Does introspection increase humanitarian concerns in judgment and decision making?

有充分的证据表明，人们在作出关于帮助陷入困境的人的决定时，他们重视人道主义目标的方式是不一致的。大多数人认为，他们在做出慈善捐赠、分配稀缺的医疗资源或为难民提供支持的决定时，应该相当重视其他人的福利。然而，随着需要帮助的人数的增加，对个别受害者的巨大同情往往会消退或消失。在某些情况下，情感上有吸引力但常态较弱的特质可能会优先于需求。由此导致的帮助他人的失败往往似乎与一个人深思熟虑的给予他们帮助的重要性的信念相矛盾。这一建议检验了这样一种假设，即对个人对人道主义关切应如何影响行为的信念进行反思，将减少对这些关切的低估。我们假设，内省将帮助人们做出更好地反映他们所考虑的价值观的判断和决定。我们提出了一系列研究来测试源自三个基本观点的预测：(A)人们在不知不觉中对他人福利的担忧的权重低于他们认为应该对这些担忧进行权重的权重，这是人道主义判断和决策中的一种偏见；(B)自我反省可以提高人们对个人信念与其表现出的行为之间的差异的认识；以及(C)意识到这种差异将导致人们通过在判断和决定中增加对他人福利的权重来减少个人信念和行为之间的不一致。理解人道主义价值观在重要的个人和政策决策中的作用具有广泛的意义。数百万人的生命以及国家和全球安全取决于这些决定。我们认为应该指导我们决策的政治、社会、经济、文化、安全和人道主义价值观是否真的以某种连贯一致的形式存在？如果是这样的话，这些被考虑的价值观是什么？我们如何确保我们的决定与这些价值观一致？本研究项目旨在通过考察一个简单的反省程序在多大程度上可以在多大程度上提高一个人的价值观与一个人在各种人道主义决策环境中的行为之间的一致性，从而为回答这些关键问题做出贡献。首先，这些研究增进了对内省如何改善决策的理解，而不是研究文献中声称内省和深思熟虑会损害决策质量。第二，通过考察人们对标准化决策过程的自省的反应，该研究促进了对人们在决策时如何监控和修正属性权重的理解。这使得研究人员能够区分内省和深思熟虑，这两个概念在文献中得到了类似的对待。第三，鉴于人们通常对如何在特定背景下做出决定有明确的信念，拟议的研究促进了对人们未能按照这些信念行事的程度的理解，以及意识到个人人道主义价值如何能够增加这些价值观与实际行为之间的一致性。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

There is ample evidence that people are inconsistent in the way that they value humanitarian objectives when making decisions about helping persons in distress. Most people believe they should give substantial weight to other people's welfare when making decisions about charitable donations, allocating scarce medical resources, or providing support for refugees. Yet great compassion extended towards individual victims often fades or disappears as the numbers of people in need increase. In some circumstances, emotionally appealing but normatively weak attributes may take precedence over needs. The resulting failures to help others often appear to contradict one's considered beliefs in the importance of giving them assistance. This proposal tests the hypothesis that introspection about personal beliefs regarding how humanitarian concerns should influence behavior will reduce underweighting of these concerns. We hypothesize that introspection will help people make judgments and decisions that better reflect their considered values. We propose a series of studies to test predictions derived from three basic ideas: (a) that people unknowingly weight concerns about others' welfare less than they believe they should weight those concerns, a bias in humanitarian judgment and decision making; (b) that introspection can increase awareness of the discrepancy between people's personal beliefs and their exhibited behavior; and (c) becoming aware of this discrepancy will lead people to reduce the inconsistency between their personal beliefs and behavior by increasing the weighting of others' welfare in their judgments and decisions. Understanding the role of humanitarian values in important personal and policy decisions has broad significance. Millions of lives and national and global security depend on these decisions. Do the political, social, economic, cultural, security, and humanitarian values that we assume should guide our decisions actually exist in some coherent and consistent form? If so, what are these considered values and how do we ensure that our decisions are in accord with these values? This research project aims to make a contribution toward answering these vital questions by examining the degree to which a simple introspection procedure can improve the coherence between one's own values and one?s actions in a variety of humanitarian decision contexts.The proposed research yields several intellectual contributions. First, the studies advance understanding of how introspection can improve decision making, in contrast with claims in the research literature that introspection and deliberation can harm decision quality. Second, by examining people's response to introspection about normative decision processes, the proposed studies advance understanding of how people monitor and revise attribute weighting when making decisions. This enables the researchers to differentiate between introspection and deliberation, concepts that are treated similarly in the literature. Third, given that people often have clear beliefs regarding how decisions should be made in specific contexts, the proposed research advances understanding of the extent to which people fail to behave according to those beliefs and how becoming aware of personal humanitarian values can increase the correspondence between those values and actual behavior.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.