Moral hindsight for good actions and the effects of imagined alternatives to reality

Moral judgements reflect default representations of possibility

Moral judgement requires representing what is possible: judging that someone ought to do something implies that they actually can do that thing; and if they cannot do that thing, then it is not the case that they ought to have done it. Moral judgements are often made quickly and effortlessly, suggesting that they may rely on default, rather than deliberative, representations of what is possible. To investigate this possibility, we asked participants to make 10 different kinds of moral judgements either very fast or more slowly about 240 different actions across 12 contexts. We found that these moral judgements were more similar to one another when participants were forced to quickly assess the morality of immoral actions, suggesting a common default template for moral judgement that becomes more differentiated upon reflection. When making moral permissibility judgements quickly, participants were more likely to judge that improbable, irrational and impossible actions were not permissible, indicating that default representations of permissibility may be reflecting default representations of possibility. A direct investigation revealed a close relationship between default representations of possibility and fast judgements of moral permissibility. These findings demonstrate the role of default representations of possibility in moral cognition. This article is part of the theme issue 'Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny'.

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

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.

Moral judgements of fairness-related actions are flexibly updated to account for contextual information

In everyday life we are constantly updating our moral judgements as we learn new information. However, this judgement updating process has not been systematically studied. We investigated how people update their moral judgements of fairness-related actions of others after receiving contextual information regarding the deservingness of the action recipient. Participants (N = 313) observed a virtual ‘Decision-maker’ share a portion of $10 with a virtual ‘Receiver’. Participants were aware that the Decision-maker made these choices knowing the Receiver’s previous offer to another person. Participants first made a context-absent judgement of the Decision-maker’s offer to the Receiver, and then a subsequent context-present judgement of the same offer after learning the Receiver’s previous offer. This sequence was repeated for varying dollar values of Decision-makers’ and Receivers’ offers. Patterns of judgements varied across individuals and were interpretable in relation to moral norms. Most participants flexibly switched from relying on context-independent norms (generosity, equality) to related, context-dependent norms (relative generosity, indirect reciprocity) as they integrated contextual information. Judgement of low offers varied across individuals, with a substantial minority of participants withholding their context-absent judgements of selfishness, and another minority that was lenient towards selfishness across both judgements. Our paradigm provides a novel framework for investigating how moral judgements evolve in real time as people learn more information about a given situation.

How We Know What Not To Think

Humans often represent and reason about unrealized possible actions - the vast infinity of things that were not (or have not yet been) chosen. This capacity is central to the most impressive of human abilities: causal reasoning, planning, linguistic communication, moral judgment, etc. Nevertheless, how do we select possible actions that are worth considering from the infinity of unrealized actions that are better left ignored? We review research across the cognitive sciences, and find that the possible actions considered by default are those that are both likely to occur and generally valuable. We then offer a unified theory of why. We propose that (i) across diverse cognitive tasks, the possible actions we consider are biased towards those of general practical utility, and (ii) a plausible primary function for this mechanism resides in decision making.