Rational Hypocrite, Irrational Saint or Both?
– A Unified Information-Theoretic Framework for Moral Decision Making
Xiaolong Wang
SSSPE, Claremont Graduate University
Motivation
Rational Hypocrite: about one out of three people
will avoid giving to charity by avoiding being asked
in front of a grocery store and changing the door
they use, but when asked, donate 65 percent more
than average voluntary donation.
Irrational Saint: the sum of contributions to a single
child in need of cancer treatment far exceeds
contributions to a group of similar sick children
even though the same single child is in the group.
Why? Attention and Emotion matter. We explain
this by constructing a information-theoretic model
that incorporates attention and emotion as
determinants of social cognition and moral
behavior. People have limited attention and hence
may not even respond to moral cause. But when
they do respond, emotion plays a key in
determining value and moral behavior given the
available social information structure.
Background
In many situations like those described above, we
need to make moral decision regarding to strangers,
and according to the uncertainty reduction theory
from the communication literature, people need
information to reduce uncertainty about the other
party. Intuitively moral behavior towards others
depends to a large extent on this uncertainty and the
moral message in a given situation contains
information that may reduce the uncertainty.
On the other hand, any information that is received
by the decision maker is encoded and interpreted in
a subjective way before it’s understood. This social
cognitive process further complicates the
transmission of information and reduction of
uncertainty. Attention, extensively studied in the
social psychology literature, is closely related to
such encoding process and also costly to the
decision maker. How attention is paid to the moral
decision problem has great implication for the
moral outcome. Besides, emotion is another
cognitive factor that will influence the encoding and
interpretation of moral messages and hence affect
the decision. It’s the role of attention and emotion
that we are going to theorize in the project.
RESEARCH POSTER PRESENTATION DESIGN © 2012
www.PosterPresentations.com
Information-Theoretic Framework for
Moral Decision Making
Social Information Transmission Process
Source
(Send out set of
messages and stimuli)
𝑘
Encoder
(Produce subjective
representation
through senses)
𝑟(𝑘)
Channel
(Social cognitive
information processing
that determines value
but is subject to limited
capacity and emotion
distortion)
𝑢(𝑟 𝑘 )
Decoder
(Generate action)
𝑚(𝑢)
Observed moral
behavior and outcome
Model
Uncertainty and Entropy
• The social uncertainty involved in a moral
decision making context is characterized by
a random variable 𝑋 , and the extent of
uncertainty is captured by its entropy
H 𝑋 = 𝐸𝑃𝑋 {−𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑃𝑋 (X)}
Moral Message and Subjective Representation
• Moral message 𝑘 is characterized by a value
𝑥𝑎 for each of n distinct attributes
• The subjective representation 𝑟𝑎 may be
different from 𝑥𝑎 and partial awareness is
specified by the probability of obtaining a
particular subjective representation 𝑝(𝑟𝑎 |𝑥𝑎 )
Limited Attention Management
The decision maker choose the attention strategy
p that minimizes uncertainty and attention cost
𝑀𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑚𝑖𝑧𝑒 𝐻 𝑋 𝑅 + 𝐾(𝑅)
and also satisfies Bayes’ Law such that
𝜇𝑎 𝑝(𝑟𝑎 |𝑥𝑎 )
𝛾𝑎 =
∑𝜇𝑖 𝑝(𝑟𝑖 |𝑥𝑖 )
where 𝛾𝑎 is posterior beliefs over 𝑋 and 𝜇𝑎 the
prior
Emotion
• Emotion 𝑒𝑎 is characterized as systematic noise
in the valuation process
Implications
• Moral behavior is not a black and white
phenomenon and is subject to human cognitive
and affective limitations, or in general, value
depends on human conditions
• Consideration on the information set is crucial for
any analysis on rationality or rational decision
making
• The model can extend our understanding of the
psychological mechanism of moral decision
making and inform better practices of charity
promotion and moral education
References
Andreoni, James, Justin M. Rao, and Hannah Trachtman. Avoiding
The Ask: A Field Experiment on Altruism, Empathy, and
Charitable Giving. Working Paper. National Bureau of Economic
Research, December 2011. http://www.nber.org/papers/w17648.
Caplin, Andrew, and Mark Dean. Revealed Preference, Rational
Inattention, and Costly Information Acquisition. Working Paper.
National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2014.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19876.
Fiske, Susan, and Shelley E. Taylor. Social Cognition: From
Brains to Culture. Second Edition edition. Los Angeles: SAGE
Publications Ltd, 2013.
Kobayashi, Te Sun Han and Kingo. Mathematics of Information
and Coding. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society,
2007.
Västfjäll, Daniel, Paul Slovic, Marcus Mayorga, and Ellen Peters.
“Compassion Fade: Affect and Charity Are Greatest for a Single
Child in Need.” PloS One 9, no. 6 (2014): e100115.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0100115.
Woodford, Michael, David Laibson, and Andrei Shleifer.
Inattentive Valuation and Reference-Dependent Choice ∗, 2012.
𝑢𝑎 𝑚, 𝑟𝑎 = 𝑣𝑎 𝑚|𝑟𝑎 + 𝑒𝑎
Acknowledgement and Contact
Moral Decision Outcome
𝒌: moral message
r(k): subjective representation
u(r(k)): decision value based on the
subjective representation
a(u): action plan
The decision maker chooses action 𝑚 to maximize
her expected utility
𝑀𝑎𝑥𝑖𝑚𝑖𝑧𝑒 𝑈 = ∑𝛾𝑎 𝑢𝑎
In sum, this is a two-stage decision problem where
the decision maker first minimize the uncertainty
and attention cost by choosing appropriate attention
strategy (beliefs) and then maximize subjective
decision value by selecting the best action plan
• I’m very grateful for Prof. Minica Capra’s
guidance and encouragement on developing this
project from the very beginning
• Author information
Xiaolong Wang
PhD student, SSSPE, Claremont Graduate
University
Xiaolong.wang@cgu.edu