Publications
Publications
- 2018
- Cognition
Your Visual System Provides All the Information You Need to Make Moral Judgments about Generic Visual Events
By: Julian De Freitas and 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.
Citation
De Freitas, Julian, and George A. Alvarez. "Your Visual System Provides All the Information You Need to Make Moral Judgments about Generic Visual Events." Cognition 178 (2018): 133–146.
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