<p>  </p> <p>This study investigates consumers’ moral-decision making process when they become aware of brands’ controversial actions. Specifically, this study aims to understand the effects of consumers’ cognitive and affective responses on their moral judgments after learning about the controversy of brands conducting animal testing, which in turn impacts their brand switching intention. The current study also considers consumers’ approach-avoidance conflicts in the moral-decision making process in which consumers confront moral dilemmas. The particular brands’ controversial action of interest for this study is personal care brands’ conducting animal testing on their products and selling animal-tested products because many believe that animal testing is only vital for biomedical research purposes but not for pursuing beauty purposes. This study builds a conceptual model depicting the consumer moral decision-making process based on Rest's (1994) and Schwartz’s (2015) ethical decision-making (EDM) theory and Sirgy’s (1986) self-congruence theory. To test the model, highly valid responses were collected from 454 U.S. nationwide consumers through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and analyzed by structural equation modeling. The results indicated that: (1) consumers’ affective response (outward-focused emotion) and cognitive response (moral awareness) both provoked their moral incongruence and brand switching intention, (2) consumers’ cognitive response had a negative and significant impact on their moral disengagement, but moral disengagement had a marginal impact on brand switching intentions, (3) consumers’ affective response has a stronger impact on their moral judgment than cognitive, and their affective response can directly lead to brand switching intention, and lastly, (4) moral incongruence and moral disengagement mediated the effects of moral awareness and outward-focused emotion on brand switching intention. Finally, the research findings contribute to the consumer science literature in the area of consumers' moral decision-making process. For practical contributions, this study encourages companies to conduct practice that follows general consumers' moral beliefs and values to avoid losing their loyal customers. </p>

The focus of this thesis is research of interaction which takes place between players and computer games. Specifically on ethical and moral aspects of such interaction in which the players are required to make moral decisions that in any way affect the progression of the story, shaping of the virtual world, or have any other effect on the in-game narration. The goal of this text is to describe context in which such moral decisions are made and factors that influence them. The theoretical part of this thesis has the form of a summary of relevant game studies topics, which influence the moral decision making issue. Research was conducted on a group of ten respondents, who played The Walking Dead game and who shared their experiences by answering questions concerning moral decision making. The gathered data was thereafter analysed using a grounded theory method, which allowed me to identify and contextualize the researched phenomena. The main output of this text is the grounded theory itself and the answers provided by its application in context with research questions.

This is a review of what the currently dominant theories of moral decision-making are and where they derive from. While the introduction serves as a common ground to explain what moral decision-making is, the earlier parts of the thesis describe older traditionalist theories within the field,  theories of emotional decision-making, in the form of the somatic marker hypothesis, as well as critique of the older traditionalist theories through the social intuitionist model. Both of these two theories are explained as the foundation of the current theories of moral decision-making and after establishing a clear basis on what the currently dominant theories of moral decision-making are built on, said theories are introduced in the form of the dual-processing theory and the event-feature-emotion complexes which are thoroughly reviewed, explained in detail and serves as the core of the text. This is afterward followed by criticism as well as arguments in favor of both theories as well as criticisms from other researchers who disagree with the methodology which the theories of moral decision-making are conducted on. The essay reviews the current state of the field of moral decision-making which has been split up into two different approaches, the locationist approach and the constructionist approach. The essay concludes that there are terms which needs to be clarified in order for the field to move forward and studies to be made regarding the social implications of gut reactions in moral decision-making.

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The focus of this research was to identify the moral reasoning and moral judgment of elementary school principals who serve in high-poverty schools. The study was undertaken at the request of the client public school district who was attempting to identify characteristics of current elementary principals serving in high-poverty schools. Two research questions guided this study concerning the moral operational level of the principals. The theoretical framework of the study was based on the work of Lawrence Kohlberg and his stages of moral development. Participating principals were administered the Defining Issues Test-2 (DIT-2), a pencil-paper questionnaire that presented five moral dilemmas and a series of statements asking for the participant to rank solutions to the dilemmas. The results indicated that the majority of participants operated from lower levels of moral development, reasoning, and judgment. Participants’ scores were matched with their schools’ performance grades. There was not an indication that high moral scores and high school performance were linked. This study confirmed the results of an early study conducted by Vitton and Wasonga (2009) and encourages a deeper examination of the results of accountability and principal decision making.

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As both a Working Memory (WM) task and as a more integrated reasoning process, moral decision making appears susceptible to interference by nociceptive stimuli. Differentiation, however, between conflicting occupation of WM resources and the influence of pain-induced autonomic activation as potential pathways of interaction represents a considerably more difficult task than simple measurement of WM performance. To clarify the basis of any noted effects, this study recorded both self-report pain intensity and Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) as a separate measure of autonomic activation under a cold pressor task using a sample of 122 undergraduate participants. Recorded pain and physiological data was compared to rates of utilitarian decision making in the provided moral dilemmas. While there were significantly lower rates of utilitarian decision making in the pain condition, a warm-water painless condition showed comparably decreased rates. Comparison with GSR data suggests that the pain condition did not induce a significantly heightened state of autonomic activation. This suggests that while divided attention or occupation of WM resources does effect patterns of moral decision making, this is not reliant on a nociceptive stimulus.

With the arrival of automated vehicles (AVs) on our streets virtually around the corner, this thesis explores advances in automated driving technology with a focus on ethical decision making in dilemmatic traf- fic situations. In a total of five publications, we take a multi-facetted approach to analyse and address the core challenges related to auto- mated ethical decision making in AVs. In publications one through three, we conduct a series of immersive virtual reality studies to analyze human behavior in traffic dilemmas, explore mathematical approaches to model the decision making process, investigate how the assessment methodology can affect moral judgment, and discuss the implications of these studies for algorithmic decision making in the real-world. In publication number four, we provide a comprehensive summary of the status quo of AV technology and legislation with regard to automated ethical decision making. Here, we discuss when and why ethical deci- sion making systems become necessary in AVs, review existing guide- lines for the behavior of AVs in dilemma situations, and compile a set of 10 demands and open questions that need to be addressed in the pursuit of a framework for ethical decision making in AVs. Finally, the basis for automated ethical decision making in AVs will be provided by accurate assessments of the immediate environment of the car. The pri- mary technology used to provide the required information processing of camera and LiDAR images in AVs is machine learning, and in particular deep learning. In publication five, we propose a form of adaptive acti- vation functions, addressing a central element of deep neural networks, which could, for instance, lead to increased detection rates of relevant objects, and thus help to provide a more accurate assessment of the AVs environment. Overall, this thesis provides a structured and compre- hensive overview of the state of the art in ethical decision making for AVs. It includes important implications for the design of decision mak- ing algorithms in practice, and concisely outlines the central remaining challenges on the road to a safe, fair and successful introduction of fully automated vehicles into the market.