Moral dynamics: Grounding moral judgment in intuitive physics and intuitive psychology

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Moral Psychology
• Computational Neuroscience

Background:

• Moral responsibility judgments consider actions and mental states.
• Traditional vignette studies offer limited insight into the precise mechanisms of moral judgment.
• Recent work explores dynamic visual stimuli for finer experimental control in moral psychology.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the role of visual stimuli in moral judgments.
• To challenge feature-based theories of moral judgment.
• To propose and test a computational model integrating intuitive physics and theory of mind for moral judgments.

Main Methods:

• Development of a computational model formalizing moral judgments based on visual scene analysis.
• Integration of intuitive physics and intuitive theory of mind within the computational model.
• Empirical testing of the model's quantitative predictions across three experiments using dynamic visual stimuli.

Main Results:

• The model successfully predicts moral judgments based on inferred agent mental states and causal roles in dynamic interactions.
• Evidence supports the mediation of visual features to moral judgments through inferred mental states and causal reasoning.
• Experimental results align with the computational model's predictions across diverse scenarios.

Conclusions:

• Visual perception influences moral judgments not directly, but through inferential processes involving intuitive physics and theory of mind.
• The proposed computational framework offers a robust explanation for how dynamic visual information shapes moral responsibility assessments.
• This research advances our understanding of the cognitive underpinnings of moral judgment in visually rich contexts.