knowingly and intentionally cause harm to another human being in the service of achieving some perceived greater good or purpose. Interviews conducted to determine how professionals who carry out necessary evils experience such incidents (e.g., surgeons operating on infants) found that 46% reported staying psychologically disengaged (Margolis & Molinsky, 2008). As a result, they denied experiencing prosocial emotions toward those (if only temporarily) harmed and reported trying to dissociate from the harmed target’s experience. This research highlights that once a utilitarian decision has been made and is about to harm someone, people often try to detach themselves emotionally from the event and show behavior lacking in interpersonal sensitivity. Whereas this line of research treats emotional expressions as a consequence of justifying utilitarian decision-making, our research asks if regulating emotional expression can lead to more utilitarian decision making when people face moral dilemmas. Given the pervasiveness of such choices in our daily lives, in this paper we aim to investigate the emotion-regulation processes that precede moral decision making and to understand the mechanism by which suppressing emotional expressions may lead to more utilitarian decision making. Utilitarian vs. deontological decision making in moral psychology Given the importance of moral decision making in dilemmas, moral psychology research has begun to identify the psychological 50 J.J. Lee, F. Gino / Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 126 (2015) 49–64 processes by which people evaluate moral dilemmas. Cognitive and emotional processes are often in conflict when a moral decision needs to be made (Bartels, 2008; Greene, 2001; Greene, Morelli, Lowenberg, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2008). One early manifestation was found in neuroimaging studies conducted to distinguish how individuals respond to personal, impersonal, and non-moral dilemmas (Greene, 2001). Personal dilemmas, in particular, trigger processing in brain regions closely associated with emotions, and this affective processing interferes with the utilitarian choice to avoid doing harm to others. Such emotions have also been identified in the form of a host of discrete intrapersonal emotions (such as victim distress and empathy; Blair, 1995), as well as visceral, physiological reactions associated with engaging in harmful actions (Cushman, Gray, Gaffey, & Mendes, 2012). When such strong aversive emotions are tied to a moral dilemma, people no longer prefer the utilitarian option (‘‘Doing harm is morally acceptable in circumstances that improve well-being’’) and instead tend to choose the more morally intuitive, deontological one (‘‘Doing harm is morally unacceptable’’). As this research from the dual-process model of moral judgment suggests, when people face difficult, personal moral dilemmas, both cognitive and emotional considerations can influence their decisions. Researchers have since proposed several ways in which one can elect the more utilitarian choice even in the presence of strong emotions. For example, when people engage in deliberative thinking (Greene, 2001; Greene, Nystrom, Engell, Darley, & Cohen, 2004) or have a higher working memory capacity (Bartels, 2008; Feltz & Cokely, 2008; Moore, Clark, & Kane, 2008), they tend to make more utilitarian judgments. Whereas this research has recognized the important role of cognitive styles and executive functions in driving moral judgments and decisions, recent evidence suggests that there is an alternate, affective route to influence our utilitarian vs. deontological decisions. For example, individuals who suffer damage to brain areas associated with emotions make more utilitarian decisions (Ciaramelli, Muccioli, Ladavas, & di Pellegrino, 2007; Koenigs et al., 2007), and visualizing or imagining a harm vividly (Amit & Greene, 2012; Bartels, 2008; Petrinovich, O’Neill, & Jorgensen, 1993) also increases the tendency to make deontological judgments. Role of emotion-regulatory efforts in moral decision making Less scholarly attention has been paid to the ways in which people regulate the emotions that arise from moral dilemmas themselves. If emotions are indeed critical in deterring people from making utilitarian decisions, then one’s decision to regulate one’s emotional reactions in the face of a moral dilemma is likely to be crucial in determining whether one chooses options that are more or less utilitarian. We consider distinct psychological routes to more utilitarian decisions by focusing on the role of regulating affective responses that arise from moral dilemmas. Research has identified two types of emotion-regulation strategies, expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal, and examined their differential consequences on behavior (Ochsner & Gross, 2005, 2008). Suppression involves concealing our emotions after the initial emotional response has occurred. It is unlikely to help one feel less negative, and it impairs the efficiency of cognitive processing, such as memory and problem solving (Richards, 2004; Richards & Gross, 2000). In contrast, cognitive reappraisal alters one’s thoughts about a target event to control the initial emotional response. Individuals who chronically engage in reappraisal have been shown to have a more adaptive profile of physiological responses (Gross & Levenson, 1997) and are psychologically healthier in the long term than those who do not (Gross, 2002; Gross & John, 2003). As compared to controls, individuals who were instructed to use reappraisal felt less negative after experiencing a negative event and had less sympathetic nervous system arousal (Gross, 1998, 2002). Taken together, the empirical evidence to date suggests that the use of reappraisal reduces one’s subjective and physiological experience of emotions. Although such adaptive profile of reappraisal and maladaptive profile of suppression are well-documented, few studies to date have examined the role of emotion-regulation strategies in moral decision making. Feinberg, Willer, Antonenko, and John (2012) demonstrated the relevance and efficacy of the reappraisal strategy in reducing moral intuitions (e.g., disgust that arises from reading a scenario describing a family eating a deceased pet dog). In their research, individuals who employed the reappraisal strategy, as compared to those who did not, judged the family’s action to be less morally wrong. Although most people experienced disgust initially, the use of reappraisal helped them to reconstrue the situation such that they felt less negative (e.g., ‘‘The dog has already been killed in an accident, so no real harm was done to the dog, and therefore I cannot judge this family’s action to be morally wrong’’). Importantly, Feinberg et al. (2012) found that habitual suppression is not significantly associated with reducing moral intuitions, which led them to focus on reappraisal only. This research pioneered the study of emotion regulation and moral decision-making using scenarios that induce moral emotions such as disgust and contempt. However, it has a limitation: the types of scenarios used do not capture the wide variety of moral dilemmas present in the world. There are several key differences between the moral scenarios used in Feinberg et al. (2012) and the moral