On Friday 11^th of February Tom of the BEHAVE-group presented a poster on his paper “Why general moral values cannot predict moral behavior in daily life” -co-authored by Maarten Kroesen and Caspar Chorus- at the Conference of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. The conference is a leading annual meeting in the field of judgment and decision making research, attracting scholars from all parts of the world. Here, Tom presented a conceptual and exploratory empirical study on the relationship between general moral values and specific moral behavior in daily life. The study concludes that general moral values are actually poor predictors of moral behavior and that the moral questionnaires that are usually used to measure peoples values –like the Moral Foundation Questionnaire- are too general to capture the context-sensitivity of moral decision making. This is a link to our poster. See for more information on our study the abstract below.

Abstract

Throughout the behavioral sciences it is routinely assumed that general, basic moral values have a considerable influence on people’s behavior in daily life. Despite that this assumption is a key underpinning of major strands of research, a solid theoretical and empirical foundation for this claim is lacking. In this study, we explore this relationship between general moral values and daily life behavior through a conceptual analysis and an empirical study. Our conceptual analysis of the moral value-moral behavior relationship suggests that the effect of a generally endorsed moral value on moral behavior is highly context-dependent. It requires the materialization of several phases of moral decision making, each influenced by many contextual factors. We expect that this renders the relationship between generic moral values and people’s specific moral behavior indeterminate. Subsequently, we empirically explore this relationship in three different studies. We relate two different measures of general moral values -the Moral Foundation Questionnaire and the Morality as a Compass Questionnaire- to a broad set of self-reported morally relevant daily life behaviors (including adherence to Covid-19 measures and participation in voluntary work). Our empirical results are in line with the expectations derived from our conceptual analysis: the considered general moral values show to be rather poor predictors of the selected daily life behaviors. Furthermore, our results show that the moral values that we tailored to the specific context of the behavior became somewhat stronger predictors. Together with the insights derived from our conceptual analysis, this indicates the relevance of the contextual nature of moral decision making as a possible explanation for the poor predictive value of general moral values. Accordingly, our conceptual and empirical findings suggest that the implicit assumption that general moral values are predictive of specific moral behavior -a key underpinning of empirical moral theories such as Moral Foundation Theory- lacks foundation and may need revision.

A new article in the EU Research and innovation magazine Horizon features work from the BEHAVE group into moral decision making during the covid-19 pandemic. The full article can be found here; an excerpt of the text relating to our research program reads as follows: Professor Caspar Chorus, who researches choice behaviour modelling at Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands and coordinates the BEHAVE project, has been studying how to turn these difficult moral choices into mathematical models that combine behavioural science and philosophy into a format that economists can use to make decisions. The technique asks participants to make dozens of these morally difficult choices, and when they are analysed can provide insights into the public preference. ‘Mathematically we were able to obtain what we call a utility function – you can think of this as a goal function that encapsulates the different effects of a policy and attaches weight to each effect. People are very poor at explaining those weights themselves, but we can learn these from the choices they make.’ His work is already helping to inform the Dutch government about some of the tricky decisions they have faced with regard to the pandemic. But it has also revealed one approach governments might take if they are hoping to bring about long lasting transformations. ‘People have some deep-seated moral values, which can be quite different from the moral actions they take,’ said Prof. Chorus. ‘Most governments think that if you can alter people’s attitudes then you will ultimately alter their behaviour – so if you convince people of a moral value like cycling is better for the environment, for example, then they will take a moral action and cycle more. ‘We have found from our research that this approach is much weaker than the other way around. If people have to start cycling because of an external factor like public transport stops running, like it did in the pandemic, then they (may) discover they like it and are more likely to stick with it. This effect is much stronger than an information campaign.’ He believes that this lesson could prove useful for governments hoping to use the pandemic to transform their economies and societies for the better. The pandemic has offered a period of intense disruption, which if harnessed could lead to lasting long-term change. ‘The key is to establish the right behaviours,’ said Prof. Chorus.

A joint proposal funded by Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management headed by Esther de Bekker-Grob will be funding a PhD-student to be partly based in the BEHAVE-group. The PhD-student, who will be co-funded by BEHAVE, will study moral preferences in the population regarding the scarce allocation of resources in healthcare settings, such as ICU-beds during pandemics. New moral choice models will be developed, and using choice experiments these will be put to the test empirically. Results will be discussed with healthcare professionals to develop a deeper understanding into the moral dimensions of tricky health care decisions. Caspar will act as second promotor; Health philosopher Maartje Schermer (Erasmus Medical Center) and Econometrician Bas Donkers (Erasmus University) will provide invaluable input from their research fields. Looking forward to this collaborative effort in a research area with great relevance for BEHAVE!

During the past weeks, several research and outreach activities have been taking place within the BEHAVE-program, that focus on the COVID-19 crisis and the moral dilemmas it imposes on society. Here is a quick summary of recent efforts:

First, based on the blogpost on moral decision making in the context of COVID-19 (see previous news item), Studium Generale recorded two short movie clips (5-10 minutes each, in English) in which Caspar explains why pro-social behaviors such as social distancing are only weakly related to our moral values and discusses why societies find it so difficult to discuss the economic impacts of the lockdown. Both mini-lectures provide hands on advice for policy makers. The Financieel Dagblad (the leading Dutch business newspaper) interviewed Caspar on the latter topic, as input for an article on Dutch lockdown policies (note that the general message of the article does not necessarily align with Caspar’s personal views on this matter). An op-ed article arguing that the COVID-19 crisis is also a moral crisis, offering moral decision making insights from the BEHAVE-program, was also published in the Dutch professional magazine Binnenlands Bestuur.

Second, together with Niek Mouter and Erlend Dancke Sandorf, and co-sponsored by the TU Delft Covid-19 response fund, Caspar performed an empirical study into how Dutch society weighs various aspects of lockdown relaxation policies, with a particular focus on the morally salient trade-off between healthcare effects and economic effects of lockdown policies. This has resulted in a Dutch language publication, an article in the leading Dutch business newspaper and a (35 minute, in Dutch) interview. An English language academic working paper is currently being reviewed for publication.

The abstract of the academic article is as follows: We report and interpret preferences of a representative sample of the Dutch adult population for different strategies to end the so-called ‘intelligent lockdown’ which their government had put in place in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a discrete choice experiment, we invited participants to make a series of choices between policy scenarios aimed at relaxing the lockdown, which were specified not in terms of their nature (e.g. whether or not to allow schools to re-open) but in terms of their effects along seven dimensions. These included health-related aspects, but also impacts on the economy, education, and personal income. From the observed choices, we were able to infer the implicit trade-offs made by the Dutch between these policy effects. For example, we find that the average citizen, in order to avoid one fatality directly or indirectly related to COVID-19, is willing to accept a lasting lag in the educational performance of 18 children, or a lasting (>3 years) and substantial (>15%) reduction in net income of 77 households. We explore heterogeneity across individuals in terms of these trade-offs by means of latent class analysis. Our results suggest that most citizens are willing to trade-off health-related and other effects of the lockdown, implying a consequentialist ethical perspective. We find that the elderly, known to be at relatively high risk of being affected by the virus, are relatively reluctant to sacrifice economic pain and educational disadvantages for the younger generation, to avoid fatalities. We also identify a so-called taboo trade-off aversion amongst a substantial share of our sample, being an aversion to accept morally problematic policies that simultaneously imply higher fatality numbers and lower taxes. We explain various ways in which our results can be of value to policy makers in the context of the COVID-19 and future pandemics.

Caspar Chorus – Professor of choice behavior modeling at TU Delft – 28 March 2020

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Want to know more about how people make moral decisions in corona times?

Here is a blogpost (around 1,750 words) that presents insights from the behavioral sciences, including work done in the BEHAVE-project. 

Two main topics in this blogpost:

• Why our moral values hardly echo through in our concrete moral actions (panic buying, social distancing); and what can be done to change that.
• Why society is heading towards a gigantically uncomfortable taboo trade-off between human lives and the economy; and how to deal with that.

Although clearly the corona crisis is first and foremost a healthcare crisis for which medical solutions are urgently needed (enormous respect for our colleagues working in those areas!), this blog attempts to make a small contribution from the social and behavioral sciences. I strongly believe that in the longer run, insights into human behavior and social processes will play a role in helping us weather this and future pandemics.

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During the past few weeks – and in China, months – it has become clear that the corona virus generates a flurry of moral challenges for human decision-makers to solve. From panic-buying and social-distancing to triage and determining the monetary ‘value’ of a human life: citizens, health professionals and politicians around the globe are faced with decisions whose moral salience make them qualitatively different from the average types of choices most of us make in our daily lives.

What insights can we draw from academic research into moral decision making, to help us navigate the storm? In this blogpost, I will draw from my team’s* publicly funded (by the European Research Council) work on this topic, in an attempt to contribute to public understanding of these important moral dimensions of the choices we make during the corona crisis.

Moral values do not influence concrete moral decisions

The current crisis demands that individuals make personal sacrifices in order to create a social good: we are asked to not hoard toilet paper, so that others don’t face empty shelves; healthy citizens are asked to stay at home and practice social-distancing, to prevent vulnerable people from catching the virus and overwhelming our health-care system. As expected, behavioral responses vary widely, ranging from careless or even anti-social behaviors to many acts of prudency and care.

An often heard opinion, is that this variety in responses reflects a variety of moral values: there are people who value fairness, care, loyalty – and there are people who do not. The former behave, the latter don’t. But things are not that easy. Research performed by our team empirically shows that the echo of moral values into concrete moral actions is only very faint, and often cannot even be detected from data about human choice behavior.

Why is that? Moral psychologists have long argued that before a moral value (e.g. fairness or loyalty) can lead to a concrete moral action, several conditions must be met: first, the decision-maker must be aware that a moral value endorsed by her is at stake in a particular situation; second, she must make the moral judgment that this value actually dictates her to choose a certain action; third, she must then decide to act in the way prescribed by her value; and finally she has to actually execute her decision. Our empirical research shows, in the context of a variety of decisions with a moral dimension, that this road from deep-seated moral values to concrete moral actions is ‘long and windy’ indeed. At each stage of the causal chain between values and actions, disruption is lurking; think of the roles of emotion and fear, misinformation, social pressure (“my best friends go out to the pub, so I have to join them”), conflicting moral values (“my family needs toilet paper and it is my moral duty to provide for them”), and rational expectations (“if everyone starts hoarding, then hoarding is the rational thing to do for me, too”).

As a result, we were not surprised to find that the empirical correlation between a person’s moral decisions and her moral values is very low. In other words, don’t be surprised if many of the people hoarding toilet paper or flouting social distancing advice strongly endorse values such as fairness, care, and loyalty.

What can a government do, to ensure citizens behave according to moral values such as fairness, care, and loyalty? Actually, most governments have been fairly effective in this regard (which should not come as a surprise, given the behavioral insight teams active in the highest circles of government): they explicitly target the steps in the causal chain described above. Take the Dutch government: our prime minister has repeatedly and forcefully argued that moral values are at stake (raising moral awareness); that there is no doubt as to what is the right thing to do (making a moral judgment); and that citizens must take responsibility and actually do the right thing (calling for moral action). When even such ‘decision-aids’ did not lead to full compliance, most governments have now resorted to stronger measures such as punishment (e.g. through fines) of anti-social behaviors.

Together, it seems that this mix of actions has in turn established a strong moral norm in society, especially regarding social-distancing, which seems to work in terms of ‘flattening the curve’. This is one of the nice by-products of forcefully establishing moral behaviors: once they are in place, the underlying attitudes or moral values will change accordingly. Similar results have been found in the context of racism and school segregation in the American South: only after the government forced schools to integrate, did moral norms regarding racism start to change gradually as a consequence of people of different ethnicity meeting each other in the classroom. Our research shows that this reverse effect (that is, concrete behavior influencing values) is actually stronger than the usually considered effect from moral value to concrete behaviors. A positively reinforcement cycle thus seems to be getting in place now, partly due to forceful and determined action of governments.

But how long can we maintain this collective ‘good’ behavior? This depends on whether or not society is willing to make a taboo trade-off…

 

Taboo trade-offs: human lives and economic costs

Moral psychologists make a distinction between conventional trade-offs, tragic trade-offs and taboo trade-offs. The first of these are the types of trade-offs we make on a daily basis, often without much contemplation (e.g. balancing the price and quality of a consumer product, when in a supermarket). The second of these is a trade-off between two ‘sacred’ entities, such as the one currently faced by health professionals who have to choose which corona-infected patient to assist, and which patient not to. Such triage may become inevitable in many hospitals, given acute scarcity of means like intensive care-beds and respiratory devices. The name says it all – this type of trade-off carries enormous emotional tolls for the decision-maker. But at least, health professionals know that society will not wag a finger at them for making these kind of life and death calls.

This is different for taboo trade-offs. These are trade-offs involving a sacred entity and a so-called secular entity. Although such taboo trade-offs are very rare, a particularly salient one is surfacing in the corona crisis. The current situation, where many societies are in full or almost complete lockdown, carries large economic costs. This begs the question how much economic loss a society is willing to accept, in an attempt to limit the loss of life caused by corona. And this is where the taboo comes in: ultimately, the above stated question implies that a human life is compared with, and traded against, an amount of money. A wealth of studies have shown, that people find the mere idea of contemplating such a trade-off as morally apprehensible. Governor Cuomo of the state of New York is one of them. President Trump of the United States of America is clearly not one of them.

When Trump suggested that the cure (lockdown and economic standstill) cannot be worse than the problem (people dying from corona), Cuomo responded by saying “If you ask the American people to choose between public health and the economy, then it’s no contest. No American is going to say, ‘accelerate the economy at the cost of human life.’ Because no American is going to say how much a life is worth”. Our research shows, that within society there is a great variety in people’s willingness to accept a taboo trade-off. For many people such a trade-off is indeed, taboo. They argue, like Governor Cuomo, that you simply cannot put a dollar or euro amount on a human life, and that all must be done so save a life. Many others however, argue that in a world of scarce resources, trade-offs simply have to be made, even when they are morally uncomfortable. We cannot, as a society, pay billions of dollars or euros for every single live saved. We cannot allow our entire economy to collapse in the process.

In fact, most Western societies have procedures in place to make such trade-offs, without much of the public knowing about them. Healthcare policies are routinely based on the notion of the monetary value of a ‘quality adjusted life year’. This value, which typically ranges in the tens of thousands of dollars or euros per healthy year of human life saved, has a long history in helping governments assess the cost-effectiveness of policies in domains as diverse as healthcare, traffic safety, and climate change.

When the inevitable moment comes where governments need to make this taboo trade-off, society’s acceptance depends a lot on how it will be communicated. One classical approach is to reframe the taboo trade-off into a tragic trade-off. In this case this could be done by expressing economic costs not in terms of decrease in GDP, but in terms of the real pain it inflicts on households and children, especially those with limited means. Another approach is to try and avoid the trade-off altogether, for example by explaining that a healthy economy is needed to sustain the healthcare system that is able to effectively deal with this and future pandemics. This is not merely a matter of clever or cynical politics; ultimately society needs to be informed about the terrible choices that need to be made in a time like this. Being open about the trade-offs these decisions imply, will help us weather future storms.

 

*The BEHAVE-project (http://behave.tbm.tudelft.nl/), funded by the European Research Council (https://erc.europa.eu/)  brings together scholars from fields as diverse as philosophy & ethics, sociology, econometrics, behavioral science, and artificial intelligence. Together we strive to develop and empirically test quantitative, mathematical models of moral decision-making. Note that the views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect those of all members of our team. For readability, I did not refer to specific academic papers in the post itself; below is a list of sources that interested readers may want to look at for more background information.

 

Literature on moral values and moral actions:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0965856416307418

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-015-2886-8

Manuscript: Does morality predict aggressive driving? A conceptual analysis and exploratory empirical investigation

(We are preparing additional manuscripts for submission to academic journals based on our research into this topic. Please contact us in case you like to receive draft versions thereof.)

 

Literature on taboo trade-offs:

https://twitter.com/arjenUSA/status/1242486964953255936

https://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/economic-cost-of-flattening-the-curve/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychology-of-taboo-tradeoff/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1755534517300684

The 3rd iteration of the Obfuscation Workshop is coming to Europe! It will take place at TU Delft, in the Netherlands, 11 and 12 May 2020.

Obfuscation can be seen as the art and science of protecting your privacy in contexts where your actions are being monitored and analyzed by other humans, organizations, or e.g. AI-powered technology. Obfuscation models are an important topic in the BEHAVE program, as obfuscation is considered a useful strategy to masque one’s true moral motivations, in contexts where giving them away might lead to contempt or feelings of shame.

This interdisciplinary workshop convenes researchers, scientists, policy makers, developers, and artists to discuss a broad range of technical, theoretical, and policy approaches to obfuscation, including tools, simulations and experimental methods that people and artificial agents use to obfuscate themselves and their environments in asymmetries of power and information.

You can read more about the last iteration of the workshop at http://www.obfuscationworkshop.org/report/ .

The organizing committee, consisting of Helen Nissenbaum @ Cornell University, Caspar Chorus & Seda Gurses @ TU Delft and Ero Balsa @ KU Leuven, will soon be sending out invitations and an open call for submissions. For now, please save the dates and feel free to forward this announcement to anyone who could find it of interest.

Our research on moral uncertainty for ethical AI is going to be featured in the AAAI/ACM conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society which will take place on February 7-8 in NY. PhD candidate Andreia Martinho will present our re-conceptualization of a metanormative framework for decision-making under moral uncertainty using Discrete Choice Analysis techniques and its operationalization using a latent class choice model. The relevance of moral uncertainty is illustrated in a proof of concept in which we conceptualize a society where AI Systems are in charge of making policy choices and investigate whether the choices of morally uncertain AI contrast with the choices of morally certain AI.

In November, three presentations based on BEHAVE-work were given to enthusiastic audiences. On November 6, the TU Delft Tracks in Transport conference hosted a special session organized by Andreia and Caspar, in which Andreia, Tom and Bing Huang presented work on the topic “On moral men and machines: Real ethical issues on the road”. In this special session highlights of recent work done in the BEHAVE project were presented, including new theoretical insights underpinned by empirical evidence on three thought-provocative questions: Can we predict aggressive driving behavior based on drivers’ moral values? Why do people find accidents caused by autonomous vehicles more unacceptable than those caused by human drivers? and What can bioethics and automotive industry reports teach us about dealing with moral issues surrounding autonomous vehicles?

On 20 November, Caspar gave a lunch lecture for the aiTech community, which brings together scholars with diverse AI-related disciplinary perspectives ranging from computer science to ethics and the behavioral sciences. Caspar’s talk, titled “Morality and taboos for men and machines”, started with a quick overview of how the BEHAVE-team integrates the newest insights from moral psychology into tractable mathematical formulations of moral choice behavior. Furthermore, it was shown how, building on such a mathematical representation of human morality, a human-inspired moral compass can be designed for a ‘morally uncertain’ Artificial Intelligence (AI).

On 28 November, as part of the so-called Dag van het Gedrag in The Hague, Tom, Maarten en Caspar co-hosted a special session on the difficulties associated with stearing human behavior through influencing moral values and attitudes. The session was oversubscribed, and participants (mostly civil servants) engaged with the speakers in a lively discussion about the pros and cons of tapping into moral values when trying to steer behavior towards more societally beneficial outcomes.

During the past couple of weeks, two new BEHAVE-research manuscripts have been published. The first is a Chapter about the moral dimension of regret, and its implications for choice set design. The design, or architecture, of choice sets is an increasingly established marketing tool to steer choices towards products with, e.g., a particularly high profit margin, in a subtle wat that is often not detectable by consumers. This manuscript shows, using the random regret minimization model which has been developed at TU Delft, how some of these choice architectures generate disproportional levels of regret and hence should be considered morally problematic. Food for thought for marketing professionals! The Chapter has appeared in the book The Moral Psychology of Regret, published by Rowman International.

Another manuscript, of which Ahmad Alwosheel is first author and Sander van Cranenburgh second author, was published in the Journal of Choice Modelling. It reconceptualizes techniques from the computer vision field to develop a procedure to build trust in the use of so-called Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for choice behavior analysis. ANNs are increasingly used to analyze and predict choice behavior, but their ‘black box’ nature causes problems in terms of explainability and interpretability. Especially in morally sensitive choice situations, this hampers the use of these models, as it precludes learning what moral values and trade-offs were at stake. The idea of having the trained neural network generate so-called prototypical examples helps gain trust, among analysts, that a particular neural network has learned intuitive relations and behavioral processes underlying the observed choice data. This in turn will help pave the way towards using these machine learning approaches for the analysis of moral decision making.