Your visual system provides all the information you need to make moral judgments about generic visual events

Cognition
Julian De Freitas, George A Alvarez

Abstract

To what extent are people's moral judgments susceptible to subtle factors of which they are unaware? Here we show that we can change people's moral judgments outside of their awareness by subtly biasing perceived causality. Specifically, we used subtle visual manipulations to create visual illusions of causality in morally relevant scenarios, and this systematically changed people's moral judgments. After demonstrating the basic effect using simple displays involving an ambiguous car collision that ends up injuring a person (E1), we show that the effect is sensitive on the millisecond timescale to manipulations of task-irrelevant factors that are known to affect perceived causality, including the duration (E2a) and asynchrony (E2b) of specific task-irrelevant contextual factors in the display. We then conceptually replicate the effect using a different paradigm (E3a), and also show that we can eliminate the effect by interfering with motion processing (E3b). Finally, we show that the effect generalizes across different kinds of moral judgments (E3c). Combined, these studies show that obligatory, abstract inferences made by the visual system influence moral judgments.

Citations

Sep 5, 2020·Annual Review of Psychology·Bertram F Malle
Apr 5, 2021·Trends in Cognitive Sciences·Alon Hafri, Chaz Firestone
Dec 1, 2019·Review of General Psychology : Journal of Division 1, of the American Psychological Association·Nelson CowanAshley L Watts
Jul 25, 2021·Cognition·Tobias Gerstenberg, Simon Stephan
Oct 16, 2021·Neuropsychologia·Leyla TarhanTalia Konkle

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