Browse
Submit Data
Databases
API
Help

Dataset Information

0 Views

0 Connections

0 Citations

0 Reanalyses

0 Downloads

Omics score: 0

Cognitive processes in imaginative moral shifts: How judgments of morally unacceptable actions change.

ABSTRACT: How do people come to consider a morally unacceptable action, such as "a passenger in an airplane does not want to sit next to a Muslim passenger and so he tells the stewardess the passenger must be moved to another seat", to be less unacceptable? We propose they tend to imagine counterfactual alternatives about how things could have been different that transform the unacceptable action to be less unacceptable. Five experiments identify the cognitive processes underlying this imaginative moral shift: an action is judged less unacceptable when people imagine circumstances in which it would have been moral. The effect occurs for immediate counterfactuals and reflective ones, but is greater when participants create an immediate counterfactual first, and diminished when they create a reflective one first. The effect also occurs for unreasonable actions. We discuss the implications for alternative theories of the mental representations and cognitive processes underlying moral judgments.

SUBMITTER: Tepe B

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9083480 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Json Xml

Publications

Cognitive processes in imaginative moral shifts: How judgments of morally unacceptable actions change.

Tepe Beyza B Byrne Ruth M J RMJ

Memory & cognition 20220509 5

How do people come to consider a morally unacceptable action, such as "a passenger in an airplane does not want to sit next to a Muslim passenger and so he tells the stewardess the passenger must be moved to another seat", to be less unacceptable? We propose they tend to imagine counterfactual alternatives about how things could have been different that transform the unacceptable action to be less unacceptable. Five experiments identify the cognitive processes underlying this imaginative moral s ...[more]

PMID: 35532831

Similar Datasets

The Effects of Intent, Outcome, and Causality on Moral Judgments and Decision Processes.

Project description:Over the past decade, moral judgments and their underlying decision processes have more frequently been considered from a dynamic and multi-factorial perspective rather than a binary approach (e.g., dual-system processes). The agent's intent and his or her causal role in the outcome-as well as the outcome importance-are key psychological factors that influence moral decisions, especially judgments of punishment. The current research aimed to study the influence of intent, outcome, and causality variations on moral decisions, and to identify their interaction during the decision process by embedding the moral scenarios within an adapted mouse-tracking paradigm. Findings of the preregistered study (final n = 80) revealed main effects for intent, outcome, and causality on judgments of punishment, and an interaction between the effects of intent and causality. We furthermore explored the dynamics of these effects during the decision process via the analysis of mouse trajectories in the course of time. It allowed detecting when these factors intervened during the trial time course. The present findings thus both replicate and extend previous research on moral judgment, and evidence that, despite some ongoing challenges, mouse-tracking represents a promising tool to investigate moral decision-making.

| S-EPMC9266851 | biostudies-literature

Transcranial direct current stimulation of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex shifts preference of moral judgments.

Project description:Attitude to morality, reflecting cultural norms and values, is considered unique to human social behavior. Resulting moral behavior in a social environment is controlled by a widespread neural network including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which plays an important role in decision making. In the present study we investigate the influence of neurophysiological modulation of DLPFC reactivity by means of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on moral reasoning. For that purpose we administered anodal, cathodal, and sham stimulation of the left DLPFC while subjects judged the appropriateness of hard moral personal dilemmas. In contrast to sham and cathodal stimulation, anodal stimulation induced a shift in judgment of personal moral dilemmas towards more non-utilitarian actions. Our results demonstrate that alterations of left DLPFC activity can change moral judgments and, in consequence, provide a causal link between left DLPFC activity and moral reasoning. Most important, the observed shift towards non-utilitarian actions suggests that moral decision making is not a permanent individual trait but can be manipulated; consequently individuals with boundless, uncontrollable, and maladaptive moral behavior, such as found in psychopathy, might benefit from neuromodulation-based approaches.

| S-EPMC4436128 | biostudies-literature

Intellectually Rigorous but Morally Tolerant: Exploring Moral Leniency as a Mediator Between Cognitive Style and "Utilitarian" Judgment.

Project description:Past research on people's moral judgments about moral dilemmas has revealed a connection between utilitarian judgment and reflective cognitive style. This has traditionally been interpreted as reflection is conducive to utilitarianism. However, recent research shows that the connection between reflective cognitive style and utilitarian judgments holds only when participants are asked whether the utilitarian option is permissible, and disappears when they are asked whether it is recommended. To explain this phenomenon, we propose that reflective cognitive style is associated with a greater moral leniency-that is, a greater tendency to be tolerant of moral violations, and that moral leniency predicts utilitarian judgment when utilitarian judgment is measured through permissibility. In Study 1 (N = 192), we design a set of vignettes to assess moral leniency. In Studies 2 and 3 (N = 455, 428), we show that reflective cognitive style is indeed associated with greater moral leniency, and that moral leniency mediates the connection between cognitive style and utilitarian judgment. We discuss the implication of our results for the interpretation of the relationship between utilitarianism and reflective cognitive style.

| S-EPMC11614319 | biostudies-literature

Does cleanliness influence moral judgments? Response effort moderates the effect of cleanliness priming on moral judgments.

Project description:Whether cleanliness influences moral judgments has recently become a topic of debate in the psychological literature. After the initial report that activating the notion of physical purity can result in less severe moral judgments (Schnall et al., 2008a), a direct replication (Johnson et al., 2014a) with much larger sample sizes failed to yield similar findings. The current paper examines the possibility that only non-conscious activation of the cleanliness concept, as achieved in participants with low response effort on priming materials, can produce the expected effect. An online replication (Study 1, N = 214) provided evidence that, when participants exerted low (yet still acceptable) levels of response effort to the experimental material, cleanliness priming led to more lenient moral judgments than neutral priming. An online experiment (Study 2, N = 440; replicated in Study 2a, N = 436) manipulating participants' effort on the priming task (low vs. high) supported the hypothesized mechanism. Specifically, respondents in the low response effort group were instructed to complete the priming task as quickly as possible without too much attention, and the cleanliness priming resulted in less extreme moral judgments than the neutral condition as expected. In contrast, respondents in the high response effort group were instructed to perform to the best of their ability on the priming task, with a non-significant difference on moral ratings between cleanliness and neutral conditions. In addition to helping resolve the controversy regarding the cleanliness hypothesis, the current paper calls into attention the role of response effort in the execution and replication of priming studies.

| S-EPMC4222330 | biostudies-literature

Public Attitudes Towards Moral Enhancement. Evidence that Means Matter Morally.

Project description:To gain insight into the reasons that the public may have for endorsing or eschewing pharmacological moral enhancement for themselves or for others, we used empirical tools to explore public attitudes towards these issues. Participants (N = 293) from the United States were recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk and were randomly assigned to read one of several contrastive vignettes in which a 13-year-old child is described as bullying another student in school and then is offered an empathy-enhancing program. The empathy-enhancing program is described as either involving taking a pill or playing a video game on a daily basis for four weeks. In addition, participants were asked to imagine either their own child bullying another student at school, or their own child being bullied by another student. This resulted in a 2 × 2 between-subjects design. In an escalating series of morally challenging questions, we asked participants to rate their overall support for the program; whether they would support requiring participation; whether they would support requiring participation of children who are at higher risk to become bullies in the future; whether they would support requiring participation of all children or even the entire population; and whether they would be willing to participate in the program themselves. We found that people were significantly more troubled by pharmacological as opposed to non-pharmacological moral enhancement interventions. The results indicate that members of the public for the greater part oppose pharmacological moral bioenhancement, yet are open to non-biomedical means to attain moral enhancement. [248 words].

| S-EPMC5569135 | biostudies-literature

Moral spillover in carbon offset judgments.

Project description:Moral spillover occurs when a morally loaded behavior becomes associated with another source. In the current paper, we addressed whether the moral motive behind causing CO2 emissions spills over on to how much people think is needed to compensate for the emissions. Reforestation (planting trees) is a common carbon-offset technique. With this in mind, participants estimated the number of trees needed to compensate for the carbon emissions from vehicles that were traveling with various moral motives. Two experiments revealed that people think larger carbon offsets are needed to compensate for the emissions when the emissions are caused by traveling for immoral reasons, in comparison with when caused by traveling for moral reasons. Hence, moral motives influence people's judgments of carbon-offset requirements even though these motives have no bearing on what is compensated for. Moreover, the effect was insensitive to individual differences in carbon literacy and gender and to the unit (kilograms or tons) in which the CO2 emissions were expressed to the participants. The findings stress the role of emotion in how people perceive carbon offsetting.

| S-EPMC9608638 | biostudies-literature

How social relationships shape moral wrongness judgments.

Project description:Judgments of whether an action is morally wrong depend on who is involved and the nature of their relationship. But how, when, and why social relationships shape moral judgments is not well understood. We provide evidence to address these questions, measuring cooperative expectations and moral wrongness judgments in the context of common social relationships such as romantic partners, housemates, and siblings. In a pre-registered study of 423 U.S. participants nationally representative for age, race, and gender, we show that people normatively expect different relationships to serve cooperative functions of care, hierarchy, reciprocity, and mating to varying degrees. In a second pre-registered study of 1,320 U.S. participants, these relationship-specific cooperative expectations (i.e., relational norms) enable highly precise out-of-sample predictions about the perceived moral wrongness of actions in the context of particular relationships. In this work, we show that this 'relational norms' model better predicts patterns of moral wrongness judgments across relationships than alternative models based on genetic relatedness, social closeness, or interdependence, demonstrating how the perceived morality of actions depends not only on the actions themselves, but also on the relational context in which those actions occur.

| S-EPMC8486868 | biostudies-literature

The effect of gender and parenting daughters on judgments of morally controversial companies.

Project description:Earlier findings suggest that men with daughters make judgments and decisions somewhat in line with those made by women. In this paper, we attempt to extend those findings, by testing how gender and parenting daughters affect judgments of the appropriateness of investing in and working for morally controversial companies ("sin stocks"). To do so, in Study 1 (N = 634) we investigate whether women judge the prospect of investing in sin stocks more harshly than men do, and test the hypothesis that men with daughters judge such investments less favorably than other men. In Study 2 (N = 782), we investigate the willingness to work in morally controversial companies at a significant wage premium. Results show that-for men-parenting daughters yields harsher evaluations of sin stocks, but no evidence that it lowers the propensity to work in such companies. This contrasts to the effect of gender: women reliably judge both investment and employment in morally controversial companies more harshly than men do. We suggest that an aversion towards morally controversial companies might be a partial determinant of the gender gap in wages.

| S-EPMC8635371 | biostudies-literature

Moral foundations, values, and judgments in extraordinary altruists.

Project description:Donating a kidney to a stranger is a rare act of extraordinary altruism that appears to reflect a moral commitment to helping others. Yet little is known about patterns of moral cognition associated with extraordinary altruism. In this preregistered study, we compared the moral foundations, values, and patterns of utilitarian moral judgments in altruistic kidney donors (n = 61) and demographically matched controls (n = 58). Altruists expressed more concern only about the moral foundation of harm, but no other moral foundations. Consistent with this, altruists endorsed utilitarian concerns related to impartial beneficence, but not instrumental harm. Contrary to our predictions, we did not find group differences between altruists and controls in basic values. Extraordinary altruism generally reflected opposite patterns of moral cognition as those seen in individuals with psychopathy, a personality construct characterized by callousness and insensitivity to harm and suffering. Results link real-world, costly, impartial altruism primarily to moral cognitions related to alleviating harm and suffering in others rather than to basic values, fairness concerns, or strict utilitarian decision-making.

| S-EPMC9772189 | biostudies-literature

Decoding moral judgments from neural representations of intentions.

Project description:Intentional harms are typically judged to be morally worse than accidental harms. Distinguishing between intentional harms and accidents depends on the capacity for mental state reasoning (i.e., reasoning about beliefs and intentions), which is supported by a group of brain regions including the right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ). Prior research has found that interfering with activity in RTPJ can impair mental state reasoning for moral judgment and that high-functioning individuals with autism spectrum disorders make moral judgments based less on intent information than neurotypical participants. Three experiments, using multivoxel pattern analysis, find that (i) in neurotypical adults, the RTPJ shows reliable and distinct spatial patterns of responses across voxels for intentional vs. accidental harms, and (ii) individual differences in this neural pattern predict differences in participants' moral judgments. These effects are specific to RTPJ. By contrast, (iii) this distinction was absent in adults with autism spectrum disorders. We conclude that multivoxel pattern analysis can detect features of mental state representations (e.g., intent), and that the corresponding neural patterns are behaviorally and clinically relevant.

| S-EPMC3619352 | biostudies-literature

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

OmicsDI is an Elixir interoperability service. Learn more ›

Tweets

OmicsDI Databases

PRIDE
PeptideAtlas
MassIVE
JPOST Repository
Physiome Model Repository

EGA
EVA
ENA
LINCS
PAXDB
Cell Collective

MetaboLights
Metabolomics Workbench
MetabolomeExpress
GNPS
BioModels
FAIRDOMHub

ArrayExpress
dbGaP
ExpressionAtlas
GEO
NODE

Information

Databases
Help
API
Contact us
Code on GitHub
Terms of use
Submit Data