ArticleMemory & cognition2022
Cognitive processes in imaginative moral shifts: How judgments of morally unacceptable actions change.
Article in Memory & cognition, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Inference and Imagination.Topics in cognitive science · 2026Review
- Imaginative Thought.Journal of cognition · 2026Article
- The German translation of the Oxford utilitarianism scale: Validation and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the observations.PloS one · 2025Article
- How people reason with counterfactual and causal explanations for Artificial Intelligence decisions in familiar and unfamiliar domains.Memory & cognition · 2023Article
- Moral judgements reflect default representations of possibility.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
How do people come to consider a morally unacceptable action, such as "a passenger in an airplane does not want to sit next to a Muslim passenger and so he tells the stewardess the passenger must be moved to another seat", to be less unacceptable? We propose they tend to imagine counterfactual alternatives about how things could have been different that transform the unacceptable action to be less unacceptable. Five experiments identify the cognitive processes underlying this imaginative moral shift: an action is judged less unacceptable when people imagine circumstances in which it would have been moral. The effect occurs for immediate counterfactuals and reflective ones, but is greater when participants create an immediate counterfactual first, and diminished when they create a reflective one first. The effect also occurs for unreasonable actions. We discuss the implications for alternative theories of the mental representations and cognitive processes underlying moral judgments.
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Registered trials
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