Track: Global Business Management Education

Abstract

Ethical decisions have an impact on our daily life regardless of the importance of the decisions. Moral judgment processes are affected by cognitive sources and performance. Theoretically, moral cognition is always connected to mental reasoning and executive functions. Cognitive flexibility, as one of the executive functions, determines how people change and modify their response until it is appropriate, and people’s cognitive flexibilities can be distinguished using switching tasks. With their cognitive flexibility, people use their cognition to adapt and deal with stimuli. This research explored and distinguished individual responses between blocks of (picture or text) stimuli in the moral dilemma scenario. The stimuli presentation was carried out using experyment, a lightweight Python library. The research consisted of two phases. Study 1 sought to differentiate and categorize participants into high and low cognitive flexibility capacity groups using the behavioral paradigm of task switching (p < 0.001) and switch-trial was found to take a longer time to respond than same-trial. In Study 2, based on the average switch-cost value in the first study (mean = 922 ms), two groups were formed (the fast and slow groups). The analysis results showed a significant difference between groups and types of stimuli (p < 0.001; Mallow’s Cp = 66.2). This finding implies that individuals who have adaptive thinking flexibility might be faster in dealing with decision dilemma than who do not. The fast-switch group was also found outperforming the slow-switch group in both moral image (p < 0.05; z ratio = 2.650) and text tasks (p < 0.05; z ratio = 4.119). This study shows that a lab experiment with a noncomplex paradigm is adequate to detect and predict more complex decision-making such as in moral dilemmas.