Cognitive parallels between moral judgment and modal judgment.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Moral Psychology
• Decision Making

Background:

• Moral judgments involve intuition and deliberation.
• Physical possibility judgments also coordinate intuition and deliberation.
• Understanding the interplay between these judgment types is crucial.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relationship between moral permissibility and physical possibility judgments.
• To explore whether a common inference strategy underlies both types of judgment.
• To examine the role of disgust sensitivity in moral judgments.

Main Methods:

• 146 adult participants judged the moral permissibility of extraordinary actions.
• Participants also judged the physical possibility of extraordinary events.
• Justification patterns and response latencies were analyzed.

Main Results:

• Tendency to judge events as possible predicted judgments of moral permissibility.
• This predictive relationship held even when controlling for disgust sensitivity.
• Justification and response latency patterns were correlated across both judgment domains.

Conclusions:

• Modal judgment (physical possibility) and moral judgment may share a common inference strategy.
• Individual differences in judgment strategies (focusing on 'why not' vs. 'how') are linked across domains.
• Findings suggest a unified cognitive mechanism for evaluating what could be and what is permissible.