Online Moral Conformity: how powerful is a Group of Strangers when influencing an Individual’s Moral Judgments during a video meeting?

Abstract

AbstractPeople make moral decisions every day. When making such decisions, they may be influenced by their companions (a so-called moral conformity effect). Increasingly, people make decisions in online environments, like video meetings. In the current preregistered experiment, we studied the moral conformity effect in an online context. We applied an Asch conformity paradigm by asking participants (N = 120) to reply to sacrificial moral dilemmas through the online video communication tool Zoom either when sitting in a “virtual” room with strangers (confederates instructed on how to answer; experimental condition) or when sitting alone (control condition). We found that people displayed a moral conformity effect on half the dilemmas included in our study as well as in the aggregate.