AUTHOR=Weippert Matthias , Rickler Michel , Kluck Steffen , Behrens Kristin , Bastian Manuela , Mau-Moeller Anett , Bruhn Sven , Lischke Alexander TITLE=It's Harder to Push, When I Have to Push Hard—Physical Exertion and Fatigue Changes Reasoning and Decision-Making on Hypothetical Moral Dilemmas in Males JOURNAL=Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience VOLUME=12 YEAR=2018 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/behavioral-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00268 DOI=10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00268 ISSN=1662-5153 ABSTRACT=

Despite the prevalence of physical exertion and fatigue during military, firefighting and disaster medicine operations, sports or even daily life, their acute effects on moral reasoning and moral decision-making have never been systematically investigated. To test the effects of physical exertion on moral reasoning and moral decision-making, we administered a moral dilemma task to 32 male participants during a moderate or high intensity cycling intervention. Participants in the high intensity cycling group tended to show more non-utilitarian reasoning and more non-utilitarian decision-making on impersonal but not on personal dilemmas than participants in the moderate intensity cycling group. Exercise-induced exertion and fatigue, thus, shifted moral reasoning and moral decision-making in a non-utilitarian rather than utilitarian direction, presumably due to an exercise-induced limitation of prefrontally mediated executive resources that are more relevant for utilitarian than non-utilitarian reasoning and decision-making.