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De Freitas, Julian Remove De Freitas, Julian →

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  • 2020
  • Article

Doubting Driverless Dilemmas
By: Julian De Freitas, Sam E. Anthony, Andrea Censi and George A. Alvarez
The alarm has been raised on so-called driverless dilemmas, in which autonomous vehicles will need to make highstakes ethical decisions on the road. We argue that these arguments are too contrived to be of practical use, are an inappropriate method for making...  View Details
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  • 2019
  • Article

Common Knowledge, Coordination, and Strategic Mentalizing in Human Social Life
By: Julian De Freitas, Kyle A. Thomas, Peter DiScioli and Steven Pinker
People often coordinate for mutual gain, such as keeping to opposite sides of a stairway, dubbing an object or place with a name, or assembling en masse to protest a regime. Because successful coordination requires complementary choices, these opportunities...  View Details
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  • 2018
  • Article

Consistent Belief in a Good True Self in Misanthropes and Three Interdependent Cultures
By: Julian De Freitas, Hagop Sarkissian, George E. Newman, Igor Grossman, Felipe De Brigard, Andres Luco and Joshua Knobe
People sometimes explain behavior by appealing to an essentialist concept of the self, often referred to as the true self. Existing studies suggest that people tend to believe that the true self is morally virtuous; that is deep inside, every person is motivated to...  View Details
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  • 2018
  • Article

Moral Goodness Is the Essence of Personal Identity
By: Julian De Freitas, Mina Cikara, Igor Grossman and Rebecca Schlegal
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  • 2018
  • Article

Optimality Bias in Moral Judgment
By: Julian De Freitas and Samuel G.B. Johnson
We often make decisions with incomplete knowledge of their consequences. Might people nonetheless expect others to make optimal choices, despite this ignorance? Here, we show that people are sensitive to moral optimality: that people hold moral agents accountable...  View Details
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  • 2018
  • Article

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
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...  View Details
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  • 2018
  • Article

Deep Down My Enemy Is Good: Thinking about the True Self Reduces Intergroup Bias
By: Julian De Freitas and Mina Cikara
Intergroup bias—preference for one's in-group relative to out-groups—is one of the most robust phenomena in all of psychology. Here we investigate whether a positive bias that operates at the individual-level, belief in a good true self, may be leveraged to reduce...  View Details
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  • 2017
  • Article

Kill or Die: Moral Judgment Alters Linguistic Coding of Causality
By: Julian De Freitas, Peter DiScioli, Jason Nemirow, Maxim Massenkoff and Steven Pinker
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...  View Details
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  • 2017
  • Article

Normative Judgments and Individual Essence
By: Julian De Freitas, Kevin P. Tobia, George E. Newman and Joshua Knobe
A growing body of research has examined how people judge the persistence of identity over time—that is, how they decide that a particular individual is the same entity from one time to the next. While a great deal of progress has been made in understanding the types...  View Details
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  • 2017
  • Article

Origins of the Belief in Good True Selves
By: Julian De Freitas, Mina Cikara, Igor Grossman and Rebecca Schlegal
Despite differences in beliefs about the self across culturesand relevant individual differences, recent evidence suggests that people universally believe in a ‘true self’ that is morally good. We propose that this belief arises from a general tendency: psychological...  View Details
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  • 2017
  • Article

Ownership Dilemmas: The Case of Finders Versus Landowners
By: Peter DiScioli, Rachel Karpoff and Julian De Freitas
People sometimes disagree about who owns which objects, and these ownership dilemmas can lead to costly disputes. We investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying people’s judgments about finder versus landowner cases, in which a person finds an object on someone...  View Details
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  • 2016
  • Article

Tracking the Changing Feature of a Moving Object
By: Julian De Freitas, Nicholas E. Myers and Anna C. Nobre
The mind can track not only the changing locations of moving objects, but also their changing features, which are often meaningful for guiding action. How does the mind track such features? Using a task in which observers tracked the changing orientation of a rolling...  View Details
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  • 2015
  • Article

Beliefs About the True Self Explain Asymmetries Based on Moral Judgment
By: George E. Newman, Julian De Freitas and Joshua Knobe
Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about (a) what a person values, (b) whether a person is happy, (c) whether a person has shown weakness of will, and (d) whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend...  View Details
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  • 2016
  • Article

Recursive Mentalizing and Common Knowledge in the Bystander Effect
By: Kyle A. Thomas, Julian De Freitas, Peter DiScioli and Steven Pinker
The more potential helpers there are, the less likely any individual is to help. A traditional explanation for this bystander effect is that responsibility diffuses across the multiple bystanders, diluting the responsibility of each. We investigate an alternative,...  View Details
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  • 2020
  • Article

Active World Model Learning with Progress Curiosity
By: Kuno Kim, Megumi Sano, Julian De Freitas, Nick Haber and Daniel Yamins
World models are self-supervised predictive models of how the world evolves. Humans learn world models by curiously exploring their environment, in the process acquiring compact abstractions of high bandwidth sensory inputs, the ability to plan across long temporal...  View Details
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  • 2014
  • Article

Attentional Rhythm: A Temporal Analogue of Object-Based Attention
By: Julian De Freitas, Brandon Liverence and Brian J. Scholl
The underlying units of attention are often discrete visual objects. Perhaps the clearest form of evidence for this is the same-object advantage: Following a spatial cue, responses are faster to probes occurring on the same object than they are to probes occurring on...  View Details
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  • 2021
  • Article

Deliberately Prejudiced Self-driving Vehicles Elicit the Most Outrage
By: Julian De Freitas and Mina Cikara
Should self-driving vehicles be prejudiced, e.g., deliberately harm the elderly over young children? When people make such forced-choices on the vehicle’s behalf, they exhibit systematic preferences (e.g., favor young children), yet when their options are...  View Details
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  • 2021
  • Article

From Driverless Dilemmas to More Practical Commonsense Tests for Automated Vehicles
By: Julian De Freitas, Andrea Censi, Bryant Walker Smith, Luigi Di Lillo, Sam E. Anthony and Emilio Frazzoli
For the first time in history, automated vehicles (AVs) are being deployed in populated environments. This unprecedented transformation of our everyday lives demands a significant undertaking: endowing complex autonomous systems with ethically acceptable behavior. We...  View Details
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  • 2019
  • Article

Maimonides’ Ladder: States of Mutual Knowledge and the Perception of Charitability
By: Julian De Freitas, Peter DiScioli, Kyle A. Thomas and Steven Pinker
Why do people esteem anonymous charitable giving? We connect normative theories of charitability (captured in Maimonides’ Ladder of Charity) with evolutionary theories of partner choice to test predictions on how attributions of charitability are affected by states...  View Details
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  • 2021
  • Article

The Ordinary Concept of a Meaningful Life: The Role of Subjective and Objective Factors in ThirdPerson Attributions of Meaning
By: Michael Prinzing, Julian De Freitas and Barbara L. Fredrickson
The desire for a meaningful life is ubiquitous, yet the ordinary concept of a meaningful life is poorly understood. Across six experiments (total N = 2,539), we investigated whether third-person attributions of meaning depend on the psychological states an agent...  View Details
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