Walking the moral plank: using virtual reality to investigate moral decision-making under threat

How is decision-making affected when individuals face threats to safety? Guided by the theory of dyadic morality, the limited capacity model of motivated-mediated message processing, and exemplification theory, we investigated how safety threats shaped individuals’ physiological responses and behavioral moral decision-making. Using an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment simulating a moral tradeoff, participants crossed a deep pit and made decisions between their safety and that of another person, reflecting a tradeoff between egoism and altruism. Results from an experiment with 201 participants revealed that exposure to threat increased arousal (physiologically and self-reported), which decreased the extent to which they felt their decision harmed others, leading to selfish decisions in the moral dilemma. However, this pattern only manifested when concerns of harm were not made salient before the threatening experience. Together, these findings demonstrate VR’s utility for simulating moral tradeoffs and advancing both psychophysiological and behavioral approaches to media psychology and morality research.