Norm Conflicts and Morality: The CNIS Conflict Model of Moral Decision-Making

The goal of this paper is to study individual variation in participants’ adherence to conflicting moral views. To do this, we elicit participants’ reflective attitudes in an argumentative task and introduce a new conflict model of moral decision-making. This conflict model builds on the widely used CNI model of moral judgments (Gawronski et al., 2017) but improves it in several respects. First, we follow Skovgaard-Olsen and Klauer (2024) in extending the model to investigate invariance violations of the models’ parameters. Second, we model cases in which participants are conflicted between utilitarian and deontological response tendencies. In Experiment 1, we employ an argumentative paradigm to elicit commitments for moral views from participants to estimate latent classes in participants’ moral views. We then measure a range of egoistic and altruistic covariates used in Kahane et al. (2015) and Conway et al. (2018a) to investigate whether participants’ acceptance of instrumental harm is associated with a genuine concern for the greater good, or whether it is rather driven by antisocial character traits (Bartels & Pizarro, 2011). Next, we report two validation studies of our new Conflict model. In a preregistered experiment, the discriminant validity of the conflict detection / resolution path of the Conflict model and the construct validity of its Conflict parameter are tested. Finally, in a second validation study, we contrast response formats of dilemma judgments and find evidence in favor of using a format in which participants can opt out of difficult moral dilemmas when they feel conflicted, over the traditional format in moral psychology that lacks this possibility. We show that the CNI model is challenged by the finding of asymmetries in experienced conflict across conditions.