This study aimed at exploring the relationship between mental time travel (MTT) and moral decisions, focusing on the predictive roles of involuntary and voluntary MTT, and the moderating and mediating influences of impulsivity and self-regulation, respectively. A Bayesian-mediated moderation analysis was conducted on a sample of 138 participants to examine these relationships.
Results showed that neither involuntary nor voluntary MTT independently predicted moral decisions, with only 1.5% of the variance being explained by the combined effects of both types of MTT. Consistently, when considering the mediated moderation model, zero was deemed credible in the relationship between voluntary MTT and moral decisions in the models for impulsivity and self-regulation. Furthermore, after calculating the Bayes Factor, no evidence was found in favour of H1 compared to H0, for all the models existing evidence for H0.
Those results indicate that moral decisions are complex, the recall of other decisions and personality factors not being enough to explain them. However, future studies should update the prior belief considering these findings, while testing for other possible variables that can better predict moral decisions, such as well-being and the emotional valence of the decision to be made. Not least, an important covariate to consider when measuring decisions is the decision time, which is of importance for understanding if participants tend to make more intuitive or deliberate decisions.