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
  • 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
  • Format:Print
ShareBar

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.

Keywords

Moral Judgment; Perceived Causality; Visual Illusions; Moral Sensibility; 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 (September 2018): 133–146.
  • Find it at Harvard
  • Read Now

About The Author

Julian De Freitas

Marketing
→More Publications

More from the Authors

    • Jul 2023
    • Faculty Research

    Keynote Speech

    By: Julian De Freitas
    • June 2023
    • Faculty Research

    Navya, Instructor Spreadsheet

    By: Julian De Freitas and Elie Ofek
    • June 2023
    • Faculty Research

    Navya: Steering Toward a Driverless Future

    By: Julian De Freitas and Elie Ofek
More from the Authors
  • Keynote Speech By: Julian De Freitas
  • Navya, Instructor Spreadsheet By: Julian De Freitas and Elie Ofek
  • Navya: Steering Toward a Driverless Future By: Julian De Freitas and Elie Ofek
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