• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

information for practice

news, new scholarship & more from around the world


advanced search
  • gary.holden@nyu.edu
  • @ Info4Practice
  • Archive
  • About
  • Help
  • Browse Key Journals
  • RSS Feeds

Intuitive deontology? A systematic review and multivariate, multilevel meta-analysis of experimental studies on the psychological drivers of moral judgments.

Psychological Bulletin, Vol 151(4), Apr 2025, 428-454; doi:10.1037/bul0000472

Humans often face moral dilemmas posing a conflict between two motives: deontology (rule-following, e.g., “thou shalt not kill”) and utilitarianism (greater-good-maximization, e.g., sacrificing one for many). A long-standing debate concerns the influence of cognitive processing on moral judgments in such dilemmas. One popular dual process account suggests that intuition favors “deontological” judgments, whereas “utilitarian” judgments require more reflection. We conducted a comprehensive multilevel, multivariate meta-analysis to assess the cumulative evidence favoring intuitive deontology, its heterogeneity within and across studies, and its robustness to bias. Following established standards, our search for published and gray literature identified 731 unique effects nested in 139 studies from 80 reports meeting our eligibility criteria. Overall, we found a significant but small effect favoring intuitive deontology (OR = 1.18, 95% CI [1.10, 1.26]; p

Read the full article ›

Posted in: Meta-analyses - Systematic Reviews on 06/03/2025 | Link to this post on IFP |
Share

Primary Sidebar

Categories

Category RSS Feeds

  • Calls & Consultations
  • Clinical Trials
  • Funding
  • Grey Literature
  • Guidelines Plus
  • History
  • Infographics
  • Journal Article Abstracts
  • Meta-analyses - Systematic Reviews
  • Monographs & Edited Collections
  • News
  • Open Access Journal Articles
  • Podcasts
  • Video

© 1993-2025 Dr. Gary Holden. All rights reserved.

gary.holden@nyu.edu
@Info4Practice