Morality across time: Evidence for a moral asymmetry between episodic future thinking and autobiographical memory

Episodic future thinking, the ability to mentally simulate potential future scenarios, shares many cognitive and neural mechanisms with autobiographical memory. However, despite common underlying processes, recent research suggests important asymmetries in their phenomenology and functional roles. Earlier philosophical perspectives, in particular, suggest that this asymmetry might extend to how morality is represented across past and future, with important implications for how individuals conceptualise and employ morality. Across three studies, we examined whether and how moral content emerges in episodic future thinking compared to autobiographical memory by objectively coding past and future events elicited through different methodologies. Results showed that future events feature less moral content overall compared to memories, contributing to the evidence of a moral asymmetry between past and future representations. This pattern was consistently observed across cueing conditions in Studies 1 and 2, as well as when events were spontaneously retrieved in Study 3. Additionally, the future more often featured morally right events from the agent perspective compared to memories, aligning with earlier evidence on the idealised and self-oriented nature of future simulations. Together, our findings support the idea of a cognitive asymmetry in how morality is represented across different temporal orientations of mental time travel and offer novel insights on the retrieval of moral representations.