Instruments with moral dilemmas used to assess moral judgment: systematic review

Abstract

Morality is an essential element of the human being, who, on many occasions, needs to face complex and stressful decisions. Techniques with moral dilemmas are considered a standard methodology in moral judgment studies. One of the traditional dilemmas is the “Trolley Problem”; using it as a model, sets of moral dilemmas were developed and adapted to different research objectives, but there is no consensus regarding its psychometric properties. Similarly, assessment instruments with moral dilemmas have been developed: the Moral Judgment Interview and the Moral Competence Test are some of the best known. The aim of this study was to investigate the assessment instruments with moral dilemmas, used to assess moral judgment, in surveys conducted between 2010 and 2020, period with a significant increase in publications on this topic. For this, a systematic review of literature was carried out using the PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus and PsycInfo databases, following the PRISMA protocol. 354 studies were found, of which 8 were selected, containing the following instruments: Moral Competence Test (MCT), Moral Judgment Test (MJT), Moral Sense Test (MST), Moral Thinking and Communication (MTC) and Moral Judgments of Sport Managers Instrument (MJSMI). It is also important to consider that 90 of the excluded studies contained varied sets of dilemmas. In conclusion, in this analysis, few studies using assessment instruments were found and the predominant use was of sets adapted to the objectives of each research.