The motivated moral reasoning framework contends that the positive feelings supervisors hold towards high performers prevent them from rendering the punitive judgment necessary to discourage cheating in reporting situations. Moral nudges have shown to be effective in encouraging rational and prosocial responses in these types of moral decision-making scenarios by providing small reminders about the ethicality of actions. Additionally, the increased agency of automated systems has furthered their ability to provide these types of instructions and reminders to human agents when integrated into moral decision-making environments. We replicated the moderating effect of performance on punitive judgment using an online experiment and sought ways to reduce this effect via moral nudging. However, we found that moral nudges only successfully increased punitive judgment for subgroups of participants with low affinity for cognition, showing an interaction with information processing in moral decisions. Additionally, we found no effect for whether the moral nudge was delivered by a human or algorithm, which calls to question distinctions made in the existing literature for the role of algorithms in moral decision-making.
