Skip to Main Content
HBS Home
  • About
  • Academic Programs
  • Alumni
  • Faculty & Research
  • Baker Library
  • Giving
  • Harvard Business Review
  • Initiatives
  • News
  • Recruit
  • Map / Directions
Faculty & Research
  • Faculty
  • Research
  • Featured Topics
  • Academic Units
  • …→
  • Harvard Business School→
  • Faculty & Research→
Publications
Publications
  • Article
  • Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Kill or Die: Moral Judgment Alters Linguistic Coding of Causality

By: Julian De Freitas, Peter DiScioli, Jason Nemirow, Maxim Massenkoff and Steven Pinker
  • Format:Print
ShareBar

Abstract

What is the relationship between the language people use to describe an event and their moral judgments? We test the hypothesis that moral judgment and causative verbs rely on the same underlying mental model of people’s actions. Experiment 1a finds that participants choose different verbs to describe the major variants of a moral dilemma, the trolley problem, mirroring differences in their wrongness judgments: they described direct harm with a single causative verb (Adam killed the man), and indirect harm with an intransitive verb in a periphrastic construction (Adam caused the man to die). Experiments 1b and 2 separate physical causality from moral valuation by varying whether the victim is a person or animal and whether the harmful action rescues people or inanimate objects. The results show that people’s moral judgments lead them to portray a causal event as either more or less direct and intended, which in turn shapes their verb choices. Experiment 3 finds the same basic asymmetry in verb usage in a production task in which participants freely described what happened.

Keywords

Moral Cognition; Moral Psychology; Causative Verbs; Trolley Problem; Argument Structure; Moral Sensibility; Judgments

Citation

De Freitas, Julian, Peter DiScioli, Jason Nemirow, Maxim Massenkoff, and Steven Pinker. "Kill or Die: Moral Judgment Alters Linguistic Coding of Causality." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 43, no. 8 (August 2017): 1173–1182.
  • Find it at Harvard
  • Read Now

About The Author

Julian De Freitas

Marketing
→More Publications

More from the Authors

    • 2023
    • Faculty Research

    Summarizing the Mental Customer Journey

    By: Julian De Freitas, Ahmet Uğuralp, Zeliha Uğuralp, Pechthida Kim and Tomer Ullman
    • 2023
    • Faculty Research

    Public Perception and Autonomous Vehicle Liability

    By: Julian De Freitas, Xilin Zhou, Margherita Atzei, Shoshana Boardman and Luigi Di Lillo
    • November 2022 (Revised December 2022)
    • Faculty Research

    Replika AI: Monetizing a Chatbot

    By: Julian De Freitas and Nicole Tempest Keller
More from the Authors
  • Summarizing the Mental Customer Journey By: Julian De Freitas, Ahmet Uğuralp, Zeliha Uğuralp, Pechthida Kim and Tomer Ullman
  • Public Perception and Autonomous Vehicle Liability By: Julian De Freitas, Xilin Zhou, Margherita Atzei, Shoshana Boardman and Luigi Di Lillo
  • Replika AI: Monetizing a Chatbot By: Julian De Freitas and Nicole Tempest Keller
ǁ
Campus Map
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
→Map & Directions
→More Contact Information
  • Make a Gift
  • Site Map
  • Jobs
  • Harvard University
  • Trademarks
  • Policies
  • Accessibility
  • Digital Accessibility
Copyright © President & Fellows of Harvard College