Previous research has suggested that there is a difference between what people believe to be morally acceptable (moral judgment) and how they would act in a situation involving a moral decision (moral action). To investigate this “moral dissonance”, researchers need a set of moral dilemma pairs that are matched for their moral principles and elicit identical 'yes'/'no' responses within individual subjects.
We have created 17 parallel dilemmas designed using the same moral principles that appear in a set of previously validated personal moral dilemmas (Christensen et al., 2014). For each original (validated) dilemma, we created a parallel (new) dilemma in which the same number of people are involved, and the moral action described is similar but all the contextual information is changed. We then validated our parallel dilemmas alongside the original dilemmas in a cohort of 108 adults to determine the within-subject consistency for each dilemma pair. A threshold of 75% within-pair within-subject consistency (lower 95% CI of 71%) was considered as an acceptable consistency rate for dilemma pairs.
Asking both established and parallel dilemmas at the same time point allowed us to ascertain whether the parallel dilemmas were in fact probing the same moral principles as their established counterparts. The consistency of people's answers to dilemma pairs presented at the same time point, however, may be influenced by their recent experience of reading the associated dilemma counterpart. Therefore, in the current study, we aim to validate this set of moral dilemmas by presenting dilemma pairs over two points in time. This will enable us to investigate moral dissonance within the same individual.