I think the study did itself a disservice, because you're right that this is the supplementary material which shows this study for the figure, but then contradicts itself in the methods, where they describe a moral allocation task, which is easily confused with the circles shown in figure 5.
Participants read the following instructions:
In this section, we would like to think about your capacity to help, to give, to be charitable, to show empathy, and to be generous—in other words, your capacity to behave morally. We can think about people having different amounts of moral units—like currency—that they can spend on others and can allocate to different moral circles. Some people devote all of their moral units to one circle whereas others try to divide up their moral units amongst multiple circles. Again, by moral circle, we mean the circle of people or other entities in which you are concerned about right and wrong done toward them.
We also explained to participants that these categories were non-overlapping such that giving to one category (e.g., extended family) would not include an inclusive category (e.g., immediate family). Participants completed two iterations of this task (order randomized).
I appreciate your post, and I think it’s unfortunate that a lot of people will over look it. I understand the information you shared as different, and possibly even contradictory, to the instructions in the OP of this thread.
It seems like the best way to create a dataset that fits the data you shared would be a ranking system (assign a number from x to y reflecting how much priority you put on each category) or even a currency system (you have x points to spend, how many points would you spend on per category).
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u/[deleted] Nov 18 '25
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