Social pressure as a stimulus context for moral behavior

The article presents the results of a study on social pressure as a stimulus context for moral behavior. Three experiments examined how external and internal social pressure, relative to the scenario of a moral dilemma, affects the evaluation of moral actions. The total number of participants was 565, with 127 in the first study, 152 — in the second study and 286 in the third one. The samples did not overlap. In the first and the second experiments, external pressure was applied by informing participants about the percentage of people who responded to the dilemmas in a particular way in a previous study, whereas internal pressure involved indicating in the text of the dilemma the solution preferred by the character’s social environment. The results show that external pressure can shift moral evaluations toward social influence, whereas internal pressure does not significantly affect participants’ choices. In the third experiment, the study investigated how information about the conformity or nonconformity of the character’s action in the moral dilemma affects its moral assessment. According to the results, participants relied on general moral rules in their evaluations, and information about the conformity or nonconformity of the character’s actions did not affect their judgments. The article discusses the findings in the context of a behaviorist approach that treats moral behavior as rule-governed. The hypothesis of the illusion of moral autonomy is proposed, describing a tendency to evaluate the moral behavior of others based on universal moral rules, while ignoring situational context.