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

    • July–August 2025
    • Harvard Business Review

    Don’t Let an AI Failure Harm Your Brand

    By: Julian De Freitas
    • June 2025
    • Journal of Consumer Research

    Ideation with Generative AI—In Consumer Research and Beyond

    By: Julian De Freitas, G. Nave and Stefano Puntoni
    • March 2025
    • Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

    Is Personal Identity Intransitive?

    By: J. De Freitas and L. J. Rips
More from the Authors
  • Don’t Let an AI Failure Harm Your Brand By: Julian De Freitas
  • Ideation with Generative AI—In Consumer Research and Beyond By: Julian De Freitas, G. Nave and Stefano Puntoni
  • Is Personal Identity Intransitive? By: J. De Freitas and L. J. Rips
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.