scholarly journals Moral dynamics: Grounding moral judgment in intuitive physics and intuitive psychology

Cognition ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 217 ◽  
pp. 104890
Author(s):  
Felix A. Sosa ◽  
Tomer Ullman ◽  
Joshua B. Tenenbaum ◽  
Samuel J. Gershman ◽  
Tobias Gerstenberg
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Sosa ◽  
Tomer David Ullman ◽  
Joshua Tenenbaum ◽  
Samuel J. Gershman ◽  
Tobias Gerstenberg

When holding others morally responsible, we care about what they did, and what they thought. Traditionally, research in moral psychology has relied on vignette studies, in which a protagonist's actions and thoughts are explicitly communicated. While this research has revealed what variables are important for moral judgment, such as actions and intentions, it is limited in providing a more detailed understanding of exactly how these variables affect moral judgment. Using dynamic visual stimuli that allow for a more fine-grained experimental control, recent studies have proposed a direct mapping from visual features to moral judgments. We embrace the use of visual stimuli in moral psychology, but question the plausibility of a feature-based theory of moral judgment. We propose that the connection from visual features to moral judgments is mediated by an inference about what the observed action reveals about the agent's mental states, and what causal role the agent's action played in bringing about the outcome. We present a computational model that formalizes moral judgments of agents in visual scenes as computations over an intuitive theory of physics combined with an intuitive theory of mind. We test the model's quantitative predictions in three experiments across a wide variety of dynamic interactions between agent and patient.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlie Kurth

Abstract Recent work by emotion researchers indicates that emotions have a multilevel structure. Sophisticated sentimentalists should take note of this work – for it better enables them to defend a substantive role for emotion in moral cognition. Contra May's rationalist criticisms, emotions are not only able to carry morally relevant information, but can also substantially influence moral judgment and reasoning.


2014 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 327-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Han Gong ◽  
Douglas L. Medin ◽  
Tal Eyal ◽  
Nira Liberman ◽  
Yaacov Trope ◽  
...  

In the hope to resolve the two sets of opposing results concerning the effects of psychological distance and construal levels on moral judgment, Žeželj and Jokić (2014) conducted a series of four direct replications, which yielded divergent patterns of results. In our commentary, we first revisit the consistent findings that lower-level construals induced by How/Why manipulation lead to harsher moral condemnation than higher-level construals. We then speculate on the puzzling patterns of results regarding the role of temporal distance in shaping moral judgment. And we conclude by discussing the complexity of morality and propose that it may be important to incorporate cultural systems into the study of moral cognition.


2014 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iris L. Žeželj ◽  
Biljana R. Jokić

Eyal, Liberman, and Trope (2008) established that people judged moral transgressions more harshly and virtuous acts more positively when the acts were psychologically distant than close. In a series of conceptual and direct replications, Gong and Medin (2012) came to the opposite conclusion. Attempting to resolve these inconsistencies, we conducted four high-powered replication studies in which we varied temporal distance (Studies 1 and 3), social distance (Study 2) or construal level (Study 4), and registered their impact on moral judgment. We found no systematic effect of temporal distance, the effect of social distance consistent with Eyal et al., and the reversed effect of direct construal level manipulation, consistent with Gong and Medin. Possible explanations for the incompatible results are discussed.


2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Geipel ◽  
Constantinos Hadjichristidis ◽  
Luca Surian

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