Causal coherence: Structural dynamics of belief and attitude in moral trade-offs

The most pressing issues we face involve resolving conflict between our moral beliefs. However, the mechanism by which agents evaluate moral trade-offs is poorly understood. We extend and test a psychological framework of moral trade-offs, under which judgment is a product of revising relevant beliefs to achieve coherence, in response to structural constraints imposed by the decision problem. Whilst traditional applications of coherence to moral judgements have been post-hoc, coherence on our view is causally involved in judgement. We develop a novel experimental dilemma concerning the issue of climate justice, which enables decision relevant beliefs to be measured before and after the dilemma is evaluated. We also estimate the coherence between these beliefs and their consistency with available choice options. Across two studies (N= 851) we examine the core predictions of this framework, including the causal role of coherence-based belief change in moral judgement. In both studies, participants re-evaluated their beliefs to become more internally coherent and more consistent with their judgement, polarising the beliefs of participants reaching competing conclusions. Coherence and consistency also separately predicted metacognitive properties of judgement such as confidence and perceived task difficulty. Network analyses demonstrated a restructuring of the belief network and an increase in the strength of partial associations between beliefs over judgement. Overall, these results provide strong support for a coherence-based framework of moral trade-offs. Whilst judgement involves revising beliefs to achieve a coherent arrangement, the choice option selected depends on the aggregate weight of these beliefs once the revision process is completed.