Bright mind, moral mind? Intelligence is unrelated to consequentialist moral judgment in sacrificial moral dilemmas

The dual-process model of moral cognition suggests that outcome-focused, consequentialist moral judgment in sacrificial moral dilemmas is driven by a deliberative, reasoned, cognitive process. Although many studies have demonstrated a positive association of consequentialist judgment with measures of cognitive engagement, no work has investigated whether cognitive ability itself is also related to consequentialist judgment. Therefore, we conducted three studies to investigate whether participants’ preference for consequentialist moral judgment is related to their intelligence. A meta-analytic integration of these three studies (with a total N = 675) uncovered no association between the two measures (r = – .02). Furthermore, a Bayesian reanalysis of the same data provided substantial evidence in favor of a null effect (BFH0 = 7.2). As such, the present studies show that if consequentialist judgments depend on deliberative reasoning, this association is not driven by cognitive ability, but by cognitive motivation.