Speakers
Overview
This session examined moral decision-making from two complementary angles: the psychology and neuroscience of how individuals respond to moral transgressions, and the organisational structures that enable or constrain moral agency in the workplace. One speaker presented findings from a meta-analysis of 116 articles examining the relationship between emotions and moral responses, revealing high heterogeneity across paradigms and showing that negative emotions strengthen moral responses while positive emotions tend to dampen them. A second speaker introduced a virtue ethics-based framework arguing that organisational design, through specialisation, centralisation, and formalisation, creates the conditions that make moral decision-making more or less possible for employees.
Key Points
Moral research paradigms are highly heterogeneous, from mental judgements, sacrificial dilemmas, and economic games tap different processes and should not be freely generalised across one another.
Incidental emotions induced before a moral task do not reliably shift moral responses, a finding replicated across other meta-analyses, with implications for paradigm design.
Emotion type is the strongest driver of variance in the emotion–morality relationship: negative emotions increase moral responding, positive emotions decrease it; and the relationship is stronger in unidimensional moral scenarios than in dilemmas involving competing principles.
High specialisation, centralisation, and formalisation in organisations disable the teleological, deliberative, and social contexts that moral agents need, and creating bureaucratic structures where employees cannot see the consequences of their actions or deliberate about moral issues.
Self-managing teams with low hierarchical distance and decisional authority better support moral agency, with real-world examples showing employees overriding formal rules in favour of fair outcomes.
Open question: How do individual differences in moral values interact with organisational structures and can structure alone explain moral behaviour, or must we account for identity, conformity, and group cohesion as well?
Next Steps
Possible collaborations: connecting laboratory-based moral measurement with organisational field research, and developing validated Dutch versions of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire and the Morality as Cooperation Questionnaire for use across disciplines.
If you are interested in moral decision-making and would like to connect with the speakers or suggest a speaker for another session, contact us at centerfordecisionscience@ru.nl.