Decision, Vol 12(4), Oct 2025, 315-333; doi:10.1037/dec0000265
Experimental work reveals that participants who have access to all situational perspectives in moral scenarios (full perspective-taking accessibility) are more prosocial in their moral judgments than those who receive scenarios offering only one situational perspective (partial perspective-taking accessibility; Martin, Kusev, & van Schaik, 2021). Since previous studies have only focused on decisions made directly after scenario presentation, in the present work, we have explored how perspective-taking accessibility influences moral judgments under varying cognitive priming tasks (no prime, task-relevant prime, and task-irrelevant prime). We found that with full perspective-taking accessibility, participants were consistently utilitarian in their moral judgments, regardless of the cognitive priming task employed. However, with partial perspective-taking accessibility, participants were more utilitarian in their moral judgments after undertaking a task-irrelevant prime (an anagram task) compared to a task-relevant prime or no prime. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found that placing the anagram task after the moral scenario (late prime) induced participants’ utilitarian moral judgments. Moreover, in Experiment 3, we explored whether placing the anagram task before the moral scenario (early prime) would have a similar effect on participants’ moral judgments. With partial perspective-taking accessibility, regardless of the anagram task placement (early or late prime), participants were more utilitarian in their moral judgments compared to participants who were not primed with an anagram task. However, crucially, the results revealed no statistically significant difference between receiving an early and late prime; the properties of the anagram task itself (and not a distraction period between the scenario and judgment task) enhance participants’ utilitarian behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)