The influence of self-relevance under time pressure on moral decision-making

Moral decision-making is a core cognitive process that influences human social behavior. Understanding its underlying psychological mechanisms is crucial for comprehending individuals' prosocial tendencies and social adaptation. This study employs a situational priming paradigm to systematically investigate the impact of self-relevance on moral decision-making under time pressure. A pilot study assessed time pressure and established decision time thresholds for moderate and high levels of time pressure. Building on this, Experiment 1 examined the impact of time pressure (none, moderate, high) on moral decision-making, revealing that participants' helping behavior significantly increased under moderate and high time pressure compared to no time pressure. Experiment 2 introduced self-relevance to explore the joint effects of time pressure (none, moderate, high) and self-relevance (low, moderate, high) on moral decision-making. The results indicated that: (1) the main effect of self-relevance was significant, with helping behavior notably higher under high self-relevance than under low and moderate conditions; (2) within each self-relevance condition, helping behavior under moderate and high time pressure was significantly greater than under no time pressure; (3) under high self-relevance, participants maintained a similarly high level of helping behavior across all time pressure conditions (none, moderate, high). These findings suggest that time pressure facilitates altruistic moral decision-making in helping dilemmas. Moreover, individuals in high self-relevance condition tend to exhibit a greater proportion of helping behavior and are relatively less influenced by variations in time pressure. This study offers a novel perspective on how time pressure influences moral behavior within close relationships.