Find out who’s the goody-two-shoes and whose antics deserve a time-out in this hilarious family-friendly game of most likely to! g., regarding the impact of stress and stress hormones on everyday moral decision-making; see [ 24]). low emotionality; [ 22, 23]), we varied the social closeness of the protagonists (socially close vs. Moreover, the availability of parallelized item sets would be of high advantage as simple retesting with identical stimulus material is not advisable because memory effects could confound the findings. This might explain the somewhat lower values of Cronbach’s alpha, although the assumptions of the Rasch model were fulfilled.

Acute psychosocial stress and everyday moral decision-making in young healthy men: the impact of cortisol. see Fig 2), indicating that everyday moral decision-making did not differ depending on the gender of our participants.

This is in line with the results of a recent ecological momentary assessment study about morality in everyday life, where the most frequent type of victim categories were “no concrete person/other entity” or “stranger” [ 17]. One item with a socially distant protagonist showed a somewhat lowered mean similarity to reality rating of 3.

Nevertheless, we tried to keep the potential impact of social desirability as low as possible by ensuring strict anonymity to all our participants. Graphical model check plotting the item values estimated for participants with EMCS scores less or equal than the median against the item values estimated for participants with EMCS scores above the median. Additionally, the graphical model test did not give hints for items, which fell out of line (see Fig 1).In both subversions, we asked the participants to judge the given responses on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 = egoistic to 7 = altruistic. Altogether, in combination with the social closeness results, our data therefore point to the idea that everyday moral decision-making with altruistic versus egoistic response options seems to be quite a different construct than abstract moral decision-making with utilitarian versus deontological response alternatives.

Altogether, N = 200 volunteers (100 males, 100 females, mainly students) aged 18–43 years (mean age ± SD = 22. By contrast, the scenarios developed by Sommer and colleagues [ 16] do rather reflect very typical daily life situations and proved useful in several experimental studies [ 16, 24, 25].However, there was a significant difference in the ratings of social closeness (Studies 1 and 2) in the expected direction with a very large effect size ( d = 7. S1 Table shows the finally selected 40 items (everyday moral conflict situations) of the EMCS Scale with corresponding response alternatives (altruistic vs. Concerning the social closeness of the protagonists, there were no significant differences in the percentage of altruistic decisions (Studies 1 and 3) and the ratings of altruistic responses (Study 2) between the items with socially close protagonists and the items with socially distant protagonists (see Table 3).