Choice with ethical outcomes: Sign effect, commodity effect, and ethical theory preference

Researchers have found significant utility in approaching choice from a behavioral economics lens. Recently, this framework has begun to be extended to describe and predict clinical-ethical choices. Researchers have found that common behavioral economics effects occur with clinical-ethical choice at the group level (e.g., framing effects, effort discounting, delay discounting, and probability discounting) and the individual level (e.g., probability discounting with specific outcomes). However, past research examining clinical-ethical outcomes through the behavioral economics lens has used experimental preparations that differ from those commonly used in discounting research with other commodities. Thus, the current exploratory study sought to use adjusting-amount procedures commonly employed in discounting work to examine the sign effect in ethical probability discounting; the commodity effect between monetary and ethical outcomes; and correlations among rates of monetary discounting, ethical discounting, and ethical theory preference as measured via an exploratory, ethical multiple-stimulus-without-replacement procedure. We observed monetary outcomes discounted more steeply than ethical outcomes, ethical violations discounted more steeply than ethical compliance, no significant correlations among discounting tasks, and no significant correlations between ethical theory preference and ethical discounting. The present work further demonstrates the presence of behavioral economics effects with ethical decision making. However, choice with ethical outcomes may not easily be predicted by choice with other commodities, measures in behavioral economics, or ethical theory preference. Despite these findings, many limitations remained, primarily centered on whether procedures common to behavioral economic analyses with other commodities are adequate for use when studying clinical-ethical decision making. Moving forward, alternative preparations to study ethical decision making may be needed.