MORAL DECISION MAKING UNDER MONETARY CONSIDERATIONS
Open Access
- Author:
- Qin, Chenrong
- Graduate Program:
- Information Sciences and Technology
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- March 18, 2019
- Committee Members:
- David T Reitter, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
- Keywords:
- classification
rationality - Abstract:
- A moral decision does not always mean rational decision. The moral decision is a choice made based on a person's feeling and what they believe is proper behavior. We use monetary choices to explore how group size is correlated with the amount of benefit gained by the subject compared to the harm that their decision inflicts on others. To test this behavior, we measure how Amazon Mechanical Turk workers make choices in a game similar to the Dictator Game where their decisions affect simulated participants. Preliminary work shows that people are more likely to accept inflicting costs to the group if they are offered more money or if the group loses less money per person. My thesis explores how people evaluate the morality of gaining money at a cost to others depending on the amount of personal gain, the cost to others, and the number of people affected. Our experiments will also reveal how individuals behave when making decisions about different sized groups. We conduct a series of experiments using Amazon Mechanical Turk and Qualtrics while each experiment kept one of the independent variables constant. To the data from each experiment, I fit classification model, multiple logistic regression model and generalized linear mixed model.