Real-world moral decisions are constrained by limited information and bounded cognitive resources, necessitating heuristic strategies. We argue that choices in moral dilemmas should be analysed in terms of decision strategies rather than ethical theories and show how resource rationality and the bias–variance trade-off explain when people rely on particular strategies.

Understanding how people make decisions in specific situations is a central challenge in (moral) psychology research. Yet there are no existing self-report scales for measuring the process of decision...