For humans and most animals, the social interaction with conspecifics is a common everyday life activity [ 1]. Thereby, we humans are often confronted with morally conflicting social interaction situations. According to Christensen and colleagues [ 2], moral conflicts are situations in which someone is pulled in contrary directions by rival moral reasons. They can, amongst others, occur when deciding between a personal interest versus an accepted moral value.

With regard to research in laboratory settings, several scholars (e.g., [ 16, 22, 23]) recently developed everyday moral dilemmas. Everyday moral dilemmas are short vignettes describing hypothetical everyday life situations. The vignettes require decisions between the fulfilment of a moral standard or social obligation towards another person versus a personal-oriented hedonistic behavior that would explicitly not cause serious bodily harm or legal consequences [ 16]. The given response alternatives are typically altruistic (e.g., helping an old woman who is in distress) versus egoistic (e.g., catching the waiting bus home; see [ 23] or [ 24] for further examples).Thus, current moral dilemma research comprises no longer only abstract reasoning about moral dead-or-life situations (e.g., [ 3, 4]) but also research on moral decision-making in a variety of daily life situations (e.g., [ 17, 18]). Applying ecological momentary assessment in a large study sample ( N = 1.252 participants), Hofmann et al. [ 18] repeatedly assessed moral or immoral acts and experiences in everyday life. The authors were able to confirm five areas of human morality (care/harm, fairness/unfairness, loyalty/disloyalty, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation) as originally proposed by the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT; [ 19, 20]). Moreover, honesty/dishonesty was the third most frequently mentioned dimension regarding morality in everyday life and, thus, emerged as another important category [ 18, 21]. I am running to catch a bus that is about to leave and that only runs once every hour. In front of me, several items drop out of the purse of a woman with two small children. Except for me, there is no one else around to help the woman. What do I do? Supplementary analysis: Influence of the actual existence of socially close protagonists in the lives of participants

I have promised my partner to go to the company party with him/her. He/she has already signed both of us up. Now I realize that I would urgently need the time to prepare for an important exam. What do I do? In the final version, the items 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 20 (socially close protagonists) and 24, 26, 27, 30, 31, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40 (socially distant protagonists) were assigned to set A; the items 1, 3, 4, 6, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19 (socially close protagonists) and 21, 22, 23, 25, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 36 (socially distant protagonists) became part of set B (see last column in S1 Table). Furthermore, we did not explicitly control for socially desirable responding in our surveys. Nevertheless, we tried to keep the potential impact of social desirability as low as possible by ensuring strict anonymity to all our participants. Moreover, we excluded all items with extremely high percentages of altruistic decisions. For the remaining items, we observed statistical variance both within participants and across items, which probably speaks against highly socially desirable responding. Interestingly, we also did not observe gender differences in our surveys, which, on the one hand, is not uncommon for hypothetical moral dilemmas [ 43], but, on the other hand, is in sharp contrast to early moral reasoning research [ 42] and current abstract moral decision-making studies [ 7, 38– 41]. This inconsistent result could potentially be explained by the fact that our new EMCS Scale measures altruistic and egoistic response tendencies, which are behavioral measures that rather reflect outcomes of morality, but not moral attitudes itself [ 43]. 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.

Hobbies

With regard to the test and measurement properties, our results showed that both the EMCS Scale and its two subsets A and B fitted the Rasch model, which implied that there was one underlying latent trait variable. Furthermore, the classical test theory fit index Cronbach’s alpha indicated reasonable internal consistencies for the total EMCS Scale as well as the two item sets A and B (0.60 ≤ α≥ 0.84). Even the fragmentation into four parts still resulted in a sufficient estimation by the Rasch model, although Cronbach’s alpha results spoke against an uncoupled use of only these 10-items parts. Thus, both the complete EMCS Scale and its two parallelized subsets A and B can be utilized as valid measures for decision-making in everyday moral conflict situations.