Patterns of Moral Judgment Derive From Nonmoral Psychological Representations (original) (raw)
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The omission effect in moral cognition: toward a functional explanation
2011
Moral judgment involves much more than computations of the expected consequences of behavior. A prime example of the complexity of moral thinking is the frequently replicated finding that violations by omission are judged less morally wrong than violations by commission, holding intentions constant. Here we test a novel hypothesis: Omissions are judged less harshly because they produce little material evidence of wrongdoing. Evidence is crucial because moral accusations are potentially very costly unless supported by others. In our experiments, the omission effect was eliminated when physical evidence showed that an omission was chosen. Perpetrators who "opted out" by pressing a button that would clearly have no causal effects on the victim, rather than rescuing them, were judged as harshly as perpetrators who directly caused death. These results show that, to reduce condemnation, omissions must not only be noncausal, they must also leave little or no material evidence that a choice was made.
Deciphering moral intuition: How agents, deeds, and consequences influence moral judgment
PLOS One, 2018
Moral evaluations occur quickly following heuristic-like intuitive processes without effortful deliberation. There are several competing explanations for this. The ADC-model predicts that moral judgment consists in concurrent evaluations of three different intuitive components: the character of a person (Agent-component, A); their actions (Deed-component, D); and the consequences brought about in the situation (Consequences-component, C). Thereby, it explains the intuitive appeal of precepts from three dominant moral theories (virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism), and flexible yet stable nature of moral judgment. Insistence on single-component explanations has led to many centuries of debate as to which moral precepts and theories best describe (or should guide) moral evaluation. This study consists of two large-scale experiments and provides a first empirical investigation of predictions yielded by the ADC model. We use vignettes describing different moral situations in which all components of the model are varied simultaneously. Experiment 1 (within-subject design) shows that positive descriptions of the AD D-, and C-components of moral intuition lead to more positive moral judgments in a situation with low-stakes. Also, interaction effects between the components were discovered. Experiment 2 further investigates these results in a between-subject design. We found that the effects of the AD D-, and C-components vary in strength in a high-stakes situation. Moreover, sex, age, education, and social status had no effects. However, preferences for precepts in certain moral theories (PPIMT) partially moderated the effects of the A-and C-component. Future research on moral intuitions should consider the simultaneous three-component constitution of moral judgment.
The Means/Side-Effect Distinction in Moral Cognition: A Meta-Analysis
Cognition, 2017
Experimental research suggests that people draw a moral distinction between bad outcomes brought about as a means versus a side effect (or byproduct). Such findings have informed multiple psychological and philosophical debates about moral cognition, including its computational structure, its sensitivity to the famous Doctrine of Double Effect, its reliability, and its status as a universal and innate mental module akin to universal grammar. But some studies have failed to replicate the means/byproduct effect especially in the absence of other factors, such as personal contact. So we aimed to determine how robust the means/byproduct effect is by conducting a meta-analysis of both published and unpublished studies (k = 101; 24,058 participants). We found that while there is an overall small difference between moral judgments of means and byproducts (standardized mean difference = 0.87, 95% CI 0.67 – 1.06; standardized mean change = 0.57, 95% CI 0.44 – 0.69; log odds ratio = 1.59, 95% CI 1.15 – 2.02), the mean effect size is primarily moderated by whether the outcome is brought about by personal contact, which typically involves the use of personal force.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1983
In two experiments, observers received information about a stimulus person and then attributed a given level of morality to that person. Attributions of morality based on the stimulus person's immoral (as opposed to moral) behavior were relatively unaffected by situational demands surrounding the behavior. That is, a person who stole or committed adultery was judged to be relatively immoral, regardless of situational pressures that appeared to facilitate the behavior. Varying the type of situational demand (reward vs. cost) did not alter this basic effect. Unlike morality attributions, causal attributions based on moral and immoral behavior were affected by situational demands to an equal extent. The results also indicated that impressions of morality formed in one context readily generalized to other aspects of morality. For example, a person who committed adultery was thought to be more likely to lie and steal than one who was not adulterous.
Judgments of Moral Responsibility: A Unified Account
Recent work in experimental philosophy shows that folk intuitions about moral responsibility are sensitive to a surprising variety of factors. Studies by Nichols and Knobe (2007) suggest that whether people take agents to be responsible for their actions in a deterministic scenario depends on whether these actions are described abstractly or concretely, and on how serious moral transgression these actions seem to represent. Studies by Nahmias et. al. (2007) show that the kind of determinism involved can affect assignments of responsibility. When deterministic scenarios were described using reductionist explanations of action, subjects were significantly less prone to ascribe responsibility than when the deterministic laws were described as involving ordinary psychological concepts. Finally, a study by Knobe (2003) suggests that people are significantly more inclined to hold an agent responsible for bringing about bad side effects than for bringing about good side effects when the agent just doesn’t care about these side effects. Elsewhere (Björnsson & Persson ms), we have presented an analysis of our everyday concept of moral responsibility that provides a unified explanation of paradigmatic cases of moral responsibility, accounting for the force of both typical excuses and the most influential skeptical arguments against moral responsibility or for incompatibilism. In this article, we suggest that it also explains the divergent and apparently incoherent set of intuitions revealed by these new studies. If our hypothesis is correct, the surprising variety of judgments stems from a unified concept of moral responsibility. Björnsson, G.; Persson, K. (ms) The Explanatory Component of Moral Responsibility. Forthcoming in Noûs Knobe, J. (2003) Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language. Analysis 63, pp.190–93. Nahmias, E.; Coates, J.; Kvaran. T. (2007) Free will, moral responsibility, and mechanism: experiments on folk intuitions. Midwest studies in Philosophy XXXI Nichols, S.; Knobe, J. (2007) Moral responsibility and determinism: the cognitive science of folk intuitions. Noûs 41:4, 663-685
The Open Psychology Journal, 2010
In this article, it is argued that intuitive judgments of immoral events result from an automatic process where perceived events are matched against mentally represented event prototypes. The proposed cognitive underpinnings of such a process are tested in two experiments. Experiment 1 demonstrated that typical immoral events require shorter judgment times than atypical events. This typicality effect implies that immediate moral responding depends on the similarity of an encountered event to a pre-existing mental prototype. Experiment 2 showed that priming representations of immoral events facilitates the responding only to other events violating the same moral value, and not to events related to other moral values. This finding provides further support for the notion that moral reactions rely on pre-existing schematic mental representations, and suggests that these representations are stored in associative networks with values as a basis for categorization. It is concluded that the results concord with and extend recent work that places moral cognition in a dual-process perspective.
The psychology of moral reasoning
2008
This article presents a theory of reasoning about moral propositions that is based on four fundamental principles. First, no simple criterion picks out propositions about morality from within the larger set of deontic propositions concerning what is permissible and impermissible in social relations, the law, games, and manners. Second, the mechanisms underlying emotions and deontic evaluations are independent and operate in parallel, and so some scenarios elicit emotions prior to moral evaluations, some elicit moral evaluations prior to emotions, and some elicit them at the same time. Third, deontic evaluations depend on inferences, either unconscious intuitions or conscious reasoning. Fourth, human beliefs about what is, and isn't, moral are neither complete nor consistent. The article marshals the evidence, which includes new studies, corroborating these principles, and discusses the relations between them and other current theories of moral reasoning.
PLoS ONE
Over the past decade, intuitionist models of morality have challenged the view that moral reasoning is the sole or even primary means by which moral judgments are made. Rather, intuitionist models posit that certain situations automatically elicit moral intuitions, which guide moral judgments. We present three experiments showing that evaluations are also susceptible to the influence of moral versus non-moral construal. We had participants make moral evaluations (rating whether actions were morally good or bad) or non-moral evaluations (rating whether actions were pragmatically or hedonically good or bad) of a wide variety of actions. As predicted, moral evaluations were faster, more extreme, and more strongly associated with universal prescriptions-the belief that absolutely nobody or everybody should engage in an action-than non-moral (pragmatic or hedonic) evaluations of the same actions. Further, we show that people are capable of flexibly shifting from moral to non-moral evaluations on a trial-by-trial basis. Taken together, these experiments provide evidence that moral versus non-moral construal has an important influence on evaluation and suggests that effects of construal are highly flexible. We discuss the implications of these experiments for models of moral judgment and decisionmaking.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2010
It has often been suggested that people's ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation. A series of recent experimental results offer a challenge to this widelyheld view, suggesting that people's moral judgments can actually influence the intuitions they hold both in folk psychology and in causal cognition. The present target article distinguishes two basic approaches to explaining such effects. One approach would be to say that the relevant competencies are entirely non-moral but that some additional factor (conversational pragmatics, performance error, etc.) then interferes and allows people's moral judgments to affect their intuitions. Another approach would be to say that moral considerations truly do figure in workings of the competencies themselves. I argue that the data available now favor the second of these approaches over the first.