Utilitarian or Deontological? The Effect of Solving Distant Analogies on Moral Judgments

Analogical reasoning involves mapping relational structure from a source domain to a target domain. Distant analogies, compared with near analogies, require reasoners to go beyond surface similarity and extract deeper relational structure. Because utilitarian judgments in sacrificial moral dilemmas also involve evaluating structural trade-offs between costs and benefits, the present study examined whether solving distant analogies increases approval of utilitarian actions. In Experiment 1, 175 Chinese university students were randomly assigned to solve either 40 distant or 40 near verbal analogies and then rated their approval of utilitarian actions across eight sacrificial moral dilemmas. In Experiment 2, 161 students completed the same procedure, except that the dilemmas were rewritten from a second-person to a third-person perspective. Across both experiments, participants in the distant-analogy condition reported significantly higher approval of utilitarian actions than those in the near-analogy condition. This effect remained significant after controlling for analogy accuracy in linear mixed-effects models, and the Condition × Accuracy interactions were not significant in either experiment. These findings suggest that solving distant analogies can increase subsequent utilitarian approval in sacrificial moral dilemmas, possibly by promoting a relational, structure-focused processing orientation.