Do you suspect that there might be correlations between certain personality traits/​values (conscientiousness, discipline, etc) and the convincingness of arguments from moral obligation?
Several people I’ve met who read The Life You Can Save have told me they were so turned off by the moral obligation arguments that they nearly gave up on it. For me, reading the argument from moral obligation just made the conclusion follow compulsorily.
I was raised as an Orthodox Jew, and others have speculated that being raised within a demanding religious movement where discipline is prioritized might translate to being more receptive to arguments from moral obligation. Of course, I don’t know whether or not this is actually true.
We checked a number of different correlations cross both studies, including altruistic type, how utilitarian they are, guilt, how manipulated they felt, agreeableness, and a number of demographic characteristics including religion.
We didn’t find anything in our regression analysis that stood out. However, we reported everything in the appendix, which can be accessed in the paper. Alternatively, I can send it to you.
I guess another question is who is the obligation coming from? In our experiments it was either from us or GWWC. With regards to religion, if it is in scripture or communicated by a religious figure (such as a rabbi or a priest), maybe it holds more weight? Also, the norms regarding giving are different to secular norms.
We didn’t measure how convinced they were by the argument (in hindsight we probably should have), but we did ask how obligated they felt and obligations ratings were significantly higher in the Moral Argument treatment than the control. That correlation may be explained by finding the argument more convincing, but we don’t have any concrete evidence (from this study) to strongly update our beliefs.
Thanks for this research!
Do you suspect that there might be correlations between certain personality traits/​values (conscientiousness, discipline, etc) and the convincingness of arguments from moral obligation?
Several people I’ve met who read The Life You Can Save have told me they were so turned off by the moral obligation arguments that they nearly gave up on it. For me, reading the argument from moral obligation just made the conclusion follow compulsorily.
I was raised as an Orthodox Jew, and others have speculated that being raised within a demanding religious movement where discipline is prioritized might translate to being more receptive to arguments from moral obligation. Of course, I don’t know whether or not this is actually true.
Thanks Ariel. That’s a great question.
We checked a number of different correlations cross both studies, including altruistic type, how utilitarian they are, guilt, how manipulated they felt, agreeableness, and a number of demographic characteristics including religion.
We didn’t find anything in our regression analysis that stood out. However, we reported everything in the appendix, which can be accessed in the paper. Alternatively, I can send it to you.
I guess another question is who is the obligation coming from? In our experiments it was either from us or GWWC. With regards to religion, if it is in scripture or communicated by a religious figure (such as a rabbi or a priest), maybe it holds more weight? Also, the norms regarding giving are different to secular norms.
We didn’t measure how convinced they were by the argument (in hindsight we probably should have), but we did ask how obligated they felt and obligations ratings were significantly higher in the Moral Argument treatment than the control. That correlation may be explained by finding the argument more convincing, but we don’t have any concrete evidence (from this study) to strongly update our beliefs.