Moral judgment and decision making, contractualism and virtual bargaining

道德心理学试图理解道德判断和决策背后的机制。这一领域的研究人员经常求助于道德哲学的规范理论来构建道德的描述性描述（Bartels et al., 2015）。近几十年来，两种思想流派——结果主义和义务论——受到了特别的关注（Greene, 2013）。简单地说，结果主义将行为的道德性建立在其结果之上。相反，对于义务论来说，某些行为本质上是对或错的，与它们所带来的后果无关，取决于特定的道德规则（Malle, 2021）。第三个有影响力的理论家族——契约主义——在实证工作中受到的关注要少得多。契约主义认为，道德是一个协议问题，“如果受该行为相关影响的所有各方都能合理地同意（或至少不合理地拒绝），那么该行为在道德上是允许的”（Levine et al., 2018, p. 1）。典型的契约主义关注（例如，协议、同意、共同利益）可能对理解道德的心理基础至关重要。虚拟议价被认为是契约主义推理的一种特殊形式。虚拟讨价还价是一种社会协调理论，它提出我们的许多社会互动可以被理解为虚拟讨价还价的结果或“社会参与者预期他们会达成的协议，他们会参与明确的讨价还价”（Misyak et al., 2014, p. 512）。本项目采用心理学（如道德困境）和经济学（如经济博弈）的实验方法，实证研究契约主义道德判断和决策，以及虚拟讨价还价过程在道德推理中所起的作用。

Moral psychology attempts to understand the mechanisms that underlie moral judgment and decision making. Researchers in this area often appeal to normative theories from moral philosophy to construct descriptive accounts of morality (Bartels et al., 2015). Two schools of thought - consequentialism and deontology - have received particular attention in recent decades (Greene, 2013). Simply put, consequentialism bases the morality of an action on its consequences only. For deontology in contrast, certain actions are inherently right or wrong, independently of the consequences they bring about, depending on specific moral rules (Malle, 2021). A third influential family of theories - contractualism - has received much less attention in empirical work. Contractualism posits that morality is a matter of agreement and that "an act is morally permissible if all the parties relevantly affected by the act could reasonably agree to it (or at least, not reasonably reject it)" (Levine et al., 2018, p. 1). Typically contractualist concerns (e.g., agreement, consent, mutual interests) could be crucial to understand the psychological basis of morality. Virtual bargaining has been proposed as a specific form of contractualist reasoning. Virtual bargaining is a theory of social coordination which proposes that many of our social interactions can be understood as the result of virtual bargains or "agreements that social participants anticipate they would make, where they to engage in explicit bargaining" (Misyak et al., 2014, p. 512). This project uses experimental methods from psychology (e.g., moral dilemmas) and economics (e.g., economic games) to empirically investigate contractualist moral judgment and decision making and the role played by virtual bargaining processes in moral reasoning.