Abstract

Moral judgements have a very prominent social nature and, in everyday life, are continually shaped by a discussion with others. Psychological investigations of these judgments, however, have rarely addressed the impact of face-to-face discussion. To examine the role of social deliberation within small groups on moral judgements, we had groups of 4 to 5 participants judge moral dilemmas first individually and privately, then collectively and interactively and finally individually a second time. We employed both real-life scenarios and sacrificial dilemmas in which the character’s decision violated a moral principle in order to benefit the greatest number of people. Participants decided if these utilitarian decisions were morally acceptable or not. Collective judgments were significantly more utilitarian compared to both first and second individual judgments indicating that the individuals were not convinced by the consensus to which they had agreed to. Deliberating within a group transiently reduced the emotional burden of norm violation producing collectives that were more utilitarian than the simple statistical aggregate of their individual members.