Summary of Research Findings

Summary of Research Study
Thank you to everyone who took part in my research study on Decisions and
Judgements in OCD! The main results of the study are presented below.
What the literature tells us so far:
1. Individuals with OCD, compared to individuals without OCD, are more likely to act
to prevent potential harm, but only in everyday situations (Foa et al., 2003) that are
relevant to their obsessional concerns (Wroe and Salkovskis, 2000).
2. Moral reasoning is often researched using scenarios where there is potential harm and
where there are 2 options: option 1, to do nothing (not to act to prevent harm); or option
2, to act to prevent that potential harm, but by doing so causing other, albeit less, harm.
For example, a commonly used scenario to explore moral reasoning is the runaway train
dilemma. This dilemma says that there is a runaway train headed towards 5 people on a
track. The reader has the option to pull a lever that will change the train’s path towards 1
person on another track.
Research suggests that individuals with OCD are less likely to try and prevent harm in
these scenarios when compared to individuals without OCD (Mancini & Gangemi,
2015; Whitton, Henry & Grisham, 2014) i.e. participants with OCD would be less likely
to pull the lever to change the train’s track.
Whilst interesting, these studies are criticised because they used non-everyday, non-
OCD relevant situations, which is unsupported by the above research in which decision
differences between those with and without OCD are specific to everyday, OCDrelevant
situations.
3. Many factors have been suggested to explain decision differences between those with
and without OCD. These include: responsibility (Franklin et al, 2009; Wroe &
Salkovskis, 2000); guilt (Mancini & Gangemi, 2015); and moral sensitivity (Harrison et
al., 2012). However, little is known about these factors and about their relative
contributions to decision differences.
Therefore this study aimed to:
1. Provide support for the notion that individuals with and without OCD only make
different decisions in everyday scenarios that are relevant to OCD; in these situations
where there is potential harm it was expected that individuals with OCD would be more
likely to say that they would act to try and prevent that harm.
2. Explore what happened to the decisions made by people with and without OCD when
the scenarios are described such that acting to prevent some harm, may result in other,
albeit less, potential harm. We wanted to test whether the previous findings on moral
judgement also apply when scenarios describe everyday situations that are more relevant
to OCD.
3. Explore whether beliefs and judgements around responsibility, guilt and immorality,
contributed to decision differences between individuals with and without OCD.
What we did:
1. We asked individuals with and without OCD to complete a questionnaire about
decisions and judgements in different hypothetical scenarios. We also asked everyone to
rank the scenarios beforehand in terms of how distressing they were so that we could

compare individuals’ responses when considering scenarios that were most- and leastdistressing
to them. It was hoped that this would mean we could explore individuals’
most distressing (and hence, likely to be OCD relevant) scenarios to their least
distressing.
2. All scenarios were presented twice. In the first presentation, the potential risk of
acting was not stated. In the second presentation, a potential risk of acting was also
presented. This second presentation therefore mirrored the train dilemma (where acting
would result in other, lesser harm). However, as this study used low-risk, everyday
scenarios, and identified individuals most-distressing scenarios, this addressed the
criticisms of previous studies.
3. All participants were also asked to rate their general beliefs about responsibility and
their feelings of responsibility, immorality and guilt if they did and didn’t act in
scenarios.
What we found:
1. When risks of acting were not presented, individuals with OCD were found to be
more likely to say that they would try and act to prevent harm than individuals without
OCD. However, this was only found to be the case in their most-distressing scenarios.
Therefore, people with OCD do not generally make different decisions to people without
OCD; this is only found to be the case in scenarios related to their individual obsessional
concerns. This supports the findings of Wroe and Salkovskis (2000).
2. When risks of acting were presented, individuals with OCD were still more likely
than individuals without OCD to act to try and prevent harm only in their obsessionrelevant
scenarios. This contradicts the findings of Mancini and Gangemi (2015) and
Whitton, Henry and Grisham (2014) who suggested individuals with OCD are less likely
than individuals without OCD to act to prevent harm when this harm causes other, less
harm. Therefore, when presented with everyday scenarios that are more relevant to their
OCD, individuals with OCD are still likely to act in a way that reduces overall harm,
when risks of acting are presented.
3. From this study, it seemed that the reason individuals with OCD were more likely to
act to prevent harm in their most-distressing scenarios was because they felt generally
more responsible, and they would have felt more immoral if they didn’t act in the
specific situation. However, this was only for scenarios when risks of acting were not
presented. When risks of acting were presented, general responsibility and feelings of
immorality, responsibility and guilt, did not explain differences in decisions, suggesting
that when risks of acting were presented, some other factor may have been at play.
These findings are important in improving our understanding of OCD, and developing
psychological work that may help people with OCD. However, more research is
required to improve our understanding of factors that influence such decisions.
I hope you have found these results interesting. Please do get in touch if you have any
questions! Thank you again for taking part in this research.
Zoe Kindynis