Skip to ContentSkip to Navigation
Over ons Faculteit Gedrags- en Maatschappijwetenschappen Sociologie

External colloquium Caspar Chorus (TU)

Wanneer:di 16-01-2018 11:00 - 12:15
Waar:B.126 Gadourekzaal Grote Rozenstraat 31


Caspar Chorus (TU Delft): Models of moral decision making: A research program and a case study into taboo trade-offs.

Discrete choice theory provides a mathematically rigorous framework to analyse and predict choice behaviour, which is widely used throughout the social sciences. However, the theory has a blind spot for moral choice behaviour: it was designed to analyse choices that are optimal given people’s consumer preferences, rather than choices that are right, given people’s moral preferences. This presentation will introduce a research program, funded by an ERC-Consolidator grant, which extends discrete choice theory to the domain of moral decision making. Based on the example of taboo trade-off aversion – a behavioral phenomenon well established in moral psychology – I will explain how we plan to produce and empirically validate a suite of new mathematical representations of choice behaviour (i.e., choice models), which are designed to capture the decision rules and decision weights that determine how individuals behave in moral choice situations. A crucial part of the program consists of using these validated choice models as input for agent based model systems, to identify how social interaction processes lead to the emergence, persistence or dissolution of moral equilibria at larger spatio-temporal scales. With this seminar, I hope to explore and trigger research collaborations between me and my discrete choice theory-group at TU Delft, and scholars in agent based modeling and ethics at Groningen University.

View this page in: English