Poster Sessions

Why do some disapproved acts seem more moral when widespread, but some acts of goodness appear especially praiseworthy when rare? Prominent monistic and pluralistic accounts highlight either intrinsic features of actions, such as whether they cause harm (Schein & Gray, 2018) or promote cooperation (Curry et al., 2019), or stable dispositions of the moral judge, such as values (Schwartz, 1992) or moral foundations (Graham et al., 2009, 2011). These approaches have generated substantial insight, yet none provides a systematic framework for how perceptions of what is common or approved shape people’s views of the harmfulness, cooperativeness, or moral status of behaviors. In everyday life, people rarely evaluate behaviors in isolation from their normative environments; instead, they rely on information about what others approve and do (Cialdini et al., 1990).

We introduce Contextual Normative Morality Theory (CNMT), which proposes that moral judgments emerge from the interaction of perceived descriptive norms (commonness) and injunctive norms (approval). Across five studies with nationally representative U.S. samples (total N = 2,562), we show that this injunctive by descriptive interaction robustly predicts moral evaluations. Disapproved behaviors were judged less harshly when common, whereas approved behaviors were judged more moral when rare. In other words, while the “common is moral” heuristic (Lindström et al., 2018) may apply to disapproved behaviors, “uncommon is moral” may be more apt for approved behaviors. These effects replicated across naturalistic behaviors (Studies 1, S1, and 2), held when directly manipulating norms around the same act (Study 3), extended to fictional (Study 4) and participant-generated behaviors (Study 5), and predicted not only moral judgments but also perceptions of harmfulness and cooperativeness. Moreover, models including the injunctive by descriptive interaction alongside harm, cooperation, and values showed better fit than those relying on any single framework alone. Together, these findings advance a more flexible, socially embedded theory of morality.

This work matters for three reasons. First, CNMT provides theoretical integration. Whereas harm-, cooperation-, and values-based theories identify important moral content, CNMT specifies how normative context embeds these features. Second, CNMT explains recurring asymmetries that other theories leave unresolved, such as why disapproved acts are tolerated when common (e.g., gossip, white lies; Caivano et al., 2020) and approved acts gain moral status when rare (e.g., stranger organ donation; Aquino et al., 2011). Common disapproved acts may appear less deviant when “everyone does it,” while rare approved acts stand out as heroic precisely because they defy typical behavior (Brewer, 2012). Third, CNMT offers practical leverage. Namely, by formalizing how descriptive and injunctive norms combine, it offers a taxonomy distinguishing ordinary morality from exceptional virtue and vice, clarifies why some behaviors remain morally ambiguous (Wylie & Gantman, 2023), and identifies shifting norm perceptions as one of the most effective levers for reducing harm and inspiring prosociality (Kraft-Todd et al., 2015).

Character is widely invoked as foundational to ethical and effective leadership (Sosik et al., 2019; Sturm et al., 2017); yet empirical and theoretical work often treats character attributes as isolated traits rather than as components of a dynamic developmental system (e.g., McGrath, 2024). This poster presents a theoretical model arguing that character attributes predict leadership performance through coherent, developmentally constructed configurations that emerge from dynamic individualcontext relations, rather than through static, trait-like qualities. Grounded in dynamic, relational developmental systems (RDS) metatheory, this model conceptualizes character as a relatively plastic system shaped through mutually influential coactions between individuals and their sociocultural environments (Lerner & Matthews, 2024; Nucci, 2019, 2024; Overton, 2015). Within this framework, leadership performance marked by good character is understood as a dynamically activated expression of moral functioning rather than a stable behavioral style.

Nucci’s character system (2017, 2019) provides a supporting theoretical model for specifying how character becomes behaviorally instantiated. Nucci identifies four interrelated components—moral cognition, other regarding social emotional capacities, self-regarding regulatory capacities, and moral critical social engagement—that together form a moral sub system embedded within the broader self-system. Because these components operate holistically and are continuously shaped by contextual affordances, character is best understood through coherence across situations rather than consistency of action (Nucci, 2019). This dynamic, systems-based view aligns with contemporary developmental scholarship emphasizing embodiment, holism, autopoiesis, and the emergence of moral agency through coordinated psychological and contextual processes (Lerner & Matthews, 2024; Witherington & McCready, 2024).

Building on these foundations, the poster proposes that leadership performance reflects the activation of specific configurations of these character components within organizational contexts. These configurations can align with prosocial leadership patterns—such as Servant Leadership, characterized by other orientation, empathy, and stewardship (Bier et al., 2024; Eva et al., 2019)—or with problematic patterns—such as Machiavellianism, characterized by instrumental reasoning, self-regarding regulation, and manipulative social conduct (Dahling et al., 2009). Rather than treating these leadership models as stable, trait-like personality types, the proposed framework interprets them as contrasting expressions of character in action, emerging from different developmental histories, identity structures, and contextual affordances.

This theoretical model contributes to moral psychology by integrating developmental systems theory with leadership studies to clarify how character attributes become enacted as measurable performance. It also addresses gaps in the literature, which are often based on leader self-reports, distal organizational outcomes, or decontextualized trait measures rather than the developmental processes through which character shapes leadership behavior (Dirks et al., 2022; Sweeney, 2024). By situating leadership performance within a dynamic, relational, and morally grounded character development system, this poster offers a conceptual foundation for future empirical work and for designing organizational contexts that cultivate productive, prosocial, and ethically grounded leadership.

Brief Description

This study examined whether neurodivergent traits relate to philosophical training and judgment, based on claims that temperament influences thought. In a large online sample (N=1,254), those with philosophical training had higher ADHD, internal verbalization, and representational manipulation, but lower visual imagery. These traits predicted responses to moral and metaphysical thought experiments. Machine learning showed neurodivergent traits more accurately classified philosophers than their judgments, suggesting stable cognitive traits underlie philosophical reasoning.

Full Abstract

Philosophers have long speculated that individual differences in temperament influence philosophical thinking, yet empirical research has rarely explored the role of neurodivergent traits in this domain. In this large online study (N = 1,254), we investigated whether participants with training in philosophy differ from the general population when it comes to six psychological traits – autism, ADHD, aphantasia, anendophasia, anauralia, and representational manipulation –and also whether these traits correlate with responses to two widely studied philosophical thought experiments: the “trolley problem” and the “rollback deterministic universe.” Compared to the general population, participants with training in philosophy had higher scores on measures of ADHD, internal verbalization, and representational manipulation, but lower scores on measures of visual imagery. These cognitive traits were also correlated with participants’ moral and metaphysical judgments (independent of their level of philosophical training) – e.g., participants who scored higher in visualization were less likely to judge that hitting the switch in the trolley problem is permissible but not obligatory, and also less likely to attribute free will and moral responsibility to agents in the rollback universe. Finally, we employed machine learning to develop predictive models that classify a randomly selected participant as either a philosopher or a non-philosopher. Models trained solely on responses to measures for neurodivergent traits achieved better performance than models trained solely on responses to philosophical thought experiments. This suggests that stable, trait-level neurodivergent characteristics may be more diagnostic of philosophical interest, aptitude, or training than judgments philosophers make on domain-relevant problems.

In this talk, I argue for the intrinsic and instrumental value of despair and compare my view with the Confucian view.
I view despair as an extremely negative emotional response to the belief that one’s desired outcome is extremely unlikely to occur. A deeper analysis of despair indicates three necessary and jointly sufficient conditions: first, the despairer must care deeply about a specific state of affairs; second, the despairer believes that the chance of obtaining this state of affairs is extremely low and one can’t do anything about it; and third, the despairer experiences an intense loss of hope (cf. Menges and Altehenger 2025).
I argue that despair is intrinsically valuable qua rational attitude. Despair is rational if it is a proper or fitting attitude toward the circumstances one is in. Despair is a fitting attitude if one rationally forms the beliefs that ground despair and regulates one’s despair accordingly. If one despairs in this proper way, that is, despairing in the right circumstances, at the right time, toward the right object, and to the right degree, such despair is integral to being a rational agent (and even virtuous if we follow Aristotle). Similarly, a Confucian moral exemplar (junzi) naturally feels immense sorrow and protest when the world rejects moral goodness. Confucius himself openly wept with unrestrained grief, crying out that Heaven had destroyed him upon learning of the death of Yan Hui, his disciple, who exemplified high moral character but died prematurely (Confucius 11.8, 11.9). Despair, in this case, is an authentic emotional marker of caring deeply about a fractured world. If such despair is a rational attitude, it’s fitting to have a pro-attitude toward it. If it is fitting to have a pro-attitude toward rational despair, then despair can be intrinsically valuable based on fitting attitude theories of value (Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen 2004, Scanlon 2000). Thus, if one rationally forms the beliefs that ground despair and regulates one’s despair accordingly, despair can be intrinsically valuable.
Despair can be instrumentally valuable if it contributes to one’s self-understanding, helps reshape one’s goals and projects, optimizes outcomes, or motivates actions. Though despairing doesn’t immediately motivate one to act to bring about the desired outcome, it can eventually. If, after the initial paralyzing effects of despair, one begins to reevaluate and adjust one’s goals and strategies, thereby generating renewed motivation to pursue a desired outcome, then despair can motivate one to act. Given that despair can force one to pause and adjust one’s goals and strategies, it can optimize outcomes and help reshape one’s goals and projects. That despair can reshape one’s goals and projects, in turn, can also enhance one’s self-understanding.
Mencius might agree that despair is instrumentally valuable, as he views being in despair as a precious opportunity to build one’s moral character (Mencius 6B15). Despair pushes us past complacency, expanding our capacity for endurance, empathy, and moral agency. As a prelude to ethical maturity, despair helps us to improve our moral character.

Compassion research has expanded significantly across psychology, neuroscience, contemplative science, and clinical practice, yet the field remains fragmented in its definitions, measures, and developmental frameworks. Existing compassion interventions demonstrate promising outcomes, including increased empathy, emotional resilience, prosocial behavior, and well-being, but there is little consensus on how compassion develops across contexts and over time. This presentation proposes a Compassion Development Theory (CDT), an interdisciplinary developmental framework synthesizing moral psychology, developmental theory, contemplative science, philosophy, and justice-oriented perspectives. CDT conceptualizes compassion as a multidimensional and trainable moral capacity involving recognition of suffering, empathic resonance, emotion regulation, moral motivation, and action to alleviate suffering. Particular attention is given to how compassion develops beyond proximal in-group concern toward broader ecological, systemic, and more-than-human forms of moral inclusion. The presentation additionally highlights major gaps in current compassion research, including inconsistent operational definitions, limited longitudinal research, and insufficient attention to systemic and cultural influences on compassionate action. Ultimately, this work argues for a unified developmental moral psychology of compassion capable of integrating individual, relational, cultural, and structural dimensions of human flourishing.

Debates exist about whether moral appeals—persuasive attempt that refer to moral values or morally relevant consequences of behaviors—can induce behavioral change. Although moral appeals should increase moral awareness (Chugh & Kern, 2016) and tap into people’s motivation to live up to their moral standards (Aquino & Reed, 2002), they may fail due to reactance or defensive reactions (Brehm, 1966; Fellner et al., 2013). Despite the potential for reactance effects, there is empirical evidence that moral appeals can bring about positive behavioral change (Brañas-Garza, 2007; Hockett & Hall, 2007; Mulder & Lokate, 2022; Tsikas, 2023) and a recent meta-analysis suggest that moral appeals do, overall, exert small but significant positive effects (Xu et al., 2026). There is little knowledge so far about the effect of type of moral appeals. Also, it has not been systematically been studied in the context
of receational drugs use, which is what we focused on in the current study.

Recreational drug use is, especially in the Netherlands, increasingly common among young people, while it also causes societal problems (e.g., organized crime, urban violence, criminal exploitation of underaged, environmental pollution). We tested whether young people can be discouraged to engage in recreational drug use by a moral appeal that makes them aware of the link between their own drug use and these societal problems. Also, we tested the difference between a high confrontational versus a low confrontational moral appeal. A field experiment was executed among young people in the Netherlands, using actual materials of the existing “Drugsimpact Rotterdam” campaign to manipulate moral appeal. Data were collected online, as part of a BA thesis project, using the social networks of students. In the T1 survey, 441 respondents were exposed to a high confrontational moral appeal (i.e. a confrontational poster and second-person framing: “the 50 euros you spend on a bag of coke goes directly into the pocket of a criminal”), or to a low confrontational moral appeal (i.e. a non-confrontational poster and third person framing: “the 50 euros drug users spend on a bag of coke goes directly into the pocket of a criminal”), or to no moral appeal. Outcomes were measured two weeks later (NT2 = 247).

Results show that, although the high confrontational moral appeal evoked more reactance than the low confrontational moral appeal, the high confrontational appeal did increase the likelihood that people read additional campaign material, and, among occasional drug users, decreased the likelihood to use drugs in the two weeks after. The low confrontational appeal did not exert these effects. We conclude that, although first reactions to a high confrontational moral appeal are negative, it can bring about the desired behavioral changes among occasional drug users in the context of recreational drug use.

Adam Blehm, Ph.D.
Biblical Worldview Director
Rejoice Christian School
13407 E. 106th St. N.
Owasso, OK 74055
918.516.0050

In virtue ethics, theorists have traditionally held that when the virtuous person acts virtuously, they experience an intrapersonal psychological harmony within their reasoning and their motivations and between their reasoning and motivations. For example, when a truly honest person acts honestly, they do not simultaneously have a desire to be deceptive. Yet, in recent years, the harmony thesis has come under significant criticism. Some critics have alleged that the harmony thesis is not a realistic depiction of human psychology. Others have produced compelling counterexamples where it seems that the virtuous person not only has psychological conflict when acting virtuously, it seems they ought to be conflicted about acting. In these cases, we think less of the person who is not conflicted because they do not seem sensitive to moral goods in the right way. In other
cases, one’s psychological conflict seems to add to one’s virtuous motivation for acting.
Yet, there are good reasons for maintaining some kind of harmony thesis. For instance, in ordinary circumstances when one acts virtuously and experiences
psychological harmony, this is an indication that their psychological faculties are all properly responsive to relevant goods. Second, psychological harmony provides a sense of satisfaction for one when acting virtuously. Thus, when one acts virtuously, one
experiences pleasure. This kind of pleasure helps to make neo-Aristotelian accounts of virtue appealing to both objectivist and subjectivist intuitions about human flourishing.
In this paper, I aim to reformulate the harmony thesis to accommodate contemporary counterexamples wherein the virtuous person must choose between competing relevant goods. I begin by briefly describing the harmony thesis and presenting a prominent counterexample to it. Second, I briefly discuss silencing theories and provide criticisms of these views. Third, most of the paper is spent developing an account of the harmony thesis which appeals to philosophical argument and psychological research wherein the virtuous person’s phronesis faculty modulates and organizes the virtuous person’s competing reasons and motivations in such a way that the virtuous person reliably performs virtuous actions in the relevant contexts. This means that the virtuous person experiences competing reasons and motivations in response to competing goods.
However, phronesis modulates and categorizes one’s reasons and one’s motivations such that one both understands and is most motivated to do the obviously virtuous action. In this way the virtuous person’s psychological harmony is not an absolute freedom from psychological conflict. Rather, virtuous psychological harmony allows for the various
facets of one’s psychology to be appropriately responsive to competing goods while
unifying all of one’s psychological faculties by “being for the good.” This formulation of the harmony thesis, then, provides for a psychological unity of diverse mental phenomena.
This framework has important implications for character education and
psychological practice. Centrally, it gives clarity to the goal of character education. Also, if becoming a virtuous person entails developing psychological commitments that may come into conflict, developing a certain kind of resilience will be necessary.

This paper examines what inner state an apologizer must have. Existing theories identify conditions such as responsibility, regret, and future commitment, but do not specify the inner state underlying them. I argue that this state is counterfactual thinking. Drawing on philosophical and neuroscientific research, I show that counterfactual thinking substantively fulfills these conditions by generating regret and functioning as a learning signal. In apology, it must encompass the entire event as experienced by the victim.

In an era where narratives of moral turmoil pervade both public discourse and personal life, how are today’s young adults developing their reasoning of what’s right and what’s wrong? Examining how soon-to-be working professionals are navigating ethical dilemmas is consequential in the workplace, home, community, and beyond. To investigate the landscape of salient, everyday moral dilemmas that young adults face, we conducted a narrative-based study.
This study examines young adults’ autobiographical narratives of salient morally ambiguous and unambiguous experiences. Participants aged 18-25 (N=300) were brought in-person to a quiet lab space to complete an online survey. They wrote two different narratives recounting experiences from this past year where (1) they had a clear judgment involving only moral, personal, or social-conventional considerations, or domain emphasis in an unambiguous scenario); and (2) it was hard to judge the moral quality of the experience due to multiple competing moral and nonmoral considerations, or an ambiguous experience. The design is heavily informed by Social Cognitive Domain Theory, or SDT (e.g., Smetana, 1983). These experiences must have directly involved themselves or someone they personally know and witnessed the event themselves. Participants then responded to numerous close-ended questions regarding their moral judgments of the event, situational features, and personal characteristics of those involved. Data collection will be completed by July 2026.
Narratives will be analyzed using structural topic modeling which relies on word co-occurrences to estimate unobserved, or latent, topics (e.g., Jacobson et al., 2024; Roberts et al., 2019). Estimated prevalence of topics based on narrative type (ambiguity and domain emphasis) will also be included in this modeling approach. After estimating the number of topics and topic prevalence across narratives, labeling of the topics will be conducted by the research team.
Furthermore, numerous Bayesian multinomial linear mixed effects models will be conducted to examine the likelihood of differing contexts (e.g., interpersonal and physical contexts) regressed on narrative type (ambiguity and domain emphasis). Main effects only and interaction models will be compared to identifying the best fitting model for each dependent variable.
Findings will map a range of topics and contexts in which young adults are wrestling with everyday moral dilemmas. Through this mapping, we hope to inspire future researchers’ stimuli development, the scope of topics or issues studied among young adults, and to better understand contemporary issues that are weighing on our next generation of global citizens.

When we express an attitude like anger to someone who has mistreated us, what is it we ask for? In the reactive attitudes literature, anger and its kin are often associated with demands, in two forms which seem closely related. First, reactive attitudes might express the “basic demand” that we be treated with proper “regard” or “goodwill.” Second, expressions of reactive attitudes might take the form of demands. I argue that the second claim is false more often than previously thought: no reactive attitude essentially takes the form of a demand or indeed any directive speech act. But the first claim remains true—in fact, we can better understand the goodwill we demand of others by seeing the full range of expressions that satisfy the basic demand. The result reveals the discretion we have in responding to slights in our relationships: the basic demand leaves us room to either try to repair the relationship or give up on it.
I first argue against the second claim, that an expressed reactive attitude takes the form of a demand—a speech act that imposes a putative obligation on its target. Recent works argue that some reactive attitudes impose statuses short of obligation , fitting not demands but other species of directive. But any directive still aims to impose normative pressure on a wrongdoer to make repairs; I argue that any reactive attitude is sometimes expressed as a verdictive rather than a directive, laying down the law instead of applying normative pressure. “Cold anger” and the like are recognizable non-directive phenomena, leaving us with a wide range of ways to express reactive attitudes.
But why do verdictive expressions make sense—why can the basic demand for regard drive us to either demand repair or to simply state that a violation has occurred? If you’ve violated the basic demand and so broken the bonds of our relationship, it may seem I must demand repair, applying normative pressure maybe even unrelentingly until the wrong is righted and the moral order restored. But what’s needed to satisfy the basic demand depends on the particular relationship at play, and so any seeming violation of a relationship norm can instead be seen as (causing) the loss of that relationship norm. Instead of demanding repair, I have the option to step back and downgrade the relationship, asking less of you and avoiding further letdown. A verdictive leaves both options open, informing you that by the relationship’s prior standards you’d need to repair your wrong but letting you choose whether those standards still apply.
To always demand repair is to waste one’s time and energy trying to hold others to levels of care they won’t reach. But to always use verdictives and accept relationship downgrade is to make every unresolved slight a step towards breakup. We want to be treated fairly by the rules of the relationships we’re in, but we also want relationships, even imperfect ones. Both demands and verdictives have a place in the basic demand for goodwill.

Since Strawson, reactive attitude theorists have been bent on figuring out how we should take responsibility for our wrongdoings. Yet, they are much less eager to talk about how we should take responsibility for our good doings. I know that when I act wrongly I perhaps ought to blame myself and feel a fitting amount of guilt, but what should I do when I act well? Monique Wonderly offers an account of moral pride on which an agent feels moral pride when she claims her good act as her own and endorses it as a productive step in a moral project. Interestingly, she briefly mentions that a global failure to feel moral pride would represent a diminished understanding of an important aspect of moral agency. However, exactly what she means by this is unclear. Wonderly’s account leaves us asking: What exactly is going wrong when we globally fail to feel moral pride for our morally good actions? My first goal in this paper will be to answer this question.
I will begin by connecting moral pride to self-respect, in a broadly Kantian sense. Since, in this Kantian sense, self-respect is a recognition of ourselves as members of a moral landscape, I will suggest that what we have “diminished competence” with when we globally fail to feel moral pride is our very status as a member of a moral community. An agent who never feels moral pride for her morally good actions fails to properly respect herself, i.e. does not sufficiently recognize herself as a full moral agent capable of meaningfully contributing to her moral community.
Here, another question arises: If a global failure to feel moral pride indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of one’s moral agency, which one certainly ought to avoid, what does an individual failure to feel moral pride indicate? Must we feel moral pride for all of our good doings? The connection between moral pride and self-respect will enable me to conclude that we have to feel moral pride, not all of the time, but at least some of the time, lest we demonstrate a total misunderstanding of our role as a moral agent. As such, I argue that feeling moral pride can be considered a sort of imperfect duty– it is something we do not have to do every time the opportunity arises, but we are required to do it enough to show our commitment to the maxim it represents. In order to better understand what it would mean for moral pride to be an imperfect duty, I will apply Karen Stohr’s framework on beneficence and obligatory aid. Using Stohr’s framework, I ultimately conclude that one must feel moral pride if not doing so would constitute indifference toward her moral agency. In other words, you have to feel moral pride when not doing so would be to deny your status as a moral agent who is capable of making meaningful contributions to your moral community.

This paper argues that we should be suspicious of assigning fundamental moral significance to causal connection as such. Drawing on recent work in causal cognition and counterfactual sampling, I argue that judgments about causal strength are shaped by factors like abnormality, salience, portability, and intervention-readiness. These features plausibly matter for prediction and control, but not obviously for fundamental morality. I argue that this gives us reason to distrust ordinary intuitions linking causal involvement and moral significance.

The target domain of morality should be identified according to the meaning of the folk concept of morality, not according to a definition based on theoretical principles. After explaining why theory-based definitions are inherently problematic, I illustrate how the folk concept can be used to identify the moral domain instead, borrowing methods from experimental philosophy. I present methods and results of an exploratory, cross-cultural study (N=1,613), along with a follow-up study (N=430).

Original empirical evidence strongly suggests that, contrary to recent empirical results, moral judgments do not exhibit a robust pattern of actor-observer asymmetry. Two pre-registered experiments measured moral judgments of participants (N = 1326) across 145 different scenarios. Experiment 1 tests for an actor-observer asymmetry in participants’ moral judgments for the trolley problem. Experiment 2 tests participants’ moral judgments across 143 ordinary real-life scenarios. Present findings do not exhibit overall trend of an actor-observer asymmetry in moral judgments.

Social media users are repeatedly exposed to hate speech and violent planning content from both violent and nonviolent actors. Growth curve analyses (N = 868) demonstrated hate speech was rated as immediately and stably harmful, while planning content required accumulated exposure before harm ratings rose. Actor type moderated content type effects, with planning content from violent actors rated nearly as harmful as their hate speech, suggesting harm perception depends on both what a message contains and who sent it.

When people learn that a physician used AI tools during medical training, do they trust them less, and if so, why? In a preregistered study (N = 216), participants evaluated a board-certified cardiologist described as having used AI during training, as never having used it, or with no information given. Disclosed AI use sharply lowered trust relative to both other conditions. The effect was mediated by perceived ability and perceived autonomy, not benevolence or integrity.

Submission preference: symposium talk (up to 30 min). The authors would welcome consideration for a talk in a symposium.

Understanding intentionality is particularly important for moral decision-making and the assignment of blame (Alicke, 2000; Cushman, 2008; Gray et al., 2012; Knobe, 2006; Malle, 2006; Malle et al., 2014; Shaver, 1985). Indeed, when someone deliberately harms someone else, it is understandable that we see their actions as maximally wrong and deserving of blame. However, whether it is the function of an agent’s action or inaction, people also assign blame to those whose behavior leads to unintended harm (i.e., when causing harm is clearly not their goal). In particular, when an agent does something that a reasonable person would have avoided (i.e., they unreasonably fail to foresee the negative outcome of their action), or when an agent acts for some reason other than to cause harm, but foresees the risk and acts anyway, the agent deserves less or more blame (Nuñez et al., 2014; Flick et al., 2024; Laurent et al., 2015, 2019, 2021). In fact, recent work (Laurent & Flick, 2026) has shown that people assign blame on a continuum that runs from no blame for “pure” accidents (where the agent is not causally responsible or could not have reasonably foreseen the harm their action would cause) to maximum blame when an agent intends to cause harm, and does.

Although intentional harm is clearly bad, we presently argue that for at least two reasons, unintended harms are much more interesting than intended harms, and therefore deserve greater research attention. First, people cause harm without intending to do so much more often than they do so intentionally, which grounds this notion in the reality of people’s most typical moral decision making. As we show in one study (N = 192), across multiple types of harm, people believe that far more instances of harm or property damage are unintended than intended, and that unintended harm is more common and likely than intended harm. In a second study (N = 817), people gave open-ended responses about a recent time when they were blamed, they blamed someone, or were aware of someone being blamed, then classified this experience along a continuum of intentionality. Overwhelmingly, across and within all target conditions, people’s own experiences with blame suggest that unintended harm is much more common and salient than intentional harm. Secondly, ratings of blame are more variable for unintended (vs. intended) harms, and greater variance offers greater room for theory building, by suggesting a larger number of factors that might influence the extent of blame attribution. Not only did variations in intent predict substantial variance in outcomes across both studies, but within studies (and in analyses of previously published work), variances for blame were significantly larger in unintended (vs. intended) harm conditions. Finding what predicts blame beyond the effects of intent, as well as studying the effects of intent on blame, will help build theory that predicts when and why people are viewed as more or less immoral or blameworthy.

When philosophers talk about the benefits of love, it’s usually in terms of how the lover sees or treats the beloved, which contributes to the moral progress of the lover. Two prominent accounts that discuss this feature of love come from Murdoch (1970) and Velleman (1999). For Murdoch, love is paying just (i.e., fair or moral) attention to the beloved such that the lover can see the beloved for who they truly are. For Velleman, love is an appreciation of the beloved’s inherent value insofar as it’s indicative of the beloved’s own capacity for love. From these accounts, we can see the moral benefits love incurs for the beloved. These benefits, however, only seem to represent one half of the picture. Murdoch and Velleman, among others, tend to overlook the distinctive benefits of love which positively contribute to the lover – specifically, the lover’s self-development. In this paper, I draw attention to this oft-neglected benefit of love. Following Paul (2014), I argue that love is a transformative experience that prepares us for future projects of self-development. It is this aspect about love that helps us become better people.

I advance my account in two parts: First, I summarize Murdoch’s and Velleman’s accounts of love and discuss their approaches to understanding the moral benefits of love. I then identify something overlooked in both accounts: Though love certainly contributes to one’s moral development insofar as it promotes positive treatment or evaluation of others, there’s more to love that can be beneficial and yet not based on the lover’s attitude or treatment towards the beloved. Second, I employ L.A. Paul’s transformative experience framework to explain the process which underlies this benefit of love. I demonstrate how we might understand love as an epistemically and personally transformative experience which yields positive self-development. Through loving, the lover understands what it is like to accept risks and vulnerabilities, make commitments, and adopt an attitude of persistence. This knowledge, I argue, facilitates positive personal developments in lovers: with time, she will become better equipped to overcome the challenges which are inherent for positive self-development. I then consider the implications of this view, and by answering an important challenge which any account of the benefits of love must face: how can loving someone bad ever yield something good?

When we judge whether someone acted intentionally, we typically treat that judgment as being about the agent, not about ourselves. Yet when the outcome of an action stands to affect our own interests, it is not clear that this personal relation can simply be set aside.
Research on the side-effect effect has shown that harmful side effects are judged as more intentional than helpful ones, even when the agent’s attitude toward the outcome is held constant (Knobe, 2003). Most studies in this tradition implicitly place the evaluator outside the case, unaffected by the outcome being judged. This assumption has rarely been tested directly. The present research asks whether intentionality judgments change when the evaluator’s own interests are at stake.

We report a preregistered study with 585 participants from the US and UK. Participants were randomly assigned to one of 24 vignette versions in a 2 × 2 design. The design crossed outcome valence, harmful versus helpful, with self-interest involvement, threatened versus unaffected, across six scenarios. In every version, participants judged whether the agent intentionally produced the harmful or helpful side effect described in the case. In the threat condition, participants were asked to imagine themselves in the situation and were told that the outcome would have personal consequences for them. In the no-effect condition, neither element was present. Intentionality judgments were measured on a 1 to 7 scale and analyzed using linear mixed-effects models.

The classic harm-help asymmetry was robustly replicated. However, the predicted interaction between outcome valence and self-interest involvement was not significant in the primary analysis, nor was the main effect of involvement. A more complex pattern emerged when scenario variation was examined. Adding scenario as a factor significantly improved model fit, p < .001, and two scenarios showed directional patterns in both the harm and help conditions that ran counter to the other four. These two scenarios were also distinct in their relation to AI. In the transportation scenario, the agent was an AI system rather than a human actor, and in the competition scenario, AI formed part of the background context. In an exploratory analysis limited to the remaining four scenarios, participants in the threat condition gave significantly higher intentionality ratings than those in the no-effect condition, p = .034. The help condition complicated the picture further. The original expectation was that personal involvement would make helpful side effects seem less intentional, but the means repeatedly leaned the other way.

These findings suggest that the evaluator’s relationship to an outcome is part of the context in which intentionality judgments are formed, but that this relationship does not operate in the simple way predicted by a straightforward self-interest account. The unexpected pattern in helping cases, together with the distinctive behavior of AI-related scenarios, points to boundary conditions that the side-effect effect literature has not yet addressed. Intentionality attribution in side-effect cases may therefore be better understood as a situated judgment, shaped by who is judging, what kind of agent is being judged, and what kind of outcome is at stake, rather than as a neutral inference from action structure alone.

In the fall of 2026, my _Concise Introduction to Moral Psychology_ will be published by Edward Elgar. This decidedly interdisciplinary book integrates conceptual distinctions and empirical evidence in order to build a comprehensive understanding of morality. It is a compact (200-page) textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in psychology, cognitive science, philosophy, and sociology.

Moral psychology’s questions are as old as philosophy, and its methods and perspectives range from cognitive to social psychology, from developmental to neuroscience, from behavioral economics to computational modeling. So moral psychology is the multidisciplinary science of morality. But what is morality?

Scholars have debated whether there is one defining feature of the moral landscape, but the evidence suggests considerable diversity. This book introduces the diverse phenomena of this landscape and illustrates how moral psychology has investigated them.

Most scholars agree that morality is for group living. Successful groups endorse standards that guide individuals’ actions so they serve the interests of the group as a whole. We can call these collective standards normative systems, which include norms, values, rights, and nowadays institutions.

For normative systems to have impact, humans evolved individual-level capacities, including judgments, concepts, regulatory processes, emotions, and communication. Only with these capacities can people learn, follow, and enforce norms. Morality, then, is the union of group-level normative systems and individual-level capacities. This book surveys what we know about the foundational normative systems (ch. 1) and the five core moral capacities built on them: moral behavior (ch. 2), moral judgments (ch. 3), moral sanctions (ch. 4), moral emotions (ch. 5), and moral communication (ch. 6).

Chapter 1 analyzes what norms are and what functions they serve in human communities. We learn about the origins of norms in our biological relatives, in our distant and more recent human ancestors, and in human norm learners.

Chapter 2 examines what we know about the causes of moral and immoral behavior, deep in human evolution and in modern life. Encountering remarkable prosociality but also serial killers and genocide, we recognize that humans are the most moral and the most immoral creature we know.

Chapter 3 distinguishing between kinds of moral judgments, leading from norm judgments to fast and effortless moral evaluations, from wrongness judgments of action to blame judgments of persons. By acknowledging this diversity, we discover how affect, emotions, and judgments can meaningfully co-exist.

Chapter 4 traces the many options people have to regulate (praise, criticize, penalize) a person’s behavior, searching for the causal determinants of the mildest to the most severe tools of regulation.

Chapter 5 gathers the evidence for calling some emotions genuinely “moral.” Investigating which emotions are uniquely elicited by moral events and motivate moral behavior we learn how the capacities of moral judgment, behavior, emotion and regulation interrelate.

Chapter 6 reviews the vocabulary and functions of moral communication. It studies the rich communication about communication moral standards and departures thereof and the intricate sequences of blame management that build on criticism, apology, and forgiveness to repair social relationships.

*Brief Description*

In the fall of 2026, my _Concise Introduction to Moral Psychology_ will be published by Edward Elgar. This interdisciplinary book integrates conceptual distinctions and empirical evidence in order to build a comprehensive understanding of morality. It is a compact (200-page) textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science. The book dedicates one chapter each to morality’s foundation in norms and the five core moral capacities: moral behavior, judgments, sanctions, emotions, and communication.

Through daily media consumption, people learn about extreme acts of immorality across the world—murder, abuse, terrorism, torture, and more. Sometimes, judging these acts “wrong” doesn’t seem strong enough; people may judge them “evil” instead. But what provokes this judgment, exactly? Although substantial work investigates judgments of wrongness (e.g., Graham et al., 2013; Schein & Gray, 2018), little work investigates judgments of evil (Gromet et al., 2016)—and no work at all has developed a theory of its underlying processes. Toward this end, we performed six studies on U.S. adults to reveal how, if at all, judgments of evil differ from judgments of wrongness.

The first two studies found that judgments of evil and wrongness are distinct in some way: People spontaneously describe serious offenses as “evil” (Study 1; n = 251) and judge “evil” to be a more accurate description of those offenses than all terms describing their “wrongness” (Study 2; n = 400).

The next four studies then examined whether these judgments differ quantitatively or qualitatively. If they differ quantitatively, then evil is just an extreme judgment of wrongness (Russell, 2007). Accordingly, all acts judged “evil” should also be judged “wrong,” and the mechanisms underlying each judgment should overlap. If they differ qualitatively, however, evil is not an extreme judgment of wrongness (Calder, 2013; Garrard, 2002; Steiner, 2002). Accordingly, some acts could be judged “evil” without being judged “wrong,” and differential mechanisms underlie each judgment.

In Study 3, we found evidence that people judge some acts “evil” without necessarily judging them “wrong,” inconsistent with a quantitative-difference view. Participants (n = 956) read four vignettes describing decisions with unambiguously good consequences—but that stemmed from malicious motives—and were randomly assigned to judge whether these decisions were “evil” vs. “morally wrong.” All four decisions were judged “evil” (69-73%) more often than they were judged “morally wrong” (59-65%), suggesting differential judgment processes (see Figure below). This clearly favors a qualitative-difference view.

The next three studies tested the following theory of these results: Judgments of evil are more sensitive than are judgments of wrongness to features which signal a disdainful attitude towards others’ life and welfare. Study 4 (n = 526) showed that judgments of a decision’s evilness were more sensitive than judgments of its wrongness to a manipulation that downgraded the actor’s motive from disdainful to merely egocentric. Study 5 (n = 550) showed that participants’ judgments of evilness were more sensitive to their own assessments of the actor’s disdainfulness than were their judgments of wrongness. Study 6 (n = 250) revealed a similar pattern using more generalizable stimuli, while also distinguishing perceptions of disdainfulness from alternative mechanisms of moral judgment (i.e., harm and injustice).

By focusing on judgments of what is “wrong,” and neglecting judgments of what is “evil,” moral judgment research has not yet captured the most serious judgments people make. We point to a new mechanism, which has not previously been identified as an essential one for moral judgment, as crucial to judging an act evil.

When making decisions, adding a similar-but-worse option can shift choices toward the similar-but-better option, a phenomenon known as the attraction effect in decision-making. We extended this effect to moral decisions using the footbridge variant of the trolley problem (push one versus do nothing). Adding the similar-but-worse option (push two) increased push-one decisions from 45% to 58% while reducing the number of do-nothing decisions, suggesting that moral choices are susceptible to seemingly irrelevant options.

Abstracts attached as PDF.

Romantic and intimate behavior with AI companions, chatbots, and robots is on the rise. Yet there is debate by scholars and the wider population on whether intimacy with AI is fundamentally the same as intimacy with humans. That is, is AI intimacy real or just roleplay? While people might have strong stated opinions, the extent to which they treat moral-relational issues the same for AI and humans provides a stronger answer. Thus, we examine the deep-seated moral prohibition against relationship infidelity—or cheating—within long-term committed human-human relationships. If a romantic partner engages in behaviors indicative of infidelity, people should perceive and define it as cheating when they believe they are really cheating with someone. That is, if AI just engages in roleplay, then ultimately it cannot be a real relational or romantic partner, and behavior toward it is not infidelity. Comparing this to infidelity behaviors done with another human provides a gauge of the fundamental difference of human intimacy compared to AI intimacy.

Our study examines whether and how these AI cheating perceptions differ by demographics—country, gender, marital status, and age—and individual characteristics—loneliness and life satisfaction. We conducted a survey using Cross Marketing’s online survey platform, collecting data on 1470 people that was balanced across our demographic measures. We had 490 from Japan, 490 from the United Kingdom, and 490 from the United States. Within each country, participants were split equally between male and female, balanced equally across ages, and approximately half from each country were married.

Our primary measures were ten total questions asking whether participants agreed that behaviors ranging from having romantic conversations to sexual behaviors with either an AI (five questions) or a human (five questions) indicated that a person was cheating on their long term romantic partner. Our repeated-measures model indicated that these infidelity behaviors were perceived as more indicative of cheating when done with a human rather than an AI. This was especially true of American and British participants, who perceived human’s infidelity behavior as nearly a point (on a five-point scale) more indicative of cheating compared to AI’s same behaviors. Comparatively, Japanese perceived all infidelity behavior as less indicative of cheating, with a much narrow gap of between human and AI perceptions. Another finding shows that overall lonely individuals, compared to less lonely individuals, perceive infidelity behavior as more indicative of cheating. Lonely individuals also distinguished less between AI and human cheating partners. Life satisfaction, marriage, gender, and age did not have primary effects.

Qualitative analyses show that emotional connection and the physical differences between humans and AI drive the human-AI differences in these judgments. The difference in loneliness, but not in life satisfaction, coupled with the emotional connection explanations suggest that concerns about AI relationships are more closely linked to unmet social or emotional needs rather than to positive aspects of well-being.

Overall, this is an important contribution to better understanding people’s perception of human-AI romance and how it affects human-human relationships.

Description

Across two studies, we hypothesize and find that people can show three kinds of responses to complex moral dilemmas. When people detect little conflict, they feel resolved about their judgments. When conflict is detected, people are likely to feel unresolved—until they identify a solution that resolves each horn of the dilemma in a satisfying way. People’s movement through these three phases—unconflicted, conflicted, and coordinated—may be a key driver of moral development and change.

Abstract

Complex moral dilemmas—pitting one weighty consideration against another—invite moral change: With time, people change their minds about how to best balance competing concerns (Tetlock, 1986; Kohlberg, 1981). A person who thinks academic cheating must always be reported can, with deliberation, conclude it wrong to report when this would jeopardize a student’s future.
How do dilemmas prompt people to refine their moral principles? We propose that views change through two processes (Nucci et al., 2017; Pennycook, 2023; Hegel, 1807/1979): First, conflict detection—recognizing competition between concerns—prompts one to reconsider whether their view does justice to the interests and values at stake. Next, conflict resolution—a satisfying solution to the dilemma—occurs when people arrive at a new way to coordinate competing concerns. Consequently, judgments of complex moral dilemmas might move through three phases—from unconflicted (no detection, resolution), to conflicted (detection, no resolution), to coordinated (detection, resolution).
As an initial test, the present studies measured these three steps of reasoning in responses to moral dilemmas. We hypothesize that when people perceive little conflict, they will feel satisfied (unconflicted, H1). When they do detect conflict, their satisfaction will depend on whether they can find a way to resolve the dilemma by integrating both competing concerns: Without an integrative solution, they will feel dissatisfied (conflicted, H2); with one, they will be more satisfied (coordinated, H3).

In Study 1, we presented college students (N=100) twelve dilemmas, each featuring two competing concerns (e.g., fail a cheating student vs. spare from outsized consequences). Participants prescribed a solution (coded for integration), rated each concern’s importance (conflict detection), and reported satisfaction with their judgment (sense of resolution).
We found an interaction between concerns and integration in satisfaction (p=.023). When participants rated concerns very different in importance (low conflict), they reported high satisfaction (H1). By contrast, when rating concerns similarly (high conflict), participants reported lower satisfaction (H2). When rating concerns equally important, those who articulated a solution that integrated both concerns reported higher satisfaction (b=0.39, H3).
Latent class analyses yielded four classes (BIC=6962.16; entropy=.83), including two unconflicted classes (no conflict, 20%; slight conflict, 33%), conflicted (25%), and coordinated (23%).

Study 2 extended Study 1 by directly measuring subjective sense of conflict: For six dilemmas, students (N=50) reported whether they felt compelled to balance competing considerations.
People who indicated higher conflict reported lower satisfaction (p<.001). When participants felt little need to balance, they were highly satisfied (H1). When they felt compelled to balance, participants were less satisfied (H2). Although findings trended in the direction predicted by H3, H3 was not supported (p=.63), possibly because so few responses offered integrative solutions (18%).

Two studies validated our three proposed phases of reasoning about moral dilemmas, distinguished by conflict detection and resolution. When people detected little conflict, they felt the matter settled. When conflict was detected, people felt unresolved—unless they identified a solution that handled the dilemma in a satisfying way. Future microgenetic work will examine the psychological and situational factors leading people to first detect and then resolve moral dilemmas.

Prior work on the common-is-moral heuristic demonstrated that moral judgment and behavior are influenced by people’s tendency to use descriptive norms to estimate what is moral. Previously, high religiosity was shown to buffer against such influence, suggesting that descriptive norms exposure and moral belief endorsement are competing inputs into the same judgment process. This study investigates the relationship between morality and social norms by manipulating descriptive norms while measuring moral belief endorsement as a moderator.

Praise is rarely questioned, yet it can oppress. In this paper, I argue that oppressive praise takes two distinct forms: fitting praise accurately acknowledges a genuine action while reinforcing harmful stereotypes; unfitting praise additionally misrepresents the action as praiseworthy. These forms operate through different mechanisms and generate different harms — including recognition failures, distributive unfairness, and affective injustice. Fitting oppressive praise is the hardest to counter, as it requires objecting to accurate, well-intentioned claims.

This essay examines a Mandevillian challenge to a standard assumption in virtue-based business ethics: that vices, such as overconfidence, are harmful to both individuals and the wider communities in which they operate. I consider the claim that individual vices can, under certain conditions, produce group-level benefits, and that this may justify cultivating such vices. The recent Mandevillian literature argues that individual vices can contribute to collective virtues and, on this basis, advances the heterodox view that individuals should sometimes cultivate vice. If successful, this argument would undermine a central commitment of virtue ethics and provide a justification for traits such as overconfidence in market settings.

Developing an immanent critique, I argue that existing Mandevillian arguments fail to establish this conclusion. First, I challenge the Mandevillian Thesis that individual vice leads to group virtue. Empirically, the evidence does not track stable traits or long-term outcomes and therefore fails to establish the relationship between individual vice and collective virtue that the thesis requires. Moreover, many of the cases invoked by the Mandevillians risk misdescribing what is virtuous and vicious, attributing positive collective outcomes to vice when those outcomes may instead depend on context-sensitive forms of virtue. I also argue that existing accounts conflate distinct levels of analysis, a problem I develop as the “Level Problem”. While the evidence sometimes suggests benefits for particular groups, organisations, or firms, it does not establish that such benefits extend to society as a whole.

Second, I argue that even if some local benefits obtain, they do not justify the normative claim that individuals should cultivate vice. Drawing on the Mandevillians’ own account of vice as a stable, long-term character trait, I develop a spillover worry: if vices are cultivated, their effects are unlikely to remain confined to particular organisational roles and may generate harms across other domains of life. I then redeploy the Level Problem to show that localised benefits are insufficient to justify cultivating vice once wider social consequences are taken into account. Finally, I reconsider the Mandevillians’ appeal to efficiency and argue that it remains unclear, even on their own terms, that cultivating vice is efficient when broader social effects are considered.

Taken together, these arguments undermine the case for overconfidence and weaken the grip of the Mandevillian threat. More broadly, the essay raises doubts about attempts to defend market vices on the grounds that they generate collective benefits and suggests that the burden of proof remains with those who claim that market actors should cultivate vice.

Interested in being considered for a poster!

Do displays of guilt inform perceivers' inferences about relationships? Across three within-subjects conditions, 85 adults judged which of two characters, one displaying either guilt or anger and one neutral, was more likely to be friends with a person in need whom they both failed to help. Adults overwhelmingly inferred friendship from guilt, more than from anger, regardless of helping cost. This suggests that, beyond shaping judgments of moral character, guilt also informs inferences about relationships.

Abstract

Beyond revealing an agent's internal state, emotional displays serve as cues for forming inferences about relationships, supporting navigation through complex social networks (Keltner & Haidt, 1999; Wu et al., 2021). For instance, displays of empathy or schadenfreude are used to infer positive or negative relationships between individuals (Smith-Flores et al., 2023), and negative reactions to a peer's neutrality in a conflict can signal friendship (Mackiel et al., 2026). However, whether guilt — the emotion experienced upon awareness of failing a moral obligation to another (Baumeister et al., 1994; Vaish, 2018; Vaish & Hepach, 2020) — plays a similar role remains underexplored. Guilt may be a particularly informative relational cue, as moral obligations are structured by relationships. Individuals hold friends and kin to stronger obligations of care than strangers and expect others to do the same (Marshall et al., 2020; Rai & Fiske, 2011). If guilt arises specifically in response to violations of these obligations, then displays of guilt should signal not only that an obligation was broken, but also the relational context in which it was held. The present study examines this possibility by asking whether adults interpret displays of guilt as a cue to friendship.

To address this question, 85 adults recruited through Prolific completed an online survey using a within-subjects design. Participants read three everyday scenarios in which two target characters failed to help a character in need; afterward, one character displayed an emotion while the other remained neutral. The displayed emotion and helping cost varied across three conditions: low-cost guilt, high-cost guilt (where helping would have carried a personal cost), and anger. After each scenario, participants identified which character was more likely to be the main character's friend.

Adults overwhelmingly selected the guilt-displaying character as more likely to be friends with the character in need in both the low-cost condition (p < .001, d = 7.35) and the high-cost condition (p < .001, d = 5.67), at rates far exceeding chance. Critically, friendship inference did not differ between the low- and high-cost conditions (p = .418, d = 0.12), suggesting that adults used guilt as a friendship cue regardless of the cost of helping; however, near-ceiling performance in both conditions limits the sensitivity of this comparison. Although adults also selected the anger-displaying character as friends above chance, the effect was substantially weaker (p < .001, d = 0.49). Direct comparisons confirmed that adults were more likely to infer friendship from guilt than from anger in both the low-cost (p < .001, d = 1.07) and high-cost (p < .001, d = 1.09) conditions.

These findings suggest that guilt functions as a social cue for the unseen moral obligations embedded within close relationships, which enables observers to make friendship inferences. Thus, guilt not only signals that a relational obligation has been transgressed (Tangney & Dearing, 2002; Wahlers et al., 2024) but may also indicate to whom the transgressor was connected. Notably, although anger also cued friendship inferences, its substantially weaker effect suggests adults' inferences were driven by guilt rather than general negative affect. By demonstrating that displays of guilt inform inferences about the social connections surrounding a transgression, these findings extend prior work on the relational nature of guilt beyond its established role in judgments of moral character.

Clinical models of trauma often treat a “traumatic event” as a unitary variable, defined primarily by objective exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence. As a result, psychiatric debates tend to focus on whether diagnostic criteria should be expanded to include a wider range of distressing experiences or narrowed to avoid pathologizing ordinary adversity. I argue that this boundary-policing approach is premature because it lacks an adequate conceptual account of traumatic events themselves. Trauma is not a static property of an event category. There are simply events—things that happen in the world—and these events become traumatic or morally injurious only through an individual’s situated relation to them. A traumatic event is therefore best understood as an agent-event structure: the interaction among an individual’s prior capacity or priming, the contextual features of the event, their relational positioning within it, and their psychophysiological response.
This paper develops a multidimensional matrix of interpersonal traumatic events in order to explain why similar exposures can produce divergent outcomes and why dissimilar events can generate similar traumatic responses. When individuals fall outside expected diagnostic or treatment patterns, clinicians often individualize the anomaly by appealing to coping style, resilience, or vulnerability. Philosophically, this strategy is backward. The explanatory gap lies not simply inside the individual, but between the event and the experience. To bridge this gap, we need a more precise taxonomy of the stimuli themselves—one that can classify the structure of traumatic experience without assuming trauma can be read directly off the world.
The matrix is organized into four higher-order families. Individual Capacity captures how an agent enters the event, including sensitization, habituation, preparedness, and forms of social or cultural priming. Contextual Features describe the external structure of the event, including risk, type of harm, exposure, and duration. Relational Positioning captures the agent’s normative location within the event: whether they are the target, bystander, harm-doer, collaborator, or someone betrayed by an intimate partner, caregiver, institution, or community. This family is especially important for moral injury, where guilt, shame, betrayal, perceived complicity, or violation of moral commitment may be central even when bodily threat is not. Psychophysiological Response concerns peritraumatic emotional and behavioral responses, including fear, horror, numbing, dissociation, goal-directed professional override, immobilization, fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.
The matrix has three central upshots. First, it provides conceptual clarity by shifting attention from whether an event “counts” as traumatic to what kind of agent-event structure it involves. Second, it provides normative insight by showing that traumatic significance can depend on responsibility, betrayal, obligation, and moral conflict, not only bodily threat. Third, it has predictive value: threat-dominant configurations may generate hyperarousal or fear-conditioning trajectories, while responsibility- or betrayal-dominant configurations may produce guilt-based or relational distress. By decomposing the traumatic event into its constituent dimensions, this taxonomy makes visible the structural differences that matter explanatorily, normatively, and clinically.

75 word version: This paper argues that acedia and profound loneliness share a distinctive moral-psychological structure: both are self-concealing attunements that substitute the appearance of engagement for genuine care. However, they differ in a philosophically significant way. Acedia's concealment originates within the agent's disordered will and habituated character. Profound loneliness's concealment is partly constituted by technological scaffolds — smartphones and social media — that actively supply a false object of connectivity. This difference has underappreciated implications for moral responsibility, therapeutic intervention, and the scope of virtue ethics.

Contemporary theories of praise typically focus on intentional cases in which a praiser deliberately communicates a positive evaluation. This paper argues that praise can also be unintentional. Cases such as taking a second helping of a meal, seeking someone's recommendations, or entrusting them with responsibility can constitute praise despite lacking any intention to praise. Recognizing unintentional praise challenges influential theories while supporting a more pluralistic understanding of praise’s nature and function.

I seek to track an historical origin of at least one source of persistent disagreement in moral psychology. By focusing on the case of Lawrence Kohlberg, we can come to see more clearly the danger of tying particular descriptive accounts to particular normative accounts, and vice versa. Although many contemporary moral psychologists disavow parts of his program or its results, it remains the case Kohlberg has exercised a large influence on the field of empirical moral psychology. In particular, Kohlberg assumes that the structures of descriptive moral psychology and normative ethical theorizing will be isomorphic. I argue that this assumption is optional for a moral psychologist. Further, because optional, moral psychologists have freedom to reasonably reject the assumption. Finally, because there also exist compelling metatheoretical considerations against the assumption, moral psychologists have at least some reason to consider an alternate paradigm of moral psychological research centered around the question of how much substantive moral content ought a researcher allow into their program. A background idea here is that moral psychology has become balkanized at least in part because various traditions have built up rival explanations out of the resources of their preferred normative theories. And given that each may be “empirically adequate” relative to the antecedent normative commitments at hand, no tradition has a reason to move from their accounts unless they also move from their normative commitments, which is unlikely for most practitioners. If we allow, though, as seems reasonable to me, that descriptive accounts can constrain normative commitments but that we ought to be wary of normative commitments constraining the descriptive accounts, then it would be useful to identify normative commitments that are shared across rival traditions in order to assess the empirical adequacy of various descriptive accounts on offer. This is because, in the end, there is no way to do moral psychology but through partial grounding in moral theory. This investigation closes with consideration of the value of integrated history and philosophy of moral psychology in informing contemporary practice, theorizing, and experimental design.

Discussion of the relation between moral judgment and motivation has been dominated by disputes about various formulations of motivation internalism. Standard versions of this claim hold that if an agent judges that she morally ought to φ then, as a matter of metaphysical or conceptual necessity, she has at least some motivation to φ. In this paper, I defend an alternative account of this relation, arguing that the connection between moral judgment and motivation is best understood as being governed by a normative ideal, rather than in terms of metaphysical or conceptual necessity; specifically: if an agent judges that she morally ought to φ, then she ought to be motivated to φ. This is an ideal of moral agency according to which we ought to be the kind of agent in whom moral judgments are accompanied by motivation to act accordingly. I call this claim the agential ideal.

I offer two arguments to defend this claim. First, I adapt an argument articulated by Kate Manne (2014). According to this argument, existing versions of internalism misdiagnose the problem in putative counter-examples to internalism. For example, Shafer-Landau (2003) describes a case of cowardice in wartime: despite a soldier’s sincere judgment that it is morally right to fight, consideration of the risks leaves him with no motivation to act accordingly. Internalists must explain such cases by holding either that the agent has a conceptual misunderstanding of moral judgment or is unable to perceive his own motivation. However, it seems far more plausible to understand such cases as involving a normative failure: he fails to have the courage of his convictions and thus falls short of an ideal of agency. The agential ideal provides a more plausible explanation of such cases.

Second, I argue that the agential ideal also offers an explanation for why people do (and should) act to bring it about that they are motivated to act in accordance with their moral judgments. For example, in cases of change in moral view, if we arrive at a new moral judgment that diverges from our existing motivations and habits, we may need to work to bring it about that we are motivated to act in accordance with it. The agential ideal explains why we do—and ought to—do so. According to internalist accounts, lacking motivation to act in accordance with a putative moral judgment indicates that it is not a genuine moral judgment and should lead us to disavow it. Thus, in cases like this, internalist accounts cannot explain why an agents do (or should) try to cultivate the appropriate motivation.

Ultimately, human moral psychology is complex and constituted by multiple interacting systems. We should not be surprised if tension or conflict between these systems is commonplace. By framing a specific type of coherence—between moral judgment and motivation—in normative terms, the agential ideal provides a model for understanding the relations among these complex interacting systems, in particular raising questions about when coherence may—or may not—be desirable.

References

Manne, K. 2014. “Tempered Internalism and the Participatory Stance” in In Motivational Internalism. Björnsson, G., C. Strandberg, R.F. Olinder, J. Eriksson, and F. Björklund, eds. Oxford University Press.

Shafer-Landau, R. 2003. Moral Realism: a defense. Oxford University Press.

Contemporary moral life, mediated by digital interfaces, increasingly confronts us with persistent exposure to wrongdoing: climate change, genocide, structural injustice, and global poverty, to name a few. At the same time, the Strawsonian reactive attitudes through which we navigate moral life appear fundamentally structured around interpersonal relationships. Drawing on Strawsonian accounts of the reactive attitudes, I argue that the aims of these attitudes presuppose situations of reciprocity, uptake, and repair that are now often absent in many cases of our digitally-mediated encounters with wrongdoing. As a result, our responsibility practices continuously solicit reactive attitudes whose ordinary aims are frustrated or absent, leading to a felt burden to cultivate and sustain attitudes whose ends are often fundamentally unattainable.
I begin by presenting familiar Strawsonian accounts of the nature and functions of reactive attitudes like blame, guilt, and indignation. On such accounts, reactive attitudes are our responses to the perceived goodwill or ill will of others, upon which much of our social world is constructed. The normative importance of such reactive attitudes is a function of their interpersonal nature. Consider blame. One might blame another for her ill will with one of several possible ends: repair or severance of the damaged relationship, reformation of the wrongdoer, or the recognition of respect for the wronged. Across theories of reactive attitudes, such attitudes are commonly thought to have such a fundamentally interpersonal role.
I then turn to cases of reactive attitudes felt for wrongdoing that we witness every day, especially through digital media. I argue that many of the reactive attitudes we experience in such cases fail to have the right sort of relational nature that we find in ordinary, face-to-face cases. Often, these reactive attitudes—if they are even expressed—fail to receive uptake, lead to repair with the wrongdoer, or bring about any sort of change in the treatment of the victim through protest. Indeed, much of the time, these attitudes go unexpressed as a result of the felt inefficacy of any given immediate affective response.
I argue that this increasingly common structure of reactive engagement reveals important limits of reactive attitudes under conditions of digitally mediated moral life. Drawing on empirical literature, I argue that moral exhaustion, outrage fatigue, emotional disengagement, doomscrolling, and similar phenomena are best understood not merely as psychological failures but as symptoms of the difficulty of sustaining interpersonal reactive attitudes under conditions in which their ordinary relational aims are persistently frustrated. Whereas existing discussions in psychology and ethics primarily focus on the psychological costs of sheer exposure to wrongdoing, I argue that the deeper problem is structural. Contemporary information technologies increasingly solicit reactive attitudes outside the interpersonal contexts that ordinarily render them intelligible as practices of accountability.
I conclude with a discussion about how contemporary information technologies have altered the social ecology within which reactive attitudes evolved and developed, thereby placing new pressures on the functional viability of our ordinary practices of moral responsibility.

Moral curiosity guides learning about others’ minds and behavior, but what motives explain this curiosity? Across 3 studies, we find that the motives underlying moral curiosity and the strength of their influence diverge for morally good and immoral targets: while instrumental motives predominate in motivating engagement with the former, hedonic motives do so for the latter. These motives also predict learning and approach-avoidance tendencies. Moral valence shapes what information people are motivated to seek out.

This abstract is being submitted in consideration for a poster talk. In this work-in-progress, we experimentally test how a moral agent’s actions, consequences for behavior, and their interaction affect early adolescent’s liking of a moral agent and dyadic harm perceptions. Additionally, we examine the interdependence of character liking by testing the correlation between agent and patient liking, as well as how behavior type and reinforcement type may interact to predict liking of the moral patient.

The present study used a moderated mediation analysis to test Stevens and Taber’s (2021) model of prosocial behavior using data gathered from undergraduate students in a psychology capstone class (n = 384). As predicted, compassion mediated the relationship between affective empathy and prosocial relational behaviors. Furthermore, as predicted, cognitive empathy moderated the relationship between compassion and prosocial behavior. However, contrary to predictions, neither mindfulness nor self-compassion moderated the relationship between affective empathy and compassion.

On evolutionary accounts of social cognition, human beings rely on evolved cognitive systems to solve the challenging problems they face in social life, including the stabilization of cooperation, free-riding, and the avoidance of uncertainty in complex social environments. However, this account of cooperative functions in social cognition still leaves an important explanatory gap between the cognitive architecture of social cognition and the problem of oppression. If human social cognition evolved to facilitate reciprocal altruism and reciprocity, why are marginalized individuals who resist their given roles and expectations often treated as threats to the cooperative system? And why do marginalized groups sometimes participate in the local norms and scripts that subordinate them? To bridge this gap, this paper argues that systemic oppression does not bypass our evolved social cognition. Rather, oppressive systems co-opt our evolved cooperative instincts for a different purpose–oppression. I present my hypothetical model to describe how mindshaping reproduces oppression. Because the brain functions as a predictive engine with a strict metabolic budget, and because conforming to others' expectations, regardless of whether they are oppressive, is adaptive for survival, this is adaptively beneficial for survival. To survive, marginalized individuals engage in preemptive mindshaping and feel an obligation to conform, a "sense of should". Rather, it is driven by an innate mechanism, an embodied “sense of should”, that makes compliance locally rational by preserving others' predictive model toward them. However, at the macro-level, the behavioral outcomes of this mindshaping are misread as empirical evidence that the hierarchy is natural and accurate. Oppression, therefore, persists because the cognitive mechanisms of social cognition and cooperative motivation are exapted by hierarchical environments to stabilize domination.

Is being moral associated with greater well-being? Prior research has used different conceptualizations of morality and well-being when examining their association. This meta-analysis synthesized evidence on the association between morality and well-being across 198 effect sizes from 78 studies. The included samples covered a wide age and gender range (mean age = 23.47 years, range = 1.79–72.40 years; 55% female on average, range = 0%–100%), and represented 17 countries or cultural regions. From a whole-trait theory perspective (Fleeson, 2001), morality was conceptualized as including moral personality and moral behavior, whereas well-being was represented by two theoretically central indicators: happiness as an indicator of hedonic well-being (Diener, 1984) and meaning in life as an indicator of eudaimonic well-being (Steger et al., 2006). Overall, morality was positively associated with well-being, with similar associations observed for moral personality and moral behavior. The association was stronger for meaning in life (Fisher’s z = 0.32, 95% CI [0.25, 0.39]) than for happiness (z = 0.20, 95% CI [0.16, 0.25]; moderation effect b = 0.15, p = .035), suggesting that morality may be more closely tied to eudaimonic than hedonic well-being. Additional moderator analyses examined the role of study design and sample characteristics, including age, gender composition, and cultural context. Experimental studies (k = 49) showed larger effects than correlational studies. However, significant publication-bias diagnostics indicated that smaller or negative effects may be underrepresented among experimental studies. Experimental procedures that asked participants to imagine themselves engaging in moral behavior yielded larger effects on well-being than procedures involving recalling or actually performing a moral act. Besides, The morality–happiness association showed both a negative linear trend and an inverted U-shaped pattern across age. At the cultural level, tightness–looseness showed a marginal moderating effect: the association between morality and well-being tended to be stronger in tighter cultures, as indexed by Gelfand et al. (2011). Individualism–collectivism did not significantly moderate the morality–well-being association. Together, these findings suggest that morality is associated with greater well-being, although the strength of this association depends on how morality and well-being are conceptualized and operationalized, as well as on the characteristics of the populations studied.

Existing clinical studies have shown that decisional regret is a real phenomenon among parents and surrogate decision-makers (e.g., Anderson et al., 2023; Mack et al., 2016; Miller et al., 2016; Sisk et al., 2020). In pediatric oncology, for example, parents making treatment decisions for children with cancer have been found to experience heightened decisional regret. Mack et al. (2016) found that 16% of parents met the threshold for heightened decisional regret within 12 weeks of their child’s initial cancer treatment decision. Such studies provide important guidance for improving healthcare practices, especially by emphasizing clearer prognostic information, better communication, and improved trust in clinicians.

However, the instruments used in these studies usually conceptualize regret as an evaluation of a deliberative decision. The widely used Decision Regret Scale asks respondents, for example, whether the decision was right, whether they regret the choice, whether they would make the same choice again, whether the choice caused harm, and whether the decision was wise (O’Connor, 1996/2003). In pediatric studies, these items are adapted to ask parents whether the choices made about their child’s treatment were right, wise, regretted, repeatable, or harmful to the child. This scale captures an important dimension of parental regret, but it does not directly ask whether parents worry that, in choosing for the child, they may have failed to understand or act according to the child’s interests.

This marks the transition from decisional regret to what I call moral-proxy regret: regret that, in acting for another, one may not have acted according to that person’s best interests. The relevant judgment is not merely “I should have chosen otherwise,” but “I may have failed to choose in accordance with my child’s good.”

I will compare moral-proxy regret identified in pediatric surrogate decision-making with two neighboring forms of regret. First, I argue that moral-proxy regret cannot be reduced to Williamsian agent-regret. In Williams’s central cases, the agent regrets that a bad outcome came about through their own agency, even without their fault. Moral-proxy regret has a different cognitive structure: it concerns whether one failed, in acting for another, to act according to that person’s best interests. Second, I argue that moral-proxy regret is structurally analogous to, but not reducible to, prudential regret, understood as regret over imprudent actions (Sussman 2018). Prudential regret can involve the thought, “I should have done otherwise because that would have better served my own good.” Moral-proxy regret has a parallel best-interest structure, but as I shall argue, a crucial cognitive element is the judgment that one may have failed to set aside one’s own interests in order to serve another’s good. For this reason, moral-proxy regret should be understood as a distinct form of moral regret. I conclude by suggesting that future empirical work should investigate this dimension directly.

References:
Andersen, S. K., Butler, R. A., Chang, C. C. H., Arnold, R., Angus, D. C., & White, D. B. (2023).
Prevalence of long-term decision regret and associated risk factors in a large cohort of ICU
surrogate decision makers. Critical Care, 27(1), 61.
Bittner, R. (1992). Is it reasonable to regret things one did?. The Journal of Philosophy, 89(5), 262-273.
Brehaut, J. C., O'Connor, A. M., Wood, T. J., Hack, T. F., Siminoff, L., Gordon, E., & Feldman-Stewart,
D. (2003). Validation of a decision regret scale. Medical decision making, 23(4), 281-292.
Mack, J. W., Cronin, A. M., & Kang, T. I. (2016). Decisional regret among parents of children with
cancer. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 34(33), 4023-4029.
Sisk, B. A., Kang, T. I., & Mack, J. W. (2020). The evolution of regret: decision-making for parents of
children with cancer. Supportive Care in Cancer, 28(3), 1215-1222.
Sussman, D. (2018). Is agent-regret rational?. Ethics, 128(4), 788-808.
Williams, B. (1981). Moral luck: philosophical papers 1973-1980. Cambridge University Press.

This paper justifies and characterizes the categorical distinction between relevant and irrelevant claims under the Relevance Constraint in limited aggregationism. I argue that Voorhoeve’s reductive justification is reasonable, but his characterization (commonly regarded as Global Relevance) requires revision as Local Relevance is more promising. Specifically, in rescue cases, aggregating weaker claims is permissible when relevant to stronger claims (e.g., 1 Death vs. 1,000 Blindness), but impermissible when irrelevant (e.g., 1 Death vs. 1 Billion Mild Headaches).
Voorhoeve’s rationale rests on sympathetic identification. Specifically, from individual P’s permissible personal perspective, she may be partial to her own interests to a morally permissible maximum, while considering others’ interests at least a morally permissible minimum. Accordingly, Voorhoeve holds that A’s claim is relevant to B’s competing claim if, in a one-to-one comparison from A’s permissible personal perspective, A’s claim is at least as important as B’s. From an agent’s third-person perspective, sympathetic identification means imaginatively adopting each person’s position and their permissible personal perspectives. If these perspectives reach unanimity, the two claims are irrelevant. For example, in Case I (1 Death vs. 1 Billion Mild Headache), both the mild-head person’s and the dying person’s perspectives prioritize addressing the death claim. In contrast, if no unanimity is reached, the competing claims are relevant to each other. For example, in Case II (1 Death vs. 1,000 Blindness), from the blind person’s perspective, her claim is at least as important as the death claim, while from the dying person’s perspective, her claim takes priority. Through sympathetic identification, the agent appreciate each person’s desire to press their claims, so both claims are relevant and must be considered.
Some objections target Voorhoeve’s reductive justification, especially the connection between personal prerogative and claim cancellation. However, it suffices to show the plausibility of a categorical distinction by presenting at least one coherent way to connect them. Other objections target Voorhoeve’s endorsement of reflective equilibrium in judging claim relevance, especially its violation of moral principles and compelling intuitions in three-option cases. However, on one hand, Voorhoeve’s rationale does not violate moral principles, as these principles apply to intrinsic-claim-strength views while he takes it as relational. On the other hand, Voorhoeve’s rationale is not counter-intuitive as deontological ethics has a similar reasoning structure in three-option cases.
Regarding characterization, under the comparative approach, Voorhoeve defends Global Relevance against Local Relevance. They differ in terms of which claim serves as the anchor for comparison. Global Relevance takes the strongest claim to be the anchor, but Local Relevance allows multiple anchors (if stronger claims are matched and balanced). I show that, contrary to what Local Relevance defenders say, it also violates moral principles and has no advantages over Global Relevance. Both have counter-intuitive implications, but Global Relevance has more moral costs. Specifically, Local Relevance allows a sore-throat claim to break the tie between two death claims, disrespecting the dying. Global Relevance allows double-counting one death claim, disrespecting the other group, and the latter is more obviously disrespectful.

Philosophy courses on critical thinking, and more tangibly, their textbooks, should incorporate practical instruction in psychologically realistic moral judgment, decision-making, and behavior (i.e., empirically informed “ethical critical thinking”). While such instruction has been increasingly included in business ethics courses taught within business schools, this type of applied moral psychology has not made the jump into college and university philosophy departments’ critical-thinking courses and textbooks. It should. Obstacles are identified, and solutions are offered.

For context, (textbooks for) philosophy courses on critical thinking increasingly include practical instruction on psychologically realistic (non-moral) judgment and decision-making, as informed by cognitive psychology. Specifically, they increasingly address cognitive heuristics and biases and teach cognitive debiasing techniques. This aligns with their practical learning objectives (e.g., online media literacy). However, when addressing ethics, such as in chapters on moral reasoning, they typically only address “ideal” methods of moral reasoning that do not take realistic models of moral psychology into account. For instance, they often only address moral belief-justification through formal argumentation and presume well-formulated, rational moral deliberation under academic-like conditions. In other words, what they teach is more applicable to equipping students to write better formal moral philosophy papers than to realizing moral improvement in real-life behavior. The presumption that such instruction would be sufficient is reminiscent of the ideal-rationality assumptions in neoclassical economics that were refuted by cognitive psychology. In this respect, the theoretical and practical outlook needed to reject presumptions of “ideal moral rationality” and to teach “non-ideal” methods for improving moral judgment, decision-making, and behavior is already (largely) validated by these textbooks’ inclusion of instruction on cognitive heuristics, biases, and debiasing. When addressing “ethical critical thinking,” these textbooks should follow their practical aims and, as with non-moral critical thinking, incorporate practical, psychologically realistic instruction that applies findings and models from psychology, in this case, empirical moral psychology, including both extant discoveries and new research in applied moral psychology.

Such instruction has increasingly been incorporated into business ethics pedagogy within business schools (often as behavioral ethics); however, it has not spread to university and college philosophy departments’ critical thinking courses (and textbooks). One likely factor is the pertinence of legal requirements and organizational codes of conduct to business ethics’ domain and pedagogical mission, which includes teaching business students to be more ethical in terms of compliance with those laws and codes. This provides a backstop against pushback grounded in moral disagreement or metaethical skepticism. In other words, business ethics instruction ultimately includes a form of “right answers” to ethical questions (e.g., by treating illegalities as “wrong” or “errors” without resolving normative or metaethical worries). This dynamic is absent from philosophy departments’ pedagogical mission, which does not include teaching students to comply with the law. Nonetheless, philosophy departments’ instruction in moral critical thinking can withstand pushback grounded in moral disagreement or metaethical skepticism by teaching “ethical critical thinking” skills that equip students to better comply with their own moral standards (e.g., in terms of the moral evaluations they endorse upon reflection).

References

Baronett, S. (2019). Logic: An emphasis on critical thinking and informal logic (4th ed.). Oxford University Press.

Biasucci, C., & Prentice, R. (2021). Behavioral ethics in practice: Why we sometimes make the wrong decisions. Routledge.

Boss, J. A. (2021). Think: Critical thinking and logic skills for everyday life (5th ed.). McGraw-Hill.

Bourget, D., & Chalmers, D. J. (2023). Philosophers on philosophy: The 2020 PhilPapers survey. Philosophers' Imprint, 23(11), 1–53.

(Please see attached for continued list of references.)

A core legal principle in the United States is the expectation that jurors presume those charged with a criminal offense are innocent until proven guilty. The law, therefore, assumes people are generally capable of adopting beliefs, on the basis of brief instructions, that might conflict with their prior beliefs about offender populations. However, whether jurors actually override their personal assumptions upon being instructed to presume innocence remains unknown. This project factorially tested the effects of presumption of innocence instructions (present vs. absent) and the presentation of the statistical probability of guilt for each offender (high, medium, or unspecified) on offender guilt judgments in a sample of potential jurors. In a survey experiment (N = 321 undergraduates), we predicted and found that presumption of innocence instructions had no overall effect on guilt rates for violent or nonviolent offenders. Participants informed that the offense has a high base rate of factual guilt assigned guilt more frequently than those presented with a medium or unspecified base rate. These results suggest that prior statistical information about offender guilt likelihood influences conviction rates (upward in this case), and that such influences are undeterred by instructions to presume innocence. Potential limits on these findings come from exploratory analyses examining binary conviction rates as a function of continuous guilt likelihood ratings. Among participants who rated the likelihood of guilt to be 50%, those given the presumption of innocence instructions (M = 35%) were less likely than those who did not receive presumption instructions (M = 58%) to issue guilty verdicts (p = .008) for the violent crime, while the nonviolent crime showed no such difference. This finding suggests that, for the most ambiguous cases, presumption of innocence instructions might limit the influence of prior beliefs of violent offenders, but the mechanism of its effect is uncertain. Further, this finding should be interpreted with caution because of the limited number of people that indicated 50% likelihood of guilt for the violent crime. To extend this research, the study will be replicated with low base rate information and additional crime vignettes in a nationally representative sample.

Do different reasoning styles tend to different ethical conclusions or are reasoning styles morality-agnostic, allowing competing moral values to lead to similar logical conclusions? Many scholars have examined this question using sacrificial moral dilemmas—hypothetical situations in which a moral actor can directly cause some harm in order to prevent much greater harm a la consequentialist ethical frameworks.

Moral psychological theories make competing predictions about how individual differences in reasoning style — such as intuitive or reflective thinking (Byrd, 2025) — are related to sacrificial dilemma responses. Consider just a few examples. Dual process theories (e.g., Greene, 2007) expect reflective thinking to overcome imperatives about harm prevention to make sacrificial harm seem more acceptable (even if harm-avoidance is also desirable). The idea is that just as reflective reasoning involves stepping back to consider one’s initial impulse (Byrd, 2021), reflective judgments about moral dilemmas involve putting our prepotent discomfort with causing harm to one side while we consider the possibility of overriding consequences. Conflict models similarly expect protected values such as harm-avoidance to be fast and thereby preferred during unreflective (or pre-reflective) thinking (Baron et al., 2015a). The moral myopia model (Landy & Royzman, 2018) argues instead that reflective thinking does not preferentially support outcome-maximizing concerns per se. Rather, the idea behind moral myopia is that reflective thinking draws attention to multiple normative considerations — e.g., both outcome-maximizing and harm-avoidance.

Alas, standard moral dilemmas make it impossible to dissociate outcome- and harm-based response patterns because standard dilemmas make them mutually exclusive (see Conway & Gawronski, 2013a; Reynolds & Conway, 2018). Therefore, many scholars have found a need to employ additional dilemmas where the harm-avoiding and outcome-maximizing choice are “congruent” — i.e., dilemmas in which the decision to cause harm would not prevent greater harm (Conway & Gawronski, 2013a). This creates the possibility of a third response pattern of harm-maximization (Conway et al., 2018a) and, thereby, allows harm-avoidant and outcome-maximizing patterns to become statistically independent. There are now a family of cognitive models that capitalize on the use of both congruent and incongruent items (a la “process dissociation” from Jacoby, 1991a), such as the Consequences, Norms, and Inaction model (Gawronski et al., 2017a).

To arbitrate between competing theories of reasoning styles in moral psychology, we ran a meta-analysis. Does reflection predict both outcome- and harm-based responding as some models predict? And to similar degrees as one model predicts? To answer these questions, we solicited published and not-yet-published process dissociation papers that employed a behavioral test of reasoning style (such as a Cognitive Reflection Test or CRT) or a self-report reasoning scale (such as Need For Cognition or NFC). Previously, reflection’s relationship to dilemma responses have depended on religiosity (McPhetres et al., 2018) and gender (e.g., Friesdorf et al., 2015; McPhetres et al., 2018). So we also ran integrative data analyses to detect how meta-analytic effects may depend on individual differences between participants or on measurement error (e.g., Pennycook et al., 2017).

Across thousands of participants from dozens of studies, reflection test performance was more predictive of (increased) outcome-maximizing than (increased) harm-avoidance, consistent with dual-process theories (e.g., Paxton & Greene, 2010; Paxton et al., 2012). However, better reflection test scores also predicted (increased) harm-avoidance, consistent with the moral myopia model. These two relationships partially cancelled each other, which may help explain why null effects are sometimes observed on conventional relative dilemma judgments (Baron et al., 2015a; Reynolds & Conway, 2018). These results may be more compatible with “softer” dual process theories of moral judgment which acknowledge that reflective thinking is compatible with considering “moral maxims” to do no harm (Byrd & Conway, 2019). Although the results may seem less compatible with other models, they help motivate such alternatives to strict dual process theories (which maintain that reflective thinking promotes only consequentialist considerations or that unreflective thinking yields to protected values such as harm avoidance).

Both gender and religiosity moderated meta-analytic effects. Reflection test performance predicted harm-avoidance only among men, rather than among women (as predicted). And religiosity moderated the relationship between performance-based — but not self-reported — reflection and harm-avoidance. In fact, all observed effects were stronger for assessed than self-reported reflective reasoning.

Secret-keeping is often framed as a self-serving act indicative of poor personal character, driven by simple cost-benefit calculations of personal interests. However, this view overlooks the role of moral reasoning in secrecy: People may choose to keep secrets out of concern for others’ welfare and privacy besides personal reasons such as reputation concerns. Across two studies, we explored people’s reasons for keeping and disclosing secrets from real experiences to understand the role of moral reasoning in everyday secrecy.

In Study 1, we surveyed 192 adults (M = 20.57, range: 18-37, 78% female, 44% Asian, 24% Latinx) about their experiences keeping secrets from different people. Participants selected reasons that informed their real secrecy decisions from a list derived from pilot testing. Among all secrets, 45% involved at least one moral reason to keep or disclose. The most common moral reasons were people’s values around honesty and concern for others’ privacy. Common nonmoral reasons included relationship and reputation impacts. In 38% of secrets, people cited both moral and nonmoral reasons to keep and disclose, illustrating the complex balancing between various reasons involved in secrecy decisions.

Study 1 provided initial insights into the role of moral reasoning in people’s secrecy decision-making. Building on these findings, Study 2 employed semi-structured interviews to capture a broader range of possible reasons involved in secrecy and explore how they inform people’s decisions in greater detail. We also extended the investigation cross-culturally to examine the scope of these patterns of reasoning within and beyond the United States.

In Study 2, participants from the United States (n = 38, M = 21.11, range: 18-29, 76% female) and China (n = 41, M = 23.24, range: 18-30, 63% female) were interviewed about their experiences with one currently kept secret and one disclosed secret. Consistent with Study 1, participants cited both moral and nonmoral reasons when making decisions to keep or disclose. Common moral considerations included respecting others’ privacy, preserving others’ welfare, and following values such as honesty. Common nonmoral reasons included reputation concerns and avoiding punishment. Notably, these reasons sometimes conflicted with each other. One participant initially chose to keep a friend’s secret of heavy drug use out of respect for their rights, before ultimately deciding to disclose: “I was keeping this secret because I felt it wasn't my place to express it. Then I realized, no, this is my friend. There needs to be something done.” Regarding cross-cultural observations, concerns about others' welfare often informed decisions to keep and reveal in both countries, consistent with the prevalence of moral concern observed in Study 1. For the overall pattern of reasoning, honesty values and the perceived absence of negative consequences were strong predictors of disclosure, while respect for others’ privacy and reputation concerns were associated with maintaining secrecy.

Our studies suggest that moral considerations play a crucial role in people’s reasoning and decisions about secrecy. Given that secrecy decisions often require balancing moral and nonmoral reasons, secrecy-keeping experiences provide fruitful ground for understanding how moral reasoning guides people’s actions in everyday life.

Morality is among the most important qualities that people consider when forming their overall impressions of others (Goodwin et al., 2014; Hartley et al., 2016) and when selecting whom they would like to have as friends and romantic partners (Regan et al., 2000). People infer that a more moral partner will have better intentions toward them, leading to better outcomes (Landy et al., 2016). The purpose of this study is to assess the actual impact of peoples’ moral character on their close others.

Mirroring laypeoples’ expectation that more moral people make better cooperative partners, people may experience better friendships when their friends are more moral (i.e., more compassionate, more dependable, etc.). Indeed, people who are more compassionate, honest, and considerate may be better sources of help, trust, and social support, all of which are key elements of high quality friendships (Davis & Todd, 1982; Demir & Weitekamp, 2007; Zimet et al., 1988).

Alternatively, people experience may better friendships to the extent that their own morality and their friends’ morality is more similar. Such a similarity effect could emerge for a number of reasons. Being less moral than one’s friends could lead to feelings of inferiority or judgment (Fleischmann et al., 2021) and do-gooder derogation (Minson & Monin, 2012). Or being more moral than one’s friends could lead to worse well-being through being exploited, disappointed, or otherwise negatively affected by those friends’ moral shortcomings.

145 four-person friend groups (N = 577; MAge = 29, range = 18–76 years. 68% women, 25% men) participated in a round-robin study in which each person answered questions about themselves and each of three friends. Participants reported on their relationship satisfaction with each of their friends and each of their friends’ moral character (a general measure of moral reputation, plus 7 specific moral virtues; e.g., compassion, honesty, dependability). Using this round-robin design, we take a novel approach to obtain a measure of moral character that is neither confounded with a target’s self-serving biases (as with self-reports) nor with friends’ relationship satisfaction with the target (as with intradyadic informant-reports). Specifically, both members of each dyad receive moral character ratings from two third-party informants: their mutual friends.

To test whether people are more satisfied with more moral friends, we ran linear regressions with cluster robust standard errors predicting individuals’ friendship satisfaction from their friend’s extradyadic, “third party” moral reputation (e.g., A’s satisfaction with B is predicted from C and D’s assessment of B’s moral character). To test whether people are more satisfied with morally similar friends, we used response surface analysis predicting intradyadic friendship satisfaction from both individuals’ extradyadic, “third party” moral reputation. Results showed that people experience better friendship satisfaction with friends who have a greater reputation for general moral character, dependability, respectfulness, patience, and fairness. We found no evidence that friendship satisfaction is associated with friends’ reputation for compassion, honesty, or loyalty. Finally, we found no evidence for similarity effects of moral character on friendship satisfaction.

The view that one can feel the emotion of guilt without construing oneself to be at fault (or to have manifested poor quality of will) has received support in recent years. On the view of guilt that has emerged—'the harm view’, as I’ll call it— the fact that one has caused another non-trivial harm can, in certain circumstances, suffice to render fitting feelings of guilt, and accordingly, to provide one with reasons to engage in the kind of reparative activity guilt characteristically motivates. Harm views of guilt thus dissociate guilt-worthiness from blameworthiness; when faultless, the harm-causing agent is non-blameworthy for the harm caused.

Although guilt and gratitude are both ways of taking seriously the costs another bears because of or for one, the idea that gratitude—of the sort that is essentially agent-directed, i.e. gratitude to another for something— can be fitting without good will (or ‘credit’) has not received comparable discussion. The received view is that gratitude is essentially responsive to perceived manifestations of good quality of will (or benevolence), and in that sense, construes the benefactor as ‘to credit’. In this paper, taking a cue from the harm view of guilt, I argue that gratitude can sometimes be fitting in response to agents who benefit us in the absence good will, when their so benefitting us comes at a non-trivial cost to them. These are cases in which the benefactor is gratitude-worthy but not praiseworthy. My argument is conditional in form: if we accept the harm view of guilt, then we should accept ‘no-credit gratitude’ too. While the harm view of guilt is, admittedly, not the standard view of guilt, it enjoys some support, far greater support than the benefit view of gratitude.

On the view of gratitude and guilt that emerges, debt repayment and interests are central to each attitude. In guilt, one is motivated to repay a debt incurred in inflicting a non-trivial cost upon another, in harming them. In gratitude, one is motivated to repay a debt one incurred by being benefitted at some cost to one’s benefactor. The debt repayment model helps explain a curious and overlooked datum: guilt and gratitude are often co-present, i.e. persons regularly report feeling both guilt and gratitude in response to (different aspects of) the same situation. (It is not unusual for “sorry” and “thanks” to be uttered in the same breath.) Importantly, on the debt repayment conception of guilt and gratitude, quality of will is not insignificant. Focusing on gratitude, when one is benefitted from good will, one is the recipient of a special kind of benefit—a moral benefit—and, depending on the details, one’s benefactor may be the fitting target not only of gratitude but also of moral praise.

I proceed as follows. In section 1 I provide a brief overview of the received view of gratitude. Section 2 reviews the harm view of guilt. In section 3, I introduce the benefit view of gratitude and defend the proposal from a pair of objections. Section 4 reflects on the common core of guilt and gratitude. In concluding (section 5), I discuss the import of my central case for those who maintain that agent-regret (and not guilt) is the fitting response to faultless harms one causes.

POST Submission

1Minwoo Lee, PhD, and 2James K. Rilling, PhD
1Department of Psychology, Georgetown University, 2Department of Psychology, Emory University
People constantly gauge whether others approve of their moral choices, yet the cues that carry this
normative information are often subtle and fleeting. Individuals less attuned to these cues may experience
greater uncertainty about where they stand relative to others, which can shape how they respond when
social misalignment becomes explicit. Here, we investigated whether individual differences in the ability to
detect subtle facial expressions of evaluative emotion (i.e., micro-expressions) are linked to behavioral
and neural responses to explicit majority feedback. A total of 49 healthy young adults (age 21 ± 4.2; 29
female) completed a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tasks. Inside the scanner,
participants first watched short videos of dynamic micro-expressions of anger, disgust, happiness, and
neutral faces, and identified the emotion. They subsequently completed a novel social conformity task in
which they indicated the relative importance of pairs of moral values and virtues widely recognized in the
United States. Then, they learned about the majority’s opinion that either matched or differed from their
own ratings. Participants re-rated the same value pairs outside the scanner. We tested whether individual
differences in emotion-perception accuracy predicted changes in value ratings between sessions and the
neural responses to the type of majority feedback received. Participants who were less accurate at
identifying micro-expressions conformed more frequently (%Conformity, r = −.427, p = .004) and more
strongly (rating change, r = −.462, p = .002) to majority feedback that deviated from their own ratings,
controlling for relevant demographic and personality factors. Perceived social misalignment, relative to
agreement, was associated with activation in the posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) and nucleus
accumbens, regions implicated in conflict and salience processing (small-volume corrected p < .05). An
exploratory mediation analysis (bias-corrected bootstrap, 10,000 iterations) supported an indirect path in
which lower perceptual sensitivity to facial micro-expressions predicted greater behavioral conformity via
a dampened pMFC response to social misalignment (a×b = −.173; 95% CI [−.356, −.026]). These findings
suggest that people with reduced perceptual sensitivity to evaluative social cues may be more likely to
follow others when social misalignment becomes salient, pointing to a perceptual-affective basis for
susceptibility to moral conformity.

In this paper, I challenge a prominent argument against the possibility of social norms in non-human primates: namely, that because non-human primates appear not to engage in third-party punishment, they cannot be normative creatures. By a “normative creature,” I do not mean one that possesses the concept of normativity, self-reflects on the norms it has internalized, or distinguishes moral from merely conventional norms. I mean a creature that internalizes the behavioral regularities of those around it as standards that guide its own behavior and structure its responses to the behavior of others. This notion is minimal, but not deflationary: I am concerned with norm psychology, not merely with normative regularities.
The paper begins by distinguishing traditions, culture, and social norms. A tradition is a socially transmitted behavioral regularity that varies between groups in a single species; a culture is a broader profile of such traditions that cuts across multiple domains of behavior, the locally patterned “way we do things” in a given community. Social norms, however, are not identical to either traditions or culture. A social norm is a culturally embedded regularity that has been internalized as a standard and sustained through social maintenance. The primate culture literature therefore does not by itself establish primate normativity. Rather, it identifies the local behavioral regularities that could become the objects of norm psychology and social maintenance.
I argue that the appeal to third-party punishment sets the bar too high. Social maintenance is an umbrella category, of which third-party punishment is only one instance. It names the social processes by which a cultural regularity is stabilized within a community, not one particular mechanism by which this stabilization occurs. Non-human primates may lack the kind of costly, disinterested third-party punishment elicited in human economic games, but this does not show that they lack all mechanisms for maintaining local standards of behavior. Instead, primate social life contains many possible forms of maintenance, including second-party punishment, withdrawal, partner choice, reconciliation, policing, conflict intervention, tolerance, grooming, affiliation, and dominance navigation.
The central aim of the paper is therefore not to prove that non-human primates possess social norms. It is to show that the argument from the absence of third-party punishment fails. Once social norms are understood as culturally embedded regularities sustained through social maintenance, the relevant question is not whether primates punish as uninvolved third parties, but whether candidate regularities are internalized as standards and maintained through some socially stabilizing mechanism. I conclude by drawing a parity argument with small-scale human societies, where social norms are often maintained without robust third-party punishment. If third-party punishment is not required for human norm maintenance, it should not be treated as the decisive test for primate normativity.

Considered under either a talk in a symposium or a poster.

In What Sense Do Large Language Models Pursue (Moral) Goals?
Brief Description
I bring together two disconnected literatures on ‘goal,’ develop a taxonomy of diff erent senses of pursuing a goal, examine (moral) goals in LLMs, and discuss implications for AI moral agency. I argue that through training, LLMs come to pursue what I call learning-guiding goals (e.g., loss, rewards), which guide them to learn how to adjust their parameters; however, training leaves it open whether LLMs pursue what I call action-guiding goals (e.g., desire, intention), which would guide their online computation of what outputs to generate.
Extended Abstract
Do large language models (LLMs) have genuine moral agency—the capacity to act morally not by performing coincidentally moral actions, but by pursuing the right moral goal? LLMs are said to become pursuing goals through training, especially the goal of generating value-aligned outputs, where alignment involves morally signifi cant criteria (e.g., harmlessness). However, this is not yet evidence for genuine moral agency because these goal attributions are mostly loose talks.
What, then, does it mean for LLMs to come to pursue (moral) goals through training, and do they? Some recent works have discussed several related issues, but this paper delivers the fi rst systematic treatment of LLM goals and makes three major contributions.
First, I survey the various ways ‘goal’ is theorized and used in modern analytic philosophy, and bring together two relevant but disconnected literature: one on goal-directedness in the philosophy of science, the other on non-cognitive mental states in the philosophy of mind.
Second, I develop a framework drawing on the fragmented yet useful literature. I fi rst propose to bracket the question of whether LLMs (and any system) pursue any goal simpliciter, but to focus on in what sense they pursue any goal. This is because no consensus has emerged on the nature of goal pursuit due to various problems of extensional adequacy, while some views do characterize conditions that have been taken as suffi cient for goal pursuit.
Drawing on those useful views, I then propose a taxonomy of diff erent senses of goal pursuit and defend it on the grounds of theoretical fruitfulness. I distinguish between action-guiding goals and selection-guiding goals, and under the latter, further between evolution-guiding goals and learning-guiding goals. A goal is pursued in the action-guiding sense, as with desire and intention, when it plays the functional role of non-cognitive states which, together with cognitive states like beliefs, guide the system’s computation of what action to perform. By contrast, a goal is pursued in the selection-guiding sense, as with learning signal (e.g., reward) and evolutionary end, when it features in the determination of what trait to selectively retain in the system. Furthermore, a selection-guiding goal can be pursued in a reproduction-guiding sense when the selective retention operates through natural selection, or can be pursued in a learning-guiding sense when through neural selection.
Third, I examine LLM goals against the proposed taxonomy. I fi rst argue that LLMs come to pursue selection-guiding goals through training, in particular, learning-guiding goals. For example, through reinforcement learning from human feedback, an LLM comes to pursue the goal of maximizing rewards defi ned on human values, which guides the model to learn how to adjust its parameters. I then argue that training leaves it open whether LLMs come to pursue any action-guiding goals such as desire and intention, because training is silent on the internal mechanisms of LLMs.
With this assessment, I end by discussing its implications for AI moral agency, AI welfare, and AI safety.

Punishment is an important mechanism by which modern communities and institutions enforce norms. Researchers in moral psychology have studied conditions that determine punishment severity, but few have looked at conditions that make punishments fair (Tyler, 1988). We know that people prefer punishment that is proportional to the seriousness of the transgression (principle of proportionality), but few other factors have been investigated. Here, we examine whether reintegration—the transgressor’s prospects of returning to their community after receiving the punishment—infl uences punishment fairness judgments. Reintegration plays a signifi cant role in some religious communities (Medalla, 2020; Jehovah’s Witnesses, 2024; Wesner, 2024), but there is no empirical evidence on its broader relevance. In two studies, we investigated whether the prospect of reintegration infl uences people’s judgments of how fair both proportional and disproportional punishments are. We operationalized proportional punishment as a major violation punished severely or a minor violation punished mildly, and disproportional punishment as a minor violation punished severely (overpunishment) or a major violation punished mildly (underpunishment).
In Study 1, 361 Prolifi c participants imagined themselves as transgressors in four small-scale communities. In each scenario, they committed a minor or major transgression (between subjects), received a mild or severe punishment, and faced certain or uncertain reintegration into the community (both within subjects). After reading each scenario, participants evaluated the punishment they received (“How fair do you think the punishment is?” 0-100 slider scale). People experienced proportional punishment as fairer than disproportional punishment (η²p = .14). In addition, they experienced punishment as fairer when reintegration was certain
rather than uncertain, but only for proportional punishment (η²p = .07). Regardless of the likelihood of reintegration, participants showed a strong aversion to overpunishment (M = 19) and rated underpunishment as fairest (M = 83), suggesting a self-serving bias. However, participants may have interpreted “fair” punishment as lenient. Thus, we sought to replicate the initial results from both fi rst- and third-person perspectives and improve the punishment fairness measure.
In Study 2, 744 Prolifi c participants answered a rephrased dependent variable—“How just do you think…?”— measured on a 100-point bipolar scale (anchored by far too mild and far too severe). This change made the proportionality test more of a manipulation check but off ered a refi ned assessment of reintegration eff ects. Perspective produced no relevant interaction eff ects, so self-servingness disappeared on the new dependent measure. As expected, participants saw proportional punishments as just (near scale midpoint), but 6 points too severe when reintegration was uncertain (η²p = .03). Among disproportional cases, people found overpunishment highly unjust (34 points too severe) and marginally more unjust when reintegration was uncertain (η²p = .007, p = .10); likewise, they found underpunishment highly unjust (24 points too mild) but even more unjust when reintegration was certain (η²p = .01). Thus, people treat guaranteed reintegration as a small corrective for punishment that is proportional or overly severe; when punishment is disproportionally lenient, certain reintegration is rejected as an unjust benefi t. In upcoming studies, we directly measure support for reintegration as a function of punishment severity.
References:
Jehovah's Witnesses. (2024). Watchtower (study). JW.org.
Medalla, S. (2020). The body in law in early New England, 1630–1675 (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara).
Tyler, T. R. (1988). What is procedural justice?: Criteria used by citizens to assess the fairness of legal procedures. Law & Society Review, 22(1), 103–135.
Wesner (2024). Shunning: Why do the Amish do it? Amish America.

In experimental metaethics, the two primary methods for determining whether nonphilosophers are moral realists or antirealists are the disagreement paradigm and conventional scales that elicit level of agreement with metaethical statements. I argue that both approaches have methodological shortcomings that threaten their validity, and that similar difficulties extend to all existing paradigms in experimental metaethics. I present theoretical and empirical support for this thesis and discuss how researchers might overcome these challenges.
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The Past and Future of Experimental Metaethics
Over the past two decades, researchers have devised a handful of methods to assess whether nonphilosophers (people without significant training in philosophy) are moral realists or antirealists. Moral realists hold that moral truth is stance-independent, meaning that it does not depend on the attitudes or values of people or cultures, while moral antirealists deny that there are stance-independent moral truths. While the results of these studies have been informative, I argue that the primary methods for assessing whether
nonphilosophers are moral realists or antirealists rely on invalid measures, and that understanding why validity has proven elusive yields insights that can improve stimuli design and reorient researchers towards more productive lines of inquiry.
The two most prominent methods used in this research are the disagreement paradigm (e.g., Goodwin & Darley, 2008; Wright et al., 2013) and the use of Likert scales that assess level of agreement with various metaethical statements (e.g., Collier-Spruel et al., 2019; Yilmaz & Bahçekapili, 2015; Zijlstra, 2019). However, both methods suffer from substantial methodological shortcomings. While some of these shortcomings are correctable, e.g., misleading instructions or the absence of adequate response options (Pölzler, 2018), it is not easy to circumvent others. This appears to be the result of ineliminable confounds, ambiguity, and underspecificity associated with ordinary language, which make it difficult to isolate the appropriate metaethical considerations using non-technical language. As a result, empirical evidence suggests that most participants do not interpret the disagreement paradigm or existing metaethics scales as researchers intend (Bush & Moss, 2020). Even extensive efforts to train participants to interpret stimuli as intended have yet to succeed (e.g., Pölzler & Wright, 2020), since the degree of training required to ensure adequate interpretation is so extensive participants would no longer reflect the population of untrained laypeople they were intended to represent (Bush, 2026).
This diagnosis may appear pessimistic. Yet far from proposing that we give up, I argue that we can instead glean valuable insights from the failure of traditional survey methods to elicit philosophical views from untrained participants. One of the main reasons existing methods have fallen short is an overreliance on top-down methods that assume the way nonphilosophers think comports with traditionally philosophical categories. In other words, moral psychologists have operated under the assumption that we can readily operationalize the positions that divide philosophers as psychological constructs that capture the way nonphilosophers think. I argue that this is a mistake. Drawing on insights from Rozin (2001), I argue that employing top-down methods in experimental metaethics was premature, and that researchers should reorient the field around more bottom-up research designs that emphasize observational, descriptive, and qualitative methods. By doing so, we can reveal how people think about the nature of morality without distorting results with our theoretical preconceptions. If so, this has broader implications for psychological research, since other research programs may suffer similar difficulties.

Morally bad persons may be more interesting (Wylie & Gantman, 2023), but how does known bad character inform attribution of out-of-character prosocial action? Evaluation of moral ambiguity may depend upon whether the bad person is imaginary or real. We examined whether bad character affects evaluations of morally ambiguous prosocial actions (Hester et al., 2020; Yucel et al., 205). Research indicates that, absent information otherwise, people assume good behavior is intrinsically motivated, i.e., done because right. We investigated whether moral evaluations of prosocial actions done by bad persons with no motive specified were lower than intrinsically motivated behavior (suggesting no moral benefit of the doubt), and whether similar results obtained for both imagined and real targets.
Study 1 participants (N = 1212) rated a target of bad (versus average) character, who does a good action from intrinsic, extrinsic, or unspecified motive. For target ratings, a repeated measures GLM, treating moral character and motivation as between person factors and time as a within person factor, revealed significant CharacterTime [F (1, 1200) = 666.86, p < .001, d = 1.49] and MotiveTime [F (2, 1200) = 13.93, p < .001, d = 0.31] interactions. Examination of means revealed that one good action dramatically increased moral ratings, bringing the target with bad character to similar moral rating as the target with average character prior to the action description. Further, participants rated intrinsically and unspecified motive targets similarly, regardless of character. Even bad targets were viewed as doing the right thing for the right reason.
However, targets in Study 1 were imaginary people, perhaps removing the stakes in everyday moral cognition. To examine this, Study 2 described prosocial action done from either intrinsic, extrinsic, or unspecified motive, and asked participants (N = 1221) to judge an imaginary target and a real morally bad person from their lives, using the same procedure as Study 1 for each. Results for the imaginary target replicated Study 1. However, the action, when done by the real (bad) person was afforded significantly less moral credit, M(SD) = 53.86(29.22), than the action done be the imaginary target, M(SD) = 70.33(22.28), t(613) = 15.02, p < .001, d = 0.61. Likewise, although the real (bad) target was initially rated higher than the imaginary (bad) target, after performance of prosocial action from the same motivation, the imaginary target received a greater boost in moral ratings than the real target. Moreover, results in the "motive unspecified" condition suggest the imaginary target received the benefit of the doubt while the real person did not.
Two additional studies are underway. In Study 3 (projected N = 1200), rather than describe target character, we asked participants to identify an imaginary or real person who is "good", "not good", or "bad". Using the Study 2 procedure, we test for differences in evaluations of not good versus bad targets. In Study 4 (projected N = 1200), the imaginary or real person who is "good", "not good", or "bad" performing a prosocial action, fails to do a morally good action.
References:
Hester, N., Payne, B. K., & Gray, K. (2020). Promiscuous condemnation: People assume
ambiguous actions are immoral. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 86, 103910.
Wylie, J., & Gantman, A. (2023). People are curious about immoral and morally ambiguous
others. Scientific reports, 13(1), 7355.
Yucel, M., Stern, J. A., Eisen, S. L., Lillard, A. S., & Vaish, A. (2025). Heroes, villains, and
everything in between: Children’s assessment of morally ambiguous characters. Journal
of Experimental Child Psychology, 256, 106251.

We argue that increased moral diversity may lead to greater tolerance for deviant behaviors and a lower propensity to enforce norms. In Studies 1 to 2 (two large-scale datasets) and in Studies 3 to 7 (pre-registered controlled experiments; N = 1,058), we showe that people in more (versus less) morally diverse communities believe that the community’s norms are looser. In turn, norm violations are more accepted, and there is a reduced willingness to police transgressions.

Moral psychology has produced powerful accounts of moral judgment, but many existing approaches remain limited by theoretical siloing and reliance on direct self-report. Cultural-developmental approaches to autonomy and community (Jensen, 2008; Shweder et al., 1997), philosophical and dual-process models of utilitarian and deontological judgment (Cameron et al., 2017; Greene et al., 2001), evolutionary accounts of harm and moral emotion (Cloninger, 1993; Darwin, 1872), and work on spirituality and transcendence (Hardy et al., 2014; Williams et al., 2024) each capture important dimensions of moral life. However, these perspectives are often studied separately, while real-world moral decisions frequently require people to navigate overlapping cultural, conceptual, survival, and spiritual concerns. Existing self-report measures also tend to ask participants to endorse abstract values directly, increasing construct transparency and potentially missing how moral values operate in context. The present project introduces Moral Compass, a gamified moral decision-making measure designed to assess how people reason through realistic moral dilemmas across four interdisciplinary domains: cultural morality, conceptual moral reasoning, survival-oriented moral concern, and spiritual moral meaning.

Moral Compass is grounded in a multidisciplinary model of moral judgment that draws from anthropology, philosophy, biology, and spirituality. The measure assesses trade-offs between autonomous and communal values, utilitarian and deontological reasoning, harm-sensitive and harm-tolerant responses, and transcendent and instrumental moral orientations. Rather than asking participants to directly endorse abstract values, Moral Compass embeds these values within everyday dilemmas and records behavioral choices. This design aims to reduce construct transparency while improving ecological validity and participant engagement.

The current validation process includes four studies. In Study 1, participants generated real-world moral dilemmas from their own lives (N = 56), allowing item development to begin from ecologically grounded moral conflicts rather than researcher-generated abstractions. In Study 2, a separate sample ranked candidate dilemmas by relevance and relatability (N = 149), identifying the strongest scenarios for inclusion in the measure. In Study 3, participants rated the extent to which each decision option reflected the intended moral values (N = 110), providing weighted valence estimates for each item. These ratings are being used to construct a scoring model in which moral decisions are weighted by perceived value alignment, participant confidence, and norm-based multipliers. The Moral Compass game implements these calibrated dilemmas in a behavioral task where participants make forced-choice moral decisions that culminate in their personalized moral compass profile.

This project contributes to moral psychology in three important ways. First, it offers a new interdisciplinary measurement framework for studying moral pluralism across cultural, philosophical, biological, and spiritual domains. Second, it advances a more ecologically grounded approach to moral measurement by using realistic dilemmas and behavioral responses rather than only direct self-report. Third, it creates a tool with applied potential for moral, character, and civic education, where participants can reflect on their own moral patterns while encountering the coherence of moral perspectives different from their own.

The current paper presents a neo-Aristotelian model of moral development during emerging adulthood. The paper reinterprets Aristotle’s typology of character as a normative developmental sequence, casting the achievement of enkrateia as the primary moral-developmental task of emerging adulthood. Following Aristotle, enkrateia is defined as the strength to overcome internal impediments to the enactment of forechoice (prohairesis), which the paper, in turn, defines as the desire to be a person of good character, transformed by deliberation into actionable moral commitments. The absence of enkrateia (akrasia) is thereby defined as the inability to overcome such internal impediments (e.g., competing desires, feelings, and impulses). The theory assumes that by the onset of emerging adulthood, the capacity for forechoice is already present in most typically developing individuals, and further posits that given adequate support, typically developing emerging adults will advance from a condition of relative akrasia to one of relative enkrateia. Although versions of this model appear in the author’s dissertation and upcoming publications, it nevertheless constitutes a novel contribution to the field of moral development.
Moreover, the paper offers a further refinement that constitutes a novel contribution in its own right, arguing that information-theoretic concepts can illuminate the neo-Aristotelian framework. Competing desires, feelings, and impulses function as affective or desiderative noise interfering with the translation of moral commitments (the signal) into action. Although both enkratic and akratic agents receive the prohairetic signal, they are distinguished by their differential vulnerability to noise. In the fully virtuous agent, by contrast, noise has been eliminated, though the paper regards aretē as a moral-developmental task of adulthood. Finally, the paper upholds the Aristotelian thesis that as interference from internal impediments to the enactment of forechoice decreases, the agent’s eudaimonia (flourishing) will increase. These are empirically defeasible claims that were tested in a sample of 410 emerging adult men (18-29).
To assess this framework empirically, I employed structural equation modeling, using Aquino and Reed’s (2002) Moral Identity Scale (MIS) to operationalize prohairesis, and administered both the original MIS and a modified version that replaced the nine original stimulus traits with nine alternative traits based on the canonical Aristotelian virtues. I used both versions of the MIS and Tangney et al.’s (2004) Brief Self-Control Scale (BSCS) to jointly operationalize enkratic character as a second-order latent variable, also referred to as the η-factor. I then used Waterman et al.’s (2010) Questionnaire for Eudaimonic Well-Being (QEWB) to operationalize the structural model’s outcome variable (eudaimonia). As a preliminary analysis, however, a cluster-analytic character-type solution yielded a four-group taxonomy that mapped coherently onto Aristotelian character-types (Integrated, Akratic, Regulated, and Disorganized), with character-type accounting for a substantial proportion of the variance in eudaimonic well-being (η² = .435). Moreover, SEM confirmed that enkratic character strongly predicted eudaimonic well-being across three model variants. Contrary to the normative model’s predictions, however, chronological age did not predict an increase in enkratic character, suggesting the model’s caveat “given adequate support” requires further investigation. It is also worth noting that the modified MIS outperformed the original across every analytical approach.

How do we come to love someone? I call reasons we possess for coming to love someone “reasons for initiating love.” This paper proposes a novel account of reasons for initiating love, called “cognitivism about initiating love.” I argue that we represent the would-be beloved as both an irreplaceable individual and a bearer of properties, and that our decision to love someone can be appropriately understood as a kind of torn decision.

When evaluating a social dilemma, multiple considerations may arise that can shape one’s moral judgment of the situation. Social Domain Theory (SDT; e.g., Smetana, 1983) posit that these considerations are characterized by three conceptually distinct systems of social knowledge, or domains, which are the moral, social-conventional, and personal. Situations that elicit multiple, competing concerns from these domains are “multifaceted”, and how an individual negotiates these concerns in their judgments is “domain coordination”. Formally specifying and testing models which reflect these unobserved systems of social knowledge and judgment processes can facilitate studying both within any given situation responding to numerous multifaceted scenarios and comparison of typical judgment patterns between situations.
This research will develop and validate a measurement tool of emerging adults’ moral judgment that is informed by SDT. A bank of 150 one-sentence written scenarios, or vignettes, was developed and tested across two studies. Vignettes depict a named character carrying out the main action to be evaluated, alongside the environmental or interpersonal context, and any present or mitigating circumstances. Vignette topics were designed with common spaces and scenarios that emerging adults may encounter. There were five theorized types of vignettes: Single-domain ones consisting of strictly moral, personal, or social scenarios; and the mixed domain ones consisting of moral-personal or moral-social scenarios.
In Study 1, university students aged 18-25 (N=400) completed an online survey evaluating 45 out of 150 vignettes. The vignettes shown to participants followed an anchor sampling approach, where a set of 10 vignettes was presented to all participants with twenty items, ten which consisted of moral and nonmoral evaluations and the other ten regarding comprehension, relevance, and severity of the scenarios. Then, participants evaluated a pseudo-random subset of vignettes consisting of 25% of the remaining 140 vignettes with only 12 items presented per vignette. The items will follow an anchor sampling approach for planned missingness which facilitates appropriate missing data handling (Full Information Maximum Likelihood). We conducted a two-level exploratory factor analysis (oblique, geomin rotation) and identified a single factor at both the between- and within-levels using parallel testing.
We are conducting a second replication study where the factor models derived in Study 1 will be treated as confirmatory. We will examine which scenarios are similar their latent means and factor loadings (i.e., strength of specific judgments) using multilevel factor mixture modeling. Mixture modeling will group vignettes together based on their covariance and mean structure. We expect to find five classes of vignettes that fall in line with the original design: those that only elicit strong moral, personal, or social judgments and those that elicit moral-personal or moral-social judgments.

This study reviewed posts on Reddit's r/AmITheAsshole to examine moral dilemmas reported in a naturalistic online community setting. A quantitative content analysis of 150 posts coded for variables in these moral dilemmas, including original poster’s age, gender, moral dilemma theme, defensiveness, relational obligation, and consensus of moral judgment. Male gender and higher consensus of negative moral judgment uniquely predicted greater defensiveness. Findings help to understand how moral transgressions are communicated in a social media platform.

Forgetting is typically understood as a passive cognitive failure that occurs when previously learned information becomes inaccessible. Both philosophical and psychological discussions of memory often focus on retrieval failure as the primary locus of forgetting. While this approach successfully captures many ordinary cases, it struggles to explain a class of forgettings that appear morally significant.
This paper argues that some instances of forgetting are best understood not as isolated retrieval failures but as the outcome of earlier failures in how information was encoded and maintained over time. Consider a person who forgets to invite a close friend to their birthday party. They are not a bad person. They have a genuine, warm relationship with this friend. They would be horrified to be called racist. And yet their friend is black, and they were the only one who was not invited. What went wrong here with forgetting? And when did it go wrong? In such cases, forgetting appears selective rather than random. What is forgotten is often shaped by background beliefs, implicit biases, and judgments concerning what is worthy of continued attention. The morally significant feature of these cases is not merely that retrieval eventually fails, but that the information was never granted the level of epistemic care necessary for its preservation. The problem for retrieval-centered accounts is that the relevant failure often occurs before retrieval is ever attempted. In some cases, the agent possesses standing reasons to maintain attention to certain information but fails to sustain it across time. In others, those reasons never become fully visible to the agent because background assumptions have already –to a degree – shaped how the information is encoded. Both cases involve forgetting, yet neither is adequately explained by focusing exclusively on retrieval failure.
To explain this phenomenon, I introduce a three-stage model of memory consisting of encoding, maintenance, and retrieval. Between encoding and retrieval lies a normatively significant maintenance phase in which agents revisit information, create reminders, monitor obligations, and sustain attention to matters they take to be important. Failures at this stage can reflect deficiencies in moral attention and epistemic care rather than simple cognitive limitations. I further argue that encoding itself is shaped by what I call an encoding pool: an active background network of assumptions, values, expectations, and implicit attitudes that influences which information is registered as salient and worthy of future maintenance.
The proposed framework has implications for moral psychology. It suggests that responsibility for certain forms of forgetting may be distributed across temporally extended cognitive processes rather than localized at the moment of retrieval failure. It also provides a conceptual framework for understanding how implicit bias, moral attention, and epistemic neglect can contribute to patterns of forgetting that are morally significant despite the absence of conscious ill will. The broader claim is modest but important: not all forgetting is morally significant, but some is. Understanding such cases requires shifting attention away from retrieval alone and toward the ways agents encode, maintain, and sustain morally relevant information across time.

People often navigate visually crowded, dynamically changing social environments while pursuing their goals. However, because of the visual-cognitive processing limits of the visual system, important visual information often goes unnoticed.

Theories of moral responsibility have long debated whether consciousness is necessary for holding agents morally responsible for their actions. Conscious visual awareness—which entails subjectively experiencing external visual inputs in an accessible and reportable manner—poses a uniquely important case within this debate because the capacity-limited visual system determines what visual information will be prioritized and accessible for intentional evaluation, behavioral control, and deliberate action. Empirical research examining lay judgments similarly suggests that conscious visual awareness is considered in blame and credit attribution.1,2 Specifically, people tend to judge seeing as a controllable mental action requiring relatively little effort,3 and they often blame others for failing to act appropriately when relevant visual information was available to be seen.1,2

Conscious visual awareness of morally relevant information, however, may pose an additional challenge to these accounts because determining moral significance depends on higher-order interpretation of contextual details, social relationships, and inferred intentions rather than simple perceptual salience or emotional affect.4,5 Consequently, an important question is whether morally relevant information alters conscious visual awareness itself or instead influences later evaluative and decisional processes surrounding what people believe they saw.

Given the importance of conscious visual awareness to both prescriptive theories and descriptive judgments of moral responsibility, the present research investigated whether morally relevant information gains privileged access to conscious visual awareness. Participants completed a scene-viewing task,6 viewing AI-generated pictures of everyday office scenes. Three scenes contained an alternative version involving either an immoral change (e.g., a colleague yelling at a coworker), a negative-but-not-immoral change (e.g., a person tripping and spilling papers), or a neutral change (e.g., a person sitting at a desk). Following the scene-viewing task, participants completed a memory test with both test and foil items and reported whether they had seen the change during the earlier task.

Across two studies (N = 375), both immoral and negative-but-not-immoral changes were detected more frequently than neutral changes. Critically, however, immoral changes did not demonstrate enhanced signal detection sensitivity relative to negative-but-not-immoral changes. Instead, compared to negative-but-not-immoral changes, participants were less likely to report having seen immoral changes during both test and foil trials, suggesting a more conservative response criterion surrounding morally relevant information. This pattern suggests that moral significance influenced judgments about conscious visual awareness more strongly than perceptual sensitivity itself.

These findings suggest that morally relevant information may not receive prioritized access to conscious visual awareness beyond its broader negative affective properties. Therefore, importantly, these findings reveal a tension within folk judgments of moral responsibility: people often view consciously seeing morally relevant information as central to appropriate moral action, yet the moral significance of information itself may not preferentially gain access to conscious visual awareness. More broadly, these findings complicate prescriptive accounts that implicitly assume morally relevant information is reliably available for conscious awareness simply because it is morally important.

A defining feature of the U.S. political system is the competition between Democratic and Republican candidates in local, state, and federal elections. Candidates utilize a variety of avenues (town halls, campaign websites, and ads) and rhetorical discourses to persuade voters and mobilize their supporters (Jerit, 2004). The choice of rhetoric could also depend on a candidate's access to institutional power (i.e., whether they are an incumbent or a challenger). Prior work has shown that morality plays a role in voters' political decision-making (Graham et al., 2009), and that the party that holds a minority in Congress relies more on moral language (Wang & Inbar, 2021). In this study, using computational text analysis, we investigate whether candidates' moral rhetoric influences electoral success and whether it is differentially used by incumbents. We rely on a large-scale dataset of policy platforms of candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections (Porter, Case, & Treul, 2025). Using a text-analytic approach, Contextualized Construct Representation (Atari, Omrani, & Dehghani, 2023), we extract the extent to which each candidate's policy platform relies on various moral values. We define moral values based on Moral Foundations Theory and the associated literature, focusing on the moral values of care, equality, proportionality, loyalty, authority, purity (Atari et al., 2023), and liberty (Iyer et al., 2012), plus religiosity (Huber & Huber, 2012) and thin morality. Results show that challengers are more likely to use moral language than incumbents, elucidating the relationship between access to power and reliance on morality or lack thereof. Controlling for this incumbency effect, the results demonstrate that moral rhetoric reflecting care, equality, and liberty leads to lower vote share in elections, while proportionality-, loyalty-, and authority-laden language is associated with higher electoral success. These findings underscore how moral rhetoric intersects with politics and power in the United States. While moral rhetoric might garner higher attention and engagement in certain contexts (e.g., online), not all moral rhetoric is made equal when it comes to electoral competition.

References

Atari, M., Haidt, J., Graham, J., Koleva, S., Stevens, S. T., & Dehghani, M. (2023). Morality beyond the WEIRD: How the nomological network of morality varies across cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 125(5), 1157.

Atari, M., Omrani, A., & Dehghani, M. (2023, February). Contextualized construct representation: Leveraging psychometric scales to advance theory-driven text analysis. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/m93pd

Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 1029.

Huber, S., & Huber, O. W. (2012). The centrality of religiosity scale (CRS). Religions, 3(3), 710–724.

Iyer, R., Koleva, S., Graham, J., Ditto, P., & Haidt, J. (2012). Understanding libertarian morality: The psychological dispositions of self-identified libertarians. PLOS One.

Jerit, J. (2004). Survival of the fittest: Rhetoric during the course of an election campaign. Political Psychology, 25(4), 563–575.

Porter, R., Case, C. R., & Treul, S. A. (2025). CampaignView, a database of policy platforms and biographical narratives for congressional candidates. Scientific Data, 12(1), 1237.

Wang, S.-Y. N., & Inbar, Y. (2021). Moral-language use by us political elites. Psychological Science, 32(1), 14–26.

Self-control is associated with moral behavior. Traditional theory suggests self-control inhibits antisocial impulses, which everyone experiences e.g., (Baumeister et al., 2007; Muraven & Slessareva, 2003). However, recent work outside the moral domain suggests that self-control facilitates goal-pursuit by automatization of that process, thereby reducing temptations (e.g., Gillebaart & De Ridder, 2015). We suggest and find support for the hypothesis that self-control facilitates moral decision making through automatization, and, subsequently, lower temptation to violate proscriptive norms (i.e., should nots; e.g., to lie, steal, cheat, harm). Across three studies (N = 1,006 adults, students at U.S. university) employing diverse methodologies and 162 moral decisions spanning multiple contexts, we examined whether self-control predicts moral responding through stronger automatization of moral inclinations and weaker temptation to violate proscriptive norms.

Study 1 experimentally manipulates the level of conflict of moral decisions to show that self-control predicts more moral decision making when people face (vs. do not face) temptation. Specifically, self-control predicted greater rejection of immoral actions only when those actions offered realistic personal benefits and therefore elicited meaningful temptation. Study 2 demonstrates that people higher (vs. lower) in self-control make more moral decisions, and this is accounted for in part by their automatically classifying immoral decisions as impossible (vs. possible). Building on research showing that moral cognition constrains representations of possibility (Phillips & Cushman, 2017), we find that individuals high in self-control were less likely to view immoral actions as viable behavioral options.

Study 3 employs an online, behavioral measure of conflict—mouse-tracking—and a novel metric that estimates the time of initiating correct (moral) categorization (decision) (TICC; March & Gaertner, 2021). People with higher (vs. lower) self-control more automatically—earlier in the decision process (i.e., smaller TICC —avoided the selfish choice and, consequently, evinced lower total conflict (i.e., area under the curve, AUC). A sequential mediation model indicates that self-control is associated with more moral decisions through more automatic categorization (i.e., TICC) and lower downstream temptation (i.e., AUC). Across operationalizations, self-control is associated with higher levels of automatization and, in turn, lower temptation in moral decision making. Thus, self-control facilitates moral decision making not only through inhibition of selfish impulses, but by reducing overall conflict through the automatic selection of the proscriptive norm-consistent choice. People with high self-control are less tempted to lie, cheat, steal, and harm.

I would like to be considered for a poster for this conference.

75-word Brief Description:

In the Appendix to Book 1 of the Ethics, Spinoza implies that wonder is a tool of social control exploited by clerical authorities. However, the role of wonder in Spinoza’s analysis and critique of clerical power has gone largely undiscussed. In this paper I offer an explanation for how wonder plays this role for Spinoza and how it fits into his wider analysis.

In the Appendix to Book 1 of the Ethics, Spinoza implies that wonder is a tool of social control exploited by clerical leaders. This has gone largely undiscussed, and in this paper I explain how wonder plays this role for Spinoza and how it fits into his wider analysis of clerical power. I start with Spinoza’s account of wonder. In wonder, we experience something as unique or distinctive in some way and fixate on that which makes it different, for Spinoza. This fixation freezes the flow of thought by blocking the movement to associated ideas. Moreover, there are different forms of wonder according to Spinoza, and he highlights in particular veneration, dread, and devotion.

Spinoza thinks we are especially liable to wonder at the idea of a transcendent God. The idea of a being that stands outside and controls the natural order has distinctive psychological purchase according to Spinoza. Adding further the notion that this being is a beneficiary transforms simple wonder into devotion–and devotion has particular power. Indeed Spinoza writes in the Theological-Political Treatise, "I don't think anything more effective can be devised for steering people's hearts...than the joy which arises from devotion."

The clerical authorities are particularly interested in arousing devotion, according to Spinoza, since it not only steers the heart but directs the attention. Devotion intensifies joy, and people do not tend to give up positive affect unless they have to. Thus, people in the grips of devotion “don’t want to know the natural causes of things,” both in the sense that they simply aren’t interested in alternative explanations, and in the sense that alternative explanations threaten to open their minds and thereby decrease their joy. Further, and for this reason, devotion leads them to “oppose those who cultivate natural science” since such inquiries similarly threaten to undermine the joy of devotion. Providential narratives are the main technique the authorities use to arouse devotion, since they present the idea of a powerful benefactor in compelling ways. Stories of miracles are perhaps the most obvious example, but so too are explanations of events in terms of God’s invisible intentions.

How does this fit into Spinoza's wider analysis of clerical power? As Spinoza is traditionally understood, the clerical authorities create a feedback loop between fear and superstition: fear makes us liable to believe anything that will assuage our fear and give us a sense of control; while these superstitious beliefs may temporarily make us feel better, they simultaneously open the door to new fears which need additional assuaging, and so on. This is surely right, but Spinoza’s account of wonder shows that there is more to his analysis. The authorities do not just use the “stick” of fear to manipulate the public, they also use the “carrot” of devotion and the joy it creates. I close with a case study. I briefly consider two clerical responses to the “Delft Thunderclap” of 1654, and show how they exemplify Spinoza’s model of clerical control through fear, superstition, and wonder.

Selected References:

Daston, Lorraine and Park, Katherine (1998). Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150-1750. Princeton University Press.

Drees, Marijke Meijer. (2016). “’Providential Discourse’ Reconsidered: The Case of the Delft Thunderclap (1654).” Dutch Crossing, 40 (2), 108-121.

James, S. (2012). Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion, and Politics: the Theologico-Political Treatise. Oxford University Press.

James, S. (2020). Spinoza on learning to live together. Oxford University Press.

Rosenthal, M. A. (2010). Miracles, wonder, and the state in Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise. Spinoza’s ‘Theological-Political Treatise’: A Critical Guide, 231-249. Cambridge University Press.

Steinberg, J. (2018). Spinoza's political psychology: the taming of fortune and fear. Cambridge University Press.

When differentiating between candidates running for office, voters often face a choice between candidates whose stances contradict their moral values. Data from a within-subjects survey experiment demonstrates that domestic policy alignment with a presidential candidate has the strongest positive influence on candidate ratings, while a voter’s sensitivity to harm is associated with colder ratings. Respondents who value the moral foundation of loyalty are more likely to compromise concerns of harm in favor of domestic alignment.

This paper challenges Robert Kane's account of effort in torn decisions and argues that its failure has direct implications for moral responsibility. Kane's (2024) libertarian account of self-forming choices is designed to respond to the explanatory luck objection (ELO) (Mele 1998, Haji 2022): if an undetermined choice is to be free and responsible, there must be something within the agent that explains why this outcome occurred rather than another. Kane's answer appeals to effort. On his revised view, when an agent faces a torn decision, she makes a specific effort directed at one particular choice rather than another; if that effort succeeds despite the indeterminism involved, the outcome is causally attributable to the agent, and responsibility is secured.
I argue that this account rests on a mischaracterization of the psychology of torn deliberation, and that this mischaracterization undermines the responsibility attribution Kane seeks to establish. My method is to begin from the first-person perspective of the torn agent—what it is like to be genuinely caught between competing motives with no settled sense of which should prevail—and to show that the psychological structure of this state is incompatible with the kind of specific effort Kane's account requires.
On the dynamics of effort: Kane's fragmented account holds that a torn agent alternates between specific efforts directed at particular outcomes. But this implies that the agent has already settled on a particular aim at each moment, which is in tension with what it means to be genuinely torn. A paradigmatically torn agent does not shift between settled aims; she remains in a state of unresolved conflict in which no particular aim has yet taken hold. The competing motives in such cases do not merely prevent specific efforts from succeeding—they preclude the formation of such efforts in the first place. The agent's effort is more plausibly understood as a unitary effort to decide what to do, not a sequence of competing specific efforts.
On the nature of effort: I argue that genuine effort requires two conditions—a pro-attitude toward a particular outcome, and a deliberative goal that structures the attempt. In torn decisions, neither condition is satisfied. The torn agent has no settled endorsement of any particular motive and therefore no pro-attitude that could ground a specific effort. And because her goal is disjunctive—to make a decision, whichever it turns out to be—there is no precise alignment between the content of her effort and the content of the eventual outcome. Kane's own assassin analogy illustrates the problem: the assassin's effort is directed at a specific target, and success consists in hitting it. In the torn agent's case, what is achieved is one disjunct of a disjunctive goal, not the satisfaction of any specific antecedent aim.
This failure is not merely a problem for Kane's phenomenology of deliberation. It directly undermines his response to ELO and, with it, the responsibility attribution he seeks. If there is no specific effort whose content aligns with the outcome, there is no basis within the agent to explain why this outcome occurred rather than another. The agent is reduced to a locus where competing motives interact, rather than an originator who actively settles the conflict. The sourcehood that moral responsibility requires is precisely what Kane's account cannot deliver.

Existing theories of morality suggest a varying number of moral values (e.g., Curry et al., 2016; Graham et al., 2013; Schein & Gray, 2012). However, when moral values come into conflict, there is no clear higher-order principle that dictates which moral value should be prioritized over others. Metamorality is a new theoretical framework that introduces principles for moral decision-making when moral values conflict. At least four metamoral principles have been suggested: Honor, Divinity, Utilitarianism, and Rational Self-interest (Atari & Zewail, 2025). In three pre-registered online studies, we developed and validated the Metamorality Scale and tested how metamoral principles are related to moral decision-making situations as well as cultural and cognitive factors. Studies 1 and 2 (total n = 536) tested how metamoralities are associated with moral foundations and moral decision-making in the U.S. In these studies, we demonstrated that each metamorality has a distinct pattern of associations with moral foundations and altruism, cooperation, parochialism, retaliation, and utilitarianism using hypothetical behavioral economic games. The results of ordinal and linear regression models showed that Divinity was associated with more altruism, Utilitarianism with more utilitarian decision-making, Honor with more deontological decision-making and more retaliation, and Self-interest with less altruism and cooperation. None of the metamoralities were significantly associated with parochial decision-making. Study 3 was a cross-cultural study with data from 13 countries (n = 3,674) where we explored cultural variation in metamoralities, and their associations with moral foundations, cultural and cognitive measures, and moral behaviors measured by incentivized economic games. We found that the Metamorality Scale had good internal reliability and validity across cultures. There was cross-cultural variation in the endorsement of the four metamoralities. While reliance on Honor, Divinity, and Self-interest increased with further cultural distance from the U.S., Utilitarianism was not significantly associated. Multilevel models revealed that Utilitarianism had robust positive associations with utilitarian and altruistic decision-making across cultures, while Self-interest had robust negative associations. Divinity and Honor displayed context-specific patterns for the two moral decision-making outcomes. These studies demonstrate how the theory of metamorality can advance our understanding of moral decision-making and illuminate the sources of moral conflict across the globe.

The full 500-word abstract is attached as PDF. The 75-word description is below (and also included in PDF):

This paper investigates how a speaker's perceived moral character influences persuasion and long-term willingness to remain receptive to their views. In one study (N = 742), participants exposed to a moral speaker were more persuaded and substantially more receptive to the speaker’s future views than participants exposed to an immoral speaker. Exploratory analyses suggest this may extend beyond halo/horn effects and may operate partly through normative judgments about whether a speaker deserves serious consideration.

Two recurring empirical trends are emerging from behavioral science inquiry into human-AI interaction: (1) people are increasingly turning to large language models (LLMs) for moral advice (How People Ask Claud for Personal Guidance, 2026), a consequential domain of social life once reserved exclusively for human judgment, and (2) LLMs tend to deliver unconditional praise to their users (Cheng et al., 2026). The nexus of these two trends poses both challenges and opportunity for moral and social progress. While the wide availability and indefatigability of AI systems allow for easier and more democratized access to moral advising on demand, AI systems are not infallible. Praise from LLMs creates two problems for users. First, AI praise routinely misleads users about the moral status of their actions. Second, it can create a heightened expectation of receiving praise for anything, combined with a mistaken sense of how often one should provide praise in human-human interactions more broadly. The question of if/how AI praises is distinct from the question of whether it can deliver sound moral advice (see: Terwiesch, 2023; Myers & Everett, 2025). Praise involves the judgment of moral goodness, but also the carefully modulated delivery of that judgment. Recent work suggests that "sycophantic" AI in the context of moral inquiry can corrode moral judgments, reduce desire to repair relationships (Cheng et al., 2026), and increase the extremity of moral judgments (Rathje et al., 2026). Additionally, LLMs praise excessively, affirming users’ actions 50% more often than humans do (Cheng et al., 2026). Yet the literature on moral advice-seeking might suggest that human-AI interactions could, in some cases, allow for the modulation of praise in a more careful and deliberate direction that is sensitive to relevant information and moral cues.
Praise is the central tool for exploring and identifying value; if you care about value you should care about praise. In ethics and moral theory, praise is nearly as central as the concept of goodness itself. In fact, the good is most often analyzed in terms of the praiseworthy. Yet praise itself often escapes our scrutiny. In the proposed perspective, we argue that psychology and philosophy together can help us understand both the societal risks and possible benefits involved in these praise interactions and provide guidance for more responsible use and development of AI technologies. Moreover, we contend that the careful study of praise in human-AI interactions can contribute to the developing philosophical understanding of the nature of praise itself, such as seen in Telech (2024), Shoemaker (2024), Holroyd (2025), Johnson King (2025) and Kwiatek (2025). Many of these theories are relevant inasmuch as they investigate emotional capacities that are relevant for apt praising, such as the ability to have empathy (see Shoemaker, 2024 for an example). To the extent that empathetic expression has become a much-contested topic in the AI ethics space (e.g., Inzlicht, Cameron, D.Cruz, & Bloom, 2024, TICS), then questions of whether AI can encourage apt human praising behaviors interfaces well with these ongoing AI empathy debates.

Sources: (Included in PDF)

Poster presentation on the Moral Psychology of Pessimism.

Much of pessimism begins in the experience of suffering, with an emphasis on personal suffering. For many pessimists, experiences of suffering offer insight into their entire system, spanning metaphysics, aesthetics, value, and more. In this paper, I highlight this element of pessimism—an attunement to experience. In contemporary philosophy, this element remains unexplored as it is often leveled against pessimism. Sully critiques pessimism by arguing that it is rooted in a temperament that skews experience. Against such psychological reductionism, Plümacher, van der Lugt, and Dienstag defend pessimism by arguing that it consists of strictly philosophical judgments. While it is vital to elucidate the evidence and arguments involved in pessimism, investigating the psychological element reveals part of the value and nature of pessimism as a developed philosophical outlook. In contemporary psychology, pessimism is investigated as dispositional and defensive pessimism, defined as characteristically forming negative expectations. However, this narrows the focus of pessimism to the future, while pessimism as discussed in philosophy is not only future-oriented, but also value-oriented. A fuller understanding of the psychology and normativity of pessimism is provided by putting the philosophy and psychology of pessimism in conversation with one another. I argue that the psychological dimension of pessimism is a sensitivity to disvalue. I draw from theories of basal emotions, existential feeling, and stance to argue that this sensitivity involves patterns of attention, interpretation, and inclination toward suffering.

A common view in the ethics of blame is that the permissibility of blame (and of dismissing rather than engaging with blame) depends not only on whether the blamee is blameworthy but also on whether the blamer has standing to blame. To say that someone lacks the standing to blame is to say, roughly, that (1) they ought not to blame, (2) due to a fact about themselves rather than the blamee, and (3) if they do blame, the blamee can permissibly dismiss their blame rather than substantively engaging with it, either by accepting blame and apologizing, or by rejecting it and defending their innocence (e.g., Herstein 2020: 2; Lippert-Rasmussen 2024: 32-37). The standard list of reasons for which someone may lack standing to blame include hypocrisy, complicity, and meddlesomeness (e.g., Cohen 2012; Herstein 2020). I propose supplementing this list with another basis on which one may lack standing to blame: incompetence at blaming. An incompetent blamer is disposed to blame people who are not blameworthy or to blame the blameworthy with excessive severity. Their unreliability may stem from a general lack of moral capacity, localized moral blindness or ignorance, negligent disregard, or misuse of blame to serve their own ends. I defend the claim that incompetent blamers lack standing to blame by arguing that incompetent blamers meet the three conditions associated with lack of standing to blame.

Regarding the first two points, the key idea is that blaming someone who is not blameworthy is unjust; it harms an innocent person. Blame is risky when the blamer lacks adequate evidence about whether the blamee is blameworthy. In general, engaging in a risky activity is wrong when the prospective benefits do not justify the risk. For a competent blamer, the benefits of blaming the blameworthy may outweigh the risk of blaming the innocent. But as a blamer becomes less competent at correctly apportioning blame, the calculus shifts, until their blaming becomes too risky to be justified. Regarding the second point, a neglected question in the ethics of blame is why a blamee is not always permitted to dismiss blame, even from competent blamers. The answer, I argue, is that some positive functions of blame, such as improving the moral understanding and alignment of the blamer and blamee (e.g., Fricker 2016), are best served by the blamee’s active participation in the blaming conversation. Both sides (as well as bystanders) may learn that they were mistaken or at least gain a more vivid understanding of the issues at stake. However, incompetent blame largely lacks these benefits. Often the incompetent blamer is not making a one-time mistake but instead exhibits consistent unreliability, so the blamee’s contributions are unlikely to improve the blamer’s moral understanding or motivation. Nor is the blamee likely to learn much from engaging with ill-founded criticism.

Blame is psychologically powerful. As blamers, we should not wield that power carelessly. As blamees, we can (to some extent) protect ourselves from incompetent blamers by exercising our own power to dismiss their blame.

References

Cohen, Gerald A. 2012. “Casting the First Stone: Who Can, and Who Can’t, Condemn the Terrorists?” In Finding Oneself in the Other. Princeton University Press.
Fricker, Miranda. 2016. “What’s the Point of Blame? A Paradigm Based Explanation.” Noûs 50 (1): 165–83.
Herstein, Ori J. 2020. “Justifying Standing to Give Reasons: Hypocrisy, Minding Your Own Business, and Knowing One’s Place.” Philosophers’ Imprint 20 (7): 1–18.
Lippert-Rasmussen, Kaspar. 2024. The Beam and the Mote: On Blame, Standing, and Normativity. Oxford University Press.

The current research investigates the role of counterfactual thought in moral judgments of actions and inactions. Outside of the moral domain, there is ample evidence that across a number of features (e.g., regret, intentionality, effortfulness; Gleicher et al, 1990; Sunderrajan & Albarracín, 2021), judgments of inactions are attenuated relevant to actions. Inaction judgments in the moral domain have traditionally been examined in frameworks such as omission bias (where actions are judged as more immoral than inactions with equivalent outcomes; Spranca et al., 1991; Yeung et al., 2022) and trolley dilemmas (which tie actions and inactions to utilitarian or deontological decisions; Foot, 1967; Thomson, 1976; Gawronski & Beer, 2017). This work expands the understanding of moral judgments of inaction by comparatively testing different predictors, rather than directly comparing actions and inactions. Specifically, we examined the impact of counterfactual thought (the consideration of alternative possibilities; Byrne, 2016) and manipulated outcome severity to explore outcome bias (where actions leading to worse outcomes are judged as more immoral; Baron & Hershey, 1988; Robbennolt, 2000) and its role in counterfactual action judgments. Though largely exploratory, we hypothesized differences in moral evaluations across counterfactual and factual conditions and outcome severity.

In Study 1, participants in a between-participant design evaluated one of eight scenarios in which a person either acted or did not act immorally. Participants in the action condition rated factual outcome severity, factual immoral character, and counterfactual moral character (how moral the actor would have been if they had not acted). Participants in the inaction condition rated counterfactual outcome severity (how bad the outcome would have been if they had acted), counterfactual immoral character (how bad the actor would have been if they had acted), and factual moral character. Study 2 replicated the Study 1 using a within-participant design. Study 3 introduced a second factor: whether the outcome of the action was (or would have been) minor or severe. All studies were analyzed using factorial ANOVAs and featured a convenience sample of undergraduate students.

Across all three studies, actual immoral actors were judged as more immoral than counterfactual immoral actors. There was mixed evidence that counterfactual non-actors may be more moral than factual non-actors. In Study 2, an order interaction emerged. The second condition presented was rated as more severe across all dependent variables. Study 3 replicated outcome bias. Actions leading to severe (vs. minor) outcomes were judged as more immoral. This study also revealed an interaction between outcome severity and action condition, where for minor outcomes, counterfactual outcomes were more severe than factual outcomes, and for extreme outcomes, factual outcomes were more severe than counterfactual outcomes.

These findings suggest that moral judgments differ depending on whether they are judged factually or counterfactually. The results consistently indicate the attenuation of inaction judgments. The project underscores the importance of considering the role of counterfactual thought and outcome severity in moral judgments of actions and inactions. It also provides further evidence for the cross-literature finding that inactions are evaluated differently than actions.

[references exceeded the character limit for the submission box and can be found in the pdf attachment]

To be considered for symposium or poster:

While emotions are often seen as deeply personal, individual phenomena constitutive of our complex interiority and sense of self, they are also robustly social in nature. Research shows that the emotions we experience most frequently, as well as their intensity, meaning, and methods of display vary significantly across cultures (Eid & Diener, 2001; Koopmann-Holm & Matsumoto, 2011; Mesquita & Frijda, 1992). A likely explanation for this is to be found in social norms: the socially maintained patterns of behavioral conformity that shape nearly every aspect of human life. But how exactly do norms shape emotions?

According to Mesquita and colleagues’ cultural regulation theory (Mesquita, 2022; Mesquita et al., 2014, 2017), these cross-cultural differences in emotion arise from differing conceptions of how to be a good person and how to relate to others. Through explicit instruction—particularly between caregivers and children—social sanctions, and environmental affordances, cultures regulate individuals’ emotions so as to bring them in line with these ideal conceptions. Despite the many strengths of cultural regulation theory, I argue that it struggles to explain how emotion norms become internalized and motivationally authoritative, particularly when they are unarticulated or lack overt enforcement mechanisms.

To address these shortcomings, I develop an alternative theory of emotion norms based upon Theriault et al.’s (2021) predictive processing theory of social cognition. On this view, emotion norms emerge from the predictive cognitive models agents construct of themselves and their environments, including their emotions, the emotions of others, and the relationship between the two. Violations of emotional expectations generate prediction error, which manifests as increased metabolic cost and the experience of negative affect. Over time, these aversive signals become incorporated into the model, producing an anticipatory aversion to emotions and emotional displays that deviate from culturally patterned expectations. This framework explains both the acquisition and internalization of emotion norms, including those that are never explicitly articulated.

Finally, I show that this predictive processing account extends naturally to each of the five stages of Gross’s (1998, 2014) process theory of emotion regulation. Because predictive models operate across the entire emotion generative process—from situation selection to response modulation—they provide a unified explanation of how norms shape the anticipation, experience, and regulation of emotion. The result is a more comprehensive and psychologically plausible theory of emotion norms.

Prior work has shown that human participants are more sensitive to intentionality for harmful actions than purity-violating actions. Here we ask whether we can 1) quantify the impact of intentionality on moral judgements and 2) compare this effect between humans and large language models. We collected human moral judgments for individual action phrases (e.g., “bake a cake”; “poison a friend”) and their combinations (“bake a cake and intentionally poison a friend”) with two intention types – accidental and intentional – and two violation types – harm (e.g. assault) and purity (e.g. sexual taboo, consuming illicit substances). From these, we constructed four conditions: accidental harm, accidental purity violation, intentional harm, and intentional purity violation. First, we replicated a previous result from Young and Saxe (2011) that for human participants, intentionality matters more in making moral judgments of harm than purity violations, as seen by a significant Intention × Violation Type interaction (F(1, 64) = 14.014, p < 0.001, ηp² = 0.0090) across participants. We then collected moral wrongness judgments for the same stimuli from a state-of-the-art large language model (GPT-5.4, non-reasoning). The degree of sensitivity to intentionality across action types in GPT-5.4 (M = -18.27) did not significantly differ from the human mean (M = -12.37, SD = 27.24), z = -0.22, p = .828 (two-tailed), consistent with the model's pattern of intentionality sensitivity being broadly comparable to that of human participants. Finally, we extended these results by quantifying the impact of intentionality information in combined actions as a function of the wrongness of their parts. We measured this as the difference between the moral wrongness of the combination (e.g. “bake a cake and intentionally poison a friend”) and the simple average of the wrongness of its parts (“bake a cake,” "poison a friend”). This serves as a view into the compositional processes underlying moral reasoning in humans and models. We found a significant Intention × Species (human vs model) interaction (F(1, 160) = 5.03, p < 0.05, ηp² = .03), indicating that humans and GPT-5.4 differ in their deviation from the simple average of moral wrongness ratings as a function of intentionality. Simple effects tests revealed that this difference was driven by the accidental condition, in which humans deviate significantly more from the simple average than models do (t(64) = -3.276, p < 0.0025), but not so in the intentional condition (t(64) = -0.124, p = .902). These results highlight our triplet paradigm as a promising design to investigate the relational dynamics between other factors believed to be critical for moral judgment (e.g. desire, belief) and to compare the combinatorial processes underlying human and LLM cognition.

Praise is ordinarily thought to be a benefit to its recipient, yet sometimes we reject praise. Why would one reject praise? I argue that one reason we reject praise is to manage our reputations. Speech acts of praise, I argue, involve a perlocutionary act of leading the audience of the praise to group together the praiser and praisee. It’s rational to reject praise if one has good reason to oppose being grouped with the praiser.

There are more opportunities than ever to help. On any given day, one can choose to support their friends and family, respond to crises in their community, and even make a life-saving donation to someone across the globe. Yet no individual can respond to all of these demands. This creates a dilemma: whom should I help?
Prior work finds that contextual features such as kinship1, the severity of potential harm2, and moral debt (i.e., reciprocity3) drive moral obligation. Yet little is known about how these features compare to one another when they compete. The present project assessed the comparative influence of contextual features on moral obligation across 7 studies in the U.S., India, and Brazil.
Studies 1–3 employed a bottom-up approach to identifying the features that drive real-world moral obligation amongst American participants and the situations where they emerge. In Study 1 (N = 61), participants freely generated features that create an obligation to help. In Study 2 (N = 62), participants rank-ordered these features, either all together or within conceptual categories. This process identified five key features to compare: spousehood, reciprocity, capacity to help, severity of harm, and prior commitment. Study 3 (N = 62) asked participants to describe situations where they or others had a moral obligation to act, to help us create ecologically valid vignettes.
Studies 4 and 5 examined how Americans judge the presence and strength of moral obligation across the five selected features. In Study 4 (N = 200), participants evaluated vignettes where the presence or absence of each feature was manipulated. The presence of every feature increased perceived obligation. In Study 5 (N = 200), participants saw variants of the same vignette with each feature present. Vignettes reflected real-life (Study 5a) and abstract (Study 5b) scenarios. Participants then judged how strong an obligation each feature drove. Across both versions, prior agreement (e.g., commitment to help & marriage) and severity of harm emerged as the strongest drivers of moral obligation.
Since these findings reflected an individualistic cultural context where contractual norms are particularly salient4, Studies 6 and 7 extend this work to India and Brazil, two collectivistic cultures where group well-being takes priority over individual interests5,6,7. Moreover, India and Brazil represent two distinct forms of collectivism (harmonic and convivial collectivism8), allowing us to explore whether distinct forms of collectivism shape moral obligation. To assess these questions, Studies 6 and 7 replicate the same bottom-up methodology as Studies 1–5, in each country's native language (Hindi and Brazilian Portuguese, respectively). While analyses are ongoing, we hypothesize that features tied to group fitness, such as kinship and reciprocity, will drive greater moral obligation in these contexts, while severity of harm might function as a universal driver across cultures.
Together, these seven studies begin to taxonomize the contextual features underlying moral obligation and inform how their influence is shaped by culture. This not only advances our understanding of moral cognition but, through revealing when people feel the strongest moral obligation, can inform the design of culturally sensitive appeals to action.

We develop an agent-based model of norm emergence around two interdependent decisions: whether to perform a private behavior and whether to disclose it publicly, using AI use as a case example. Agents update empirical and normative expectations from observable disclosure rates, but vary in skepticism (whether disclosure reflects behavior) and cynicism (whether behavior reflects normative beliefs). Simulations show that voluntary disclosure produces pluralistic ignorance, while mandatory disclosure with auditing narrows perception gaps but can also accelerate AI adoption.

Moral psychology has long relied on a single methodological template: hypothetical dilemmas evaluated from a third-person, observer-like stance. This approach has produced influential findings, but a growing body of evidence suggests it may be quietly confounding an important variable relevant in real moral life. When people actually enact morally consequential choices, their decisions diverge from what they say they would do when imagining the same situation from the outside,¹ʼ²ʼ³ and the neural systems involved differ as well.⁴ʼ⁵ʼ⁶ These enacted-versus-imagined differences are well documented but poorly explained. This paper argues that agency, both the actual causal and control role a person plays in a morally consequential act and their later judgment of that role,⁷ʼ⁸ʼ⁹ʼ¹⁰ is a likely but under-isolated mechanism behind them, one that overlaps with and may help organize the other factors: perspective,⁴ʼ¹¹ consequence salience,⁷ʼ¹² and emotion.⁶ʼ¹³

The central conceptual goal is to separate these two things that standard methods leave indistinguishable. Actual agency is the degree to which a person is the genuine causal author and intentional initiator of an act.⁷ Judged agency is their retrospective sense of having caused or controlled it, including beliefs about their own responsibility.⁹ These can be separated, and when they are, moral responsibility appears to track judged rather than actual agency;⁸ʼ⁹ʼ¹⁴ʼ¹⁵ʼ¹⁶ʼ¹⁷ implying that moral cognition is more reconstructive than current paradigms reveal.⁷ʼ⁸ʼ¹⁰ʼ¹⁸ʼ¹⁹ʼ²⁰ʼ²¹ʼ²²ʼ²³ Yet no widely used method isolates the two within a single task.

This reflects a limitation shared across two research traditions. Moral judgment paradigms minimize actual agency by asking participants to evaluate hypothetical acts they never perform.²⁴ʼ²⁵ʼ²⁶ Sense-of-agency research isolates agency cleanly but only in stripped-down motor tasks; button presses, not the intentional authorship of consequential acts.¹⁵ʼ²⁷ʼ²⁸ Each studies its construct from an artificial vantage point,¹⁵ʼ²⁴ʼ²⁵ʼ²⁹ʼ³⁰ and neither captures agency and moral judgment as they operate together in genuinely enacted contexts.¹ʼ²ʼ¹⁴ʼ¹⁶ʼ³¹ʼ³²

I propose an adapted choice blindness paradigm as a way to begin separating them.²²ʼ³²ʼ³³ʼ³⁴ʼ³⁵ʼ³⁶ Participants make real first-person decisions with moral consequences, then receive subtly altered feedback about what they chose. Whether they detect the switch, whether they adopt the false choice as their own, and whether their moral self-evaluation then tracks their real choice or the manipulated one serve as indirect behavioral indicators of judged agency and moral responsibility, without either being explicitly foregrounded. Post-task trait measures (sense of agency,³⁷ locus of control,³⁸ moral identity³⁹) add convergent evidence and let actual choices be separated from later judgments of them.

The contribution is both theoretical and methodological. The aim is not to show that agency explains moral cognition, but that prevailing methods confound perspective, consequence, emotion, and agency,⁷ʼ⁸ʼ²⁴ and that a choice-blindness-based design offers a way to begin differentiating the two.²²ʼ³³ʼ³⁴ʼ³⁵ Because it is feasible, scalable, and online-compatible, the paradigm also offers a practical route toward studying enacted moral agency at scale.¹ʼ²ʼ²⁴ʼ²⁵ʼ³⁴ʼ³⁶ʼ⁴⁰

This paper argues for three theses about cares as a psychological kind. First, it develops a naturalized account of what it means to care about something that identifies cares with states of our valuational systems countenanced by affective science. Second, it defends the view that cares are a first-order attitude which do not require the capacity for reflective endorsement. Third, it applies this account of caring to the question of free will in other animals. It argues that if acting freely is acting in accordance with what you care about, as many compatibilist philosophers of free will have argued, then contrary to what many philosophers of free will have assumed, other animals have a meaningful form of free will.

Fairness is a fundamental component of moral development that shapes how children evaluate social interactions, understand justice, resolve conflict, and distribute resources (Killen & Smetana, 2015; Piaget, 1932/1965). Parents communicate beliefs about justice through how they respond to and intervene in conflicts, set and enforce rules, and model fair behavior (Brody et al., 1992; Ihinger, 1975; Ross, 2014). Although children’s beliefs about fairness and justice are associated with parental beliefs, family climate, and parenting styles (Armstrong, 2012; Dalbert & Radant, 2004; Wang et al., 2024), these measures focus on attitudes and general orientations rather than parenting practices. Children’s internalization of parental values does not only depend on what parents believe, but also on how values are conveyed, interpreted, and accepted in everyday situations (Grusec & Goodnow, 1994). Yet little is known about how parents intentionally incorporate and communicate fairness in their parenting practices.
To address this gap, this pilot study proposes the Fairness Socialization in Parenting Scale (FSPS) conceptualized as the degree to which parents intentionally incorporate fairness through (a) deliberately thinking about fairness when making parenting decisions, (b) communicating fairness-based reasoning to their child, and (c) modeling fair behavior in everyday interactions. These three components encompass the cognitive, communicative, and behavioral aspects of fairness socialization, which are informed by theories of socialization and value internalization (Grusec & Goodnow, 1994). Items were developed and refined using theory-driven scale development procedures outlined by Salah et al. (2025), with an AI-assisted process of iterative refinement (OpenAI, 2025) and expert revisions.
This pilot study includes three components to understand how parents define, practice, and prioritize fairness principles. First, parents are asked open-ended questions to define fairness in parenting and critique a proposed definition of fairness in socialization. Second, parents will respond to three hypothesized subscales: (1) Thinking About Fairness (e.g., “after a disagreement, I think about whether I treated my child fairly”); (2) Fairness-Based Communication (e.g., “I explain to my child why a rule or decision is fair.”); and (3) Modeling Fair Behavior (e.g., “I show my child how to make fair choices, even when it is difficult.”). Third, five vignettes will be used to assess the relative prioritization of different fairness principles (e.g., equality, need, and merit; Killen & Smetana, 2015) embedded in common parenting situations. For example, if a parent has only 30 minutes to assist two children with homework, participants rank the fairness of allocating more time to the struggling child (need), more time to the child who is putting in more effort (merit), or an equal amount of time to both children (equality).
Expert review and think-aloud interviews will support content validity before data collection in the summer of 2026. A preliminary analysis will examine parents’ definitions of fairness, their prioritization of competing fairness principles, and their responses to the scale items to inform ongoing refinement during scale development procedures.

In this paper, I aim to explore how we can make sense of an interesting epistemic and psychological phenomenon that love relationships generate: *believing in us*. I do so by examining an example case where two partners, Sally and Olivia, are unmatched in their experience of healthy love relationships and face asymmetrical means for navigating the continued pursuit of their joint relational project as a result. I argue that a unique kind of epistemic trap is created when one lacks healthy, supportive relationships, such that one does not know herself well-enough to properly assess and balance her values, goals, and projects to participate in the joint relationship project, but that self-knowledge of this kind also requires the pursuit of a joint relationship project to obtain. I show that this also generates implications for conceptualizing autonomy loss in love relationships. In tandem, I hope to illuminate how the decision to “break up” is not so obviously a good or bad decision, especially in healthy, loving cases such as Sally and Olivia’s.

First, I consider whether Sally might be exercising the right amount of epistemic grit in pursuing her relationship project, following Jennifer Morton and Sarah Paul’s work. Next, I explore how Sally might still fail to see belief in her relationship as justified, despite maintaining gritty evidential policies. Using Marilyn Friedman’s merger identity account of love, I introduce her notion of the merged evaluative perspective. I then consider whether this merged evaluative perspective can guide joint intention and action in a way that is irreducible to each individual’s considerations taken individually. I show how this might give Sally even greater evidence for the prospect of her relationship’s success. Then, I consider whether Sally might fail to evaluate the goal of maintaining her relationship through the joint evaluative perspective formed from within the relationship itself.

Finally, following the discussion of merged evaluative perspectives, I raise and discuss a worry about autonomy loss in love. I argue this worry arises from a particular kind of paradoxical epistemic trap that Sally, and others in less ideal relationships, may be in. I explain how this epistemic trap arises, how it persists, and why it captures the kind of knowledge required for pursuing relationships. I aim to show that this trap is characterized by both a lack of self-knowledge and a need to exist in relationship(s) with others in order to obtain such self-knowledge, and discuss how this complicates the decision to “break up” in generally healthy, supportive relationship contexts. I argue that this epistemic trap gives Sally, and others in similar situations, serious reasons to resist the impulse to “break up” when a joint relationship project is difficult to envision. This suggests autonomy loss in love may be grounded more in asymmetrical opportunities for self-knowledge rather than solely in the structure of loving relationships themselves.

When faced with moral dilemmas, people rely on decision-making strategies such as cost-benefit reasoning (CBR) or following moral rules. How do they learn when to use each strategy? Prior research suggests that people adopt strategies that have produced better outcomes in previous decisions (Maier et al., 2026). To examine whether this learning occurs via forming mental habits (model-free; MF) or by constructing a mental model of consequences (model-based; MB), we adapted an established paradigm to dissociate MB and MF learning, the two-step task (Daw et al., 2011), to moral dilemmas in a charitable decision-making context.

Participants (N=400) made 20 funding allocation decisions, with binary choices aligned with either CBR or following moral rules (e.g., not lying). Each decision was either executed as chosen (common transition, 70% chance) or overridden by a lottery to the alternative choice (rare transition, 30% chance). In the “Rule Success” condition, following moral rules often led to good outcomes in common transitions and bad outcomes in rare transitions. In the “CBR Success” condition, following CBR produced good outcomes on common transitions and bad outcomes on rare transitions.

Participants learned to favor the strategy yielding better outcomes. In the CBR Success condition, the mean frequency of choosing the CBR option increased from 56.0% (95% CI [49.1%, 62.9%]) on the first trial to 61.0% (95% CI [54.2%, 67.8%]) on the last trial, By contrast, the Rule Success condition decreased reliance on CBR from 49.5% (95% CI [42.6%, 56.4%]) on the first trial to 27.5% (95% CI [21.3%, 33.7%]) on the last trial. This learning transferred beyond the experimental paradigm to an incentive-compatible donation task. Moreover, participants in the CBR Success condition scored higher on the Sacrificial Harm Subscale of the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale (Kahane et al., 2018) than those in the Rule Success condition, t(397.91)=2.64, p=.004, d=0.26, one-sided. Using the Decision Process Scale (Cheung et al., 2026), participants in the Rule Success condition reported greater reliance on moral rules, t(397.92)=−2.87, p=.002, d=−0.29, one-sided, while those in the CBR Success condition relied more on consequences (W=22,678, p=.012, one-sided), suggesting evidence for strategy level (metacognitive) learning.

Analysis of the two-step task indicated primarily model-based learning: participants were more likely to repeat their decision strategy after a good outcome, and less likely to repeat it after a bad outcome only if it occurred via a common transition, and this pattern was reversed after rare transitions. The effect of condition on transfer measures was moderated by participants’ extent of model-based learning; those with higher MB learning exhibited stronger learning effects. Computational modeling further explored whether participants’ choices were better explained by action-level behavioral learning or strategy-level metacognitive learning, and assessed the fit of model-free, model-based, and hybrid models to individual decision trajectories. Understanding the mechanisms underlying metacognitive moral learning informs our understanding of moral development and moral progress.

How does technology shape our understanding of human agency and, indeed, shape human agency itself? My focus is primarily neurotechnology, in particular brain-computer interfaces (BCI). Much of what I have to say has further bearing on agency in the context of predictive analytics and agentic artificial intelligence (AI). I argue that humans can do by thinking. Both conventionally via thought and trans-humanly as extended hybrid biological-artificial agent systems. Despite the arguably widely accepted and intuitive flavor of this conclusion, this talk argues that claiming this philosophical ground is surprisingly no easy matter. Understanding human agency in the context of BCIs and emerging smart technology requires confronting our cognitive dissonance about experimental interpretations and discarding traditional theoretical assumptions about cognition and agency. 

Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology promises to restore and transform our agency by decoding user intentions, even if the user lacks the capacity for intentional bodily movement. Users have been documented as experiencing a sense of agency, both explicit and implicit, over their BCI actions and outcomes, akin to the sense of agency experienced in the embodied case (Cornelio et al. 2022; Noel et al. 2023). In contrast, experimental decoding of intentions — such as the much-discussed broad Libet-inspired paradigm — has been taken to threaten agency, exposing the illusion of conscious control, even if the agent has a full range of intentional bodily movement. Intriguingly, both projects rely on the same neurotechnology and brain activity. Call the former Agency Optimism and the latter Perhaps Pessimism about BCI Agency. If these parallels between the BCI technology and Libet paradigms hold, then we ought to conclude the same thing metaphysically about BCI usage, even allowing for the practically transformative nature of the technology.

In this talk, I outline the best arguments for both the Agency Optimism and Perhaps Pessimism, including the Doing with Thought argument and Extended argument for Optimism and the Reliable Prediction Argument for Pessimism. I argue in favor of Agency Optimism about BCI Agency. To do so, I re-visit classic armchair thought experiments in action theory as well as neuroscience of agency. I outline four metaphysical candidate characterizations of (active) BCI use, as non-action events, as basic mental action, as non-basic action, and as basic extended action. The standard causalist story of action should cohere well with BCI action under the umbrella of basic mental action and nonbasic intentional action. However, I argue that on the standard causalist view, BCI users are only agents in the sense of consciously (or not) intending outcomes, a kind of mental action; their agency stops there, “in the head”. In response, I argue that the best metaphysical case for BCI use as agency involves adopting a hybrid sophisticated causalism plus extended mind approach, which I call Extended Causal Agency.

References
Cornelio, P., Haggard, P., Hornbaek, K., Georgiou, O., Bergström, J., Subramanian, S., & Obrist, M. (2022). The sense of agency in emerging technologies for human–computer integration: A review. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 16, 949138.

Noel, J. P., Bockbrader, M., Colachis, S., Solca, M., Orepic, P., Ganzer, P. D., ... & Serino, A. (2023). Human primary motor cortex indexes the onset of subjective intention in brain-machine-interface mediated actions. bioRxiv.

This project investigates whether scam victims engage in deliberate,
rational reasoning during scams or whether their decisions are primarily intuitive and irrational.
We conducted semi-structured interviews with scam victims to understand decision-making
processes during scams. We found that victims employed deliberate and rational reasoning,
including moral reasoning, when responding to scammers. These results challenge theories in
moral and social psychology that emphasize intuitive processes in judgment and
decision-making, suggesting a greater role of deliberate reasoning.

Are scam victims irrational? Much of the prevailing research proposes that victims fall
for scams because they make quick judgments without analytical thinking, relying on faulty
heuristic processes1,2
. Similar accounts have shaped our understanding of moral decision-making,
where dual process frameworks propose that many moral judgments are intuitive instead of
deliberate3
.
However, scam victims’ decision-making may not be fully explained by accounts focused
on intuition. Scammers often require sustained engagement from victims, taking them through
multiple decision-making steps and requiring them to reason about persuasive cues4,5
. Rather
than relying on intuition6
, could it be that scam victims engage in deliberate reasoning, even
including moral reasoning, during a scam? This project explores whether scam victims rely on
intuitive or deliberate decision-making processes by investigating their reasoning as scams
unfold.
We conducted in-depth, semi-structured, 45-minute interviews with undergraduates who
had been scammed (n = 12) to examine their reasoning. Participants freely recalled the scam
event and were then asked about their motivations (e.g., “Why did you speak to the scammer”)
and perceptions (e.g., “What made it seem real?”) during the scam to explore their reasoning.
We prescreened for participants who had direct interaction with the scammer, excluding
non-interactive scams like phishing emails.
Victims described a variety of scams (e.g., charity scams, employment scams, false friend
emergency scam). Scam losses ranged from $15 to $95,000 and all victims lost personal
information.
Perceptions
Participants cited many reasons for why they perceived the scam as legitimate. They
reasoned about the scammers’ behavior (“they were friendly, not desperate”), communication
style (“they talked like my friend”), professionality (“their page was organized”), scammer
identity (“I thought a woman wouldn’t harm me”), social proof (“there were positive reviews”),
or other indicators of legitimacy (“videos showed them shipping stuff”). These findings suggest
that victims engaged in deliberate reasoning during the scam, providing multiple rational reasons
for believing it was legitimate. As one participant noted, “I had more reasons to believe it was
real than not real”.
Motivations
Participants cited multiple motivations for speaking to the scammer, including moral
motivations7
. These included values like care (“I wanted to help”), loyalty (“I wouldn’t have sent
money to a stranger”), and respect for authority (“I was not sure, but they reassured me they
were the real police”). Others referenced social conventions (“I thought it’s polite to say yes”),
self-preservation (“I didn't want to be arrested”) or personal goals (“I needed a job to help my
mom pay tuition”). Only one participant mentioned being unsure of their motivations (“I was just
not thinking”).
Rather than making automatic, intuitive decisions, we found that scam victims provided
many rational reasons for engaging with a scammer. The implications of these findings are both
applied and theoretical. Theoretically, they challenge prevailing accounts in moral and social
psychology that emphasize intuitive processes in decision-making, suggesting that victims’
behavior is not fully explained by these models. Practically, these findings help to challenge
victim-blaming narratives and reframe scam victims as reasonable people, rather than irrational
individuals.

POST submission

Cognitive Load Does Not Shift Utilitarian Moral Judgment: A Null Result and Its
Theoretical Implications
Dual-process accounts predict that cognitive load should suppress utilitarian moral judgment by
depleting controlled processing resources. We tested this prediction in an experiment (N = 96)
using a continuous response scale and including the need for cognition as a moderator. Despite
successful load manipulation, neither cognitive load nor NFC predicted utilitarian responses, and
no interaction emerged. These null findings suggest that utilitarian judgment may be more
load-resistant than expected, with implications for distinction between process and product of
moral reasoning.
Abstract
Objective. Dual-process theories of moral judgment predict that utilitarian
responses – requiring controlled, deliberative processing – should be selectively
suppressed under conditions of cognitive load (Greene et al., 2008). Furthermore,
individual differences in need for cognition (NFC), reflecting the dispositional tendency
to engage in effortful thinking, are expected to positively predict utilitarian inclinations
and buffer against load-induced interference (Conway & Gawronski, 2013). The present
study subjected both predictions to a direct empirical test using a continuous
measurement approach designed to capture judgment shifts that binary scales may
obscure.
Method. A sample of 96 participants (M age = 25.21, SD = 9.66; recruited via
online crowdsourcing) was randomly assigned to a cognitive load condition
(memorisation of an 8-digit sequence) or a control condition (2-digit sequence). All
participants evaluated five incongruent moral dilemmas adapted from Conway and
Gawronski (2013) using a 7-point continuous scale ranging from "extremely
inappropriate" to "extremely appropriate." NFC was assessed using the validated 6-item
NFC scale (Coelho et al., 2020). The study was pre-powered to detect medium effects (f²
= 0.15, power = .80). Hypotheses were tested via hierarchical multiple regression. One
dilemma (Time Machine) was excluded from the aggregate score due to unacceptable
item-total correlation; the remaining four items yielded a Cronbach's α of .50.
Results. The load manipulation was successful. Participants in the experimental
condition rated the memorisation task as significantly more difficult than controls (d =
1.27, p < .001). Nevertheless, cognitive load did not significantly predict moral judgment
(β = -0.016, p = .874), with mean utilitarianism scores nearly identical across conditions.
NFC showed no significant association with utilitarian responding (β = -0.119, p = .251),
and the predicted load × NFC interaction was likewise non-significant (β = -0.051, p =
.756). The overall model accounted for only 1.4% of variance in moral judgments.
Discussion. These null findings are theoretically informative rather than merely
inconclusive. The dissociation between successful process-level interference – as
evidenced by manipulation check and partial recall failure – and unchanged final
judgment replicates the pattern observed by Greene et al. (2008) using a binary scale, and
extends it to a continuous measure, substantially weakening the measurement-artifact
explanation for prior null results. Taken together, the evidence suggests that utilitarian
moral judgment may be more load-resistant than dual-process accounts anticipate: once a
moral orientation is operative, it may not require continuous high-level cognitive
resources to sustain. This is consistent with emerging critiques of the
deliberation-as-utilitarianism assumption (Cushman, 2013), and raises the possibility that
cognitive load affects the process of moral reasoning – including response latency and
deliberation quality – without altering its product. Limitations include modest sample
diversity and online environment. Future research should incorporate reaction time
measures to disentangle process-level from judgment-level effects, and employ dilemma
batteries with stronger psychometric properties

Chat GPT was released in November 2022, reaching more than 1 million users in 5 days. It now has more than 100 million active weekly users. Despite this surge in AI use, we know little about how we judge others who do engage with these systems. Participants over the age of 18 from the United States of America were recruited using the online survey platform Prolific. The present sample comprised 301 participants (Mage = 41.5, SD = 13.05). Of these 301 participants 111(37%) were male, 189(62%) were female and 3 (1%) identified as non-binary/other. We asked participants to make judgements about individuals who sought advice to complete a task. We varied whether individuals sought advice from AI or humans, and also whether they were successful or unsuccessful in their task. Participants were asked to make judgements of warmth, competence, and humanness (Human Nature and Human Uniqueness). In line with predictions, we found that people held more positive views of those who sought advice from humans compared to AI and those who were successful compared to those who failed. We also found an interaction where those who sought advice from AIs and were unsuccessful were seen most negatively. These findings persisted across all measures – warmth, competence, human nature and human uniqueness. This study provides novel insight into our understanding of how we perceive AI users. We show that, not only do we consider them less warm and competent, we also deny them humanness. Given the global adoption of AI, these findings may have important consequences for not only our interpersonal relationships but our broader social networks. Further, character traits are among the most powerful drivers of the impressions we form and significantly influence the way we moralise others. As such, people may moralise AI use and subsequently make moral judgements about those who use AI.

ABSTRACT (for data blitz and poster consideration) Moral hypocrisy typically entails inconsistent evaluations in which individuals deem their own transgressions as less objectionable while maintaining a harsher judgement of the same transgressions when enacted by others. In the present work, however, we explore the inverse of this asymmetry: instances in which individuals judge their own transgressive behavior more harshly relative to an identical transgression enacted by another person. Drawing on attributional accounts of moral judgment, the tendency for self-directed emotions to heighten self-scrutiny, and the possibility that condemning others is itself viewed as undesirable, we predicted that participants would judge self-enacted transgressions more severely than equivalent transgressions enacted by others. In a pre-registered between-subjects study (N = 422), we offer preliminary evidence for inverses in moral hypocrisy. The 22-item stimulus set included 18 reversal-eligible (RE) transgressions, which were developed from a qualitative pilot study in which undergraduate participants (N = 186) generated examples of behaviors they viewed as more acceptable for others than for themselves, and 4 universally condemnable (UC) transgressions, which were included as a comparison category and expected to elicit relatively stable evaluations across framing conditions. Both RE and UC items spanned the six moral foundations (Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Sanctity/Degradation, Authority/Subversion, and Liberty/Oppression), allowing us to explore whether self-other asymmetries varied across domains. A linear mixed-effects model revealed that participants assigned to the self-framed condition (e.g., “Imagine that you decided to X...”) rated transgressive behaviors as significantly more immoral than participants assigned to the other-framed condition (e.g., “A person decided to X...”), Δ = 4.79, p < .001. Consistent with predictions, this asymmetry was observed for RE transgressions. Against expectations, however, a comparable pattern emerged for UC items despite the substantially greater severity of these transgressions. The overall interaction between framing condition and moral foundation neared significance (p = 0.08), with exploratory analyses suggesting that the asymmetry was attenuated for Fairness/Cheating items relative to other foundations. Overall, the present work grounds the phenomenon of inverses in moral hypocrisy and draws attention to the processes that may underlie increased self-scrutiny and/or increased tolerance toward the behaviors of others. Possible explanatory avenues are discussed and follow-up studies are outlined. (word count = 359)