Moral decision making during COVID-19 pandemic

Morality plays a significant role in human lives, rooted in our ancestors' understanding of cooperation and sense of responsibility towards others, and is maintained via in-group norms and rules. Here we suggest that with the effect of COVID-19, the understanding of morality and moral judgments of anti-prevention behaviors changed, such that new societal norms like wearing a mask have been created, or perspectives on some neutral acts like going to parties have changed. The current study examined individuals' moral judgment, anger, and disgust reactions towards hypothetical COVID-19 scenarios, confirming higher moral judgment and anger reactions in cases of rule violation. Furthermore, previous literature suggests that disgust works as a response of disease avoidance. However, our results showed that individuals' primary emotional reaction was anger rather than disgust when asked about their moral judgment of the situation. This might be due to the stigma of COVID-19 and its less obvious ways of spreading, as opposed to other diseases like Salmonella. In two experiments, we showed that contrast could be explained by the importance of rule-following, particularly for mask-wearing. In cases of rule violation, anger and moral judgments were triggered regardless of whether there was a real COVID-19 threat or not, which would trigger disgust. Furthermore, Experiment 2 confirmed that even though individuals perceive COVID-19 to pose a higher risk than the flu, the disease avoidance aspect of COVID-19 is not enough to trigger disgust as the primary reaction.