Decision Making and Moral Judgment in Adolescents and Young Adults

Abstract

Introduction: Decision-Making (DM) is a process aimed at selecting one or more response options, while Moral-Judgment (MJ) is defined as the evaluation decision through which the agent approves or disapproves of intentional actions in which physical and/or psychological harm is caused to the people. Social cognition tries to study the bases of human development of DM and MJ as a dual process, where cognition and emotion jointly participate. Objective: The objective of this study was the evaluation of DM and MJ in adolescents and young adults. Methodology: The Columbia Card Task (Figner et al., 2009), which evaluates DM, and Young’s Moral Judgment task (Baez et al., 2015), were used to evaluate MJ. Results: The results of the study suggest that adolescents take greater risk than young adults in the DM in emotional and cognitive tasks, even increasing the risk in their choices in the cognitive task compared to the emotional task. Regarding the MJ, adolescents consider the negative consequences of a positive action inappropriate even though there is no intention to cause harm, their reaction being more emotional. Regarding young adults, they consider a negative action inappropriate when there is a clear intent to cause harm, despite the fact that the consequence is not negative, their reaction being more reasoned. Conclusion: These results allow for an evaluation of DM and MJ in a comprehensive way, taking into account that in everyday life both emotion and cognition interact to carry out a choice both in adolescence and in young adulthood.