Your visual system provides all the information you need to make moral judgments about generic visual events

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2018.05.017

Cognition

Volume 178, September 2018, Pages 133-146

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.05.017 Get rights and content

Abstract

To what extent are people's moral judgments susceptible to subtle factors of which they are unaware? Here we show that we can change people’s moral judgments outside of their awareness by subtly biasing perceived causality. Specifically, we used subtle visual manipulations to create visual illusions of causality in morally relevant scenarios, and this systematically changed people’s moral judgments. After demonstrating the basic effect using simple displays involving an ambiguous car collision that ends up injuring a person (E1), we show that the effect is sensitive on the millisecond timescale to manipulations of task-irrelevant factors that are known to affect perceived causality, including the duration (E2a) and asynchrony (E2b) of specific task-irrelevant contextual factors in the display. We then conceptually replicate the effect using a different paradigm (E3a), and also show that we can eliminate the effect by interfering with motion processing (E3b). Finally, we show that the effect generalizes across different kinds of moral judgments (E3c). Combined, these studies show that obligatory, abstract inferences made by the visual system influence moral judgments.

Introduction

We have less control of our moral judgments than we might think. Converging evidence shows that priming, highlighting, or framing one factor over another can influence moral judgments (Gu et al., 2013, Haidt et al., 1993, Petrinovich and O'Neill, 1996, Wheatley and Haidt, 2005). Furthermore, scientists have also exploited the dynamics of eye gaze while subjects are making a moral decision to bias subjects toward making one particular moral decision over another (Pärnamets et al., 2015).

Here we hypothesized that, in addition to being susceptible to such behavioral manipulations, moral judgments should also be susceptible to quirks of how the visual system automatically interprets the world. Specifically, we predicted and found that certain visual illusions, when present within a moral context, will distort the perception of causal relations in those moral contexts, leading people to make different moral judgments than they otherwise would. Furthermore, we used manipulations that had this effect without observers ever being aware that their moral judgments were being changed. This does not mean that moral judgments are not also influenced by non-visual factors (e.g., knowing that a person is a criminal). Yet insofar as our subtle, unrecognized visual manipulations changed moral judgments, this suggests that moral judgments about these visual scenes are based on causal information that is read out from the visual system.

In the introduction that follows, we explain why we have chosen to use visual illusions as well as what is known about visual illusions of causality per se. Next, we discuss how causal perception might be linked to cognitive processing, focusing on moral judgment as a case study.

Section snippets

Visual Illusions, and the distinction between perception and cognition

Visual illusions are perceived images or events that differ from objective reality. The best illusions exploit knowledge of how the visual system works in order to make people see features or events that are not an accurate reflection of the world, thereby illustrating the nature of the visual inferences that underlie perception.

By ‘visual illusion’ we will refer specifically to ‘toy’ displays that have been deliberately designed to demonstrate that the visual system has made an inference that

Experiment 1: illusory moral wrongs

Observers saw one of four visual events (presented between-subjects), all of which involved an interaction between a red and blue car, immediately followed by the blue car apparently driving into a man and knocking him over (see Fig. 1a–d). In the launching condition the red car stopped adjacent to the blue car just before the blue car moved (Fig. 1a). These kinds of temporally contingent events are overwhelmingly seen as causal, whereby the first object causes the movement of the second (

Results & discussion

Descriptions. We were curious whether people spontaneously described the interactions in causal terms when asked to explain their moral judgments. To this end, the first author and one hypothesis-blind coder coded the sentences. Both coders were condition-blind, and coded the sentences as causal whenever the language suggested that the red car caused the blue car to move. After checking that inter-coder reliability was high on the first 10 sentences, they coded the rest of the sentences.

Experiment 2: extinguishing the effect with millisecond manipulations of task-irrelevant factors

If, as these results suggest, this manipulation of moral judgments is due to the illusion of causality in these moral events, then moral judgments should also be more subtly affected by cues that are known to alter the strength of the causal illusion (Scholl & Nakayama, 2002), such as millisecond manipulations of the duration of the contextual events (Experiment 2a, Fig. 2) and their timing relative to the main event (Experiment 2b, Fig. 3).

Experiment 3: conceptual replication with a subtler manipulation

So far, we have operated under the assumption that observers were unaware of the manipulations in Experiment 2, for a couple of reasons: these manipulations consisted of subtle, task-irrelevant events; each observer only saw the display once; and the different manipulations were tested between-subjects. Furthermore, after each participant gave their blame ratings in Experiments 1–2, we asked them to explain why they made their particular moral blame judgments (Please describe why you gave the

General discussion

How does causal perception interface with the rest of cognition? Here we isolated the effect of causal perception on moral judgment, finding that task-irrelevant manipulations known to alter causal perception also change people’s moral judgments (Experiment 1). Furthermore, observers’ explanations for their moral judgments suggest that they were unaware that these manipulations induced illusory causal impressions of the main events, suggesting that their moral judgments relied on mandatory,

Conclusion

We find that moral judgments can be determined by causal illusions embedded in visual stimuli depicting morally relevant interactions. To our knowledge, these studies provide the first demonstration that causal perception drives moral judgment, leaving a number of implications for current models of moral cognition, AI approaches to social psychology, and the use of visual evidence in any moral domain. This is not to say that the current effects were not mediated by explicit inferences, nor that

Acknowledgments

We thank Steven Pinker, Patrick Cavanagh, Roger Strong, Bria Long, and Johan Wagemans for helpful comments, and Patcharaporn Thammathorn for coding the sentences.

References (90)

F. Cushman
Crime and punishment: Distinguishing the roles of causal and intentional analyses in moral judgment
Cognition
(2008)
C. Firestone et al.
Enhanced visual awareness for morality and pajamas? Perception vs. memory in ‘top-down’effects
Cognition
(2015)
C. Firestone et al.
‘Moral perception’ reflects neither morality nor perception
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
(2016)
A.P. Gantman et al.
Moral perception
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
(2015)
J. Knobe
Folk judgments of causation
Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part A
(2009)
A.M. Leslie et al.
Do six-month-old infants perceive causality?
Cognition
(1987)
T. Matsuno et al.
Causal capture effects in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)
Cognition
(2017)
R. Mayrhofer et al.
Indicators of causal agency in physical interactions: The role of the prior context
Cognition
(2014)
L. Petrinovich et al.
Influence of wording and framing effects on moral intuitions
Ethology and Sociobiology
(1996)
M. Rolfs et al.
Visual adaptation of the perception of causality
Current Biology
(2013)

Y. Rossetti

Implicit short-lived motor representations of space in brain damaged and healthy subjects

Consciousness and Cognition

(1998)

A.F. Rossi et al.

Feature-specific effects of selective visual attention

Vision Research

(1995)

J. Samland et al.

How prescriptive norms influence causal inferences

Cognition

(2016)

B.J. Scholl et al.

Perceptual causality and animacy

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

(2000)

K.A. Thomas et al.

Validity and Mechanical Turk: An assessment of exclusion methods and interactive experiments

Computers in Human Behavior

(2017)

A. Treisman et al.

Illusory conjunctions in the perception of objects

Cognitive Psychology

(1982)

B.W.A. Whittlesea et al.

Illusions of immediate memory: Evidence of an attributional basis for feelings of familiarity and perceptual quality

Journal of Memory and Language

(1990)

E.H. Adelson

Lightness perception and lightness illusions

M.D. Alicke

Culpable control and the psychology of blame

Psychological Bulletin

(2000)

M.D. Alicke et al.

Causal conceptions in social explanation and moral evaluation: A historical tour

Perspectives on Psychological Science

(2015)

E. Amit et al.

You see, the ends don’t justify the means: Visual imagery and moral judgment

Psychological Science

(2012)

S.M. Anstis

The perception of apparent movement

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B

(1980)

S.J. Blakemore et al.

How the brain perceives causality: An event-related fMRI study

NeuroReport

(2001)

M. Buehner et al.

Causal contraction: Spatial binding in the perception of collision events

Psychological Science

(2010)

E.M. Caruso et al.

Slow motion increases perceived intent

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

(2016)

H. Choi et al.

Effects of grouping and attention on the perception of causality

Perception & Psychophysics

(2004)

H. Choi et al.

Perceiving causality after the fact: Postdiction in the temporal dynamics of causal perception

Perception

(2006)

G.L. Clore

Cognitive phenomenology: Feelings and the construction of judgment

T. Crane

The waterfall illusion

Analysis

(1988)

A.M. Cravo et al.

Voluntary action and causality in temporal binding

Experimental Brain Research

(2009)

M. Crump et al.

Evaluating Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as a tool for experimental behavioral research

PLoS ONE

(2013)

De Freitas, J., & Cikara, M. (2017). Deep down my enemy is good: Thinking about the true self reduces intergroup bias....

J. De Freitas et al.

Origins of the belief in morally good true selves

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

(2017)

J. De Freitas et al.

Kill or die: Moral judgment alters linguistic coding of causality

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

(2017)

De Freitas, J., Hafri, A., Yamins, D. L. K., & Alvarez, G. A. (in preparation). Learning to recognize objects provides...

De Freitas, J., & Johnson, S. G. B. (2015). Behaviorist thinking in judgments of wrongness, punishment, and blame. In...

J. De Freitas et al.

Normative judgments and individual essence

Cognitive Science

(2017)

T. Felin et al.

Rationality, perception, and the all-seeing eye

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

(2017)

J.I. Flombaum et al.

Spatiotemporal priority as a fundamental principle of object persistence

P. Foot

Virtues and vices and other essays in moral philosophy

(1978)

J.D. Greene et al.

An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment

Science

(2001)

J. Gu et al.

Listen to your heart: When false somatic feedback shapes moral behavior

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

(2013)

J. Haidt

The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion

(2012)

J. Haidt et al.

Affect, culture, and morality, or is it wrong to eat your dog?

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

(1993)

J.Y. Halpern et al.

Graded causation and defaults

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

(2014)

Cited by (15)

Moral thin-slicing: Forming moral impressions from a brief glance
2024, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Despite the modern rarity with which people are visual witness to moral transgressions involving physical harm, such transgressions are more accessible than ever thanks to their availability on social media and in the news. On one hand, the literature suggests that people form fast moral impressions once they already know what has transpired (i.e., who did what to whom, and whether there was harm involved). On the other hand, almost all research on the psychological bases for moral judgment has used verbal vignettes, leaving open the question of how people form moral impressions about observed visual events. Using a naturalistic but well-controlled image set depicting social interactions, we find that observers are capable of ‘moral thin-slicing’: they reliably identify moral transgressions from visual scenes presented in the blink of an eye (< 100 ms), in ways that are surprisingly consistent with judgments made under no viewing-time constraints. Across four studies, we show that this remarkable ability arises because observers independently and rapidly extract the ‘atoms’ of moral judgment (i.e., event roles, and the level of harm involved). Our work supports recent proposals that many moral judgments are fast and intuitive and opens up exciting new avenues for understanding how people form moral judgments from visual observation.
Seeing social interactions
2023, Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Seeing the interactions between other people is a critical part of our everyday visual experience, but recognizing the social interactions of others is often considered outside the scope of vision and grouped with higher-level social cognition like theory of mind. Recent work, however, has revealed that recognition of social interactions is efficient and automatic, is well modeled by bottom-up computational algorithms, and occurs in visually-selective regions of the brain. We review recent evidence from these three methodologies (behavioral, computational, and neural) that converge to suggest the core of social interaction perception is visual. We propose a computational framework for how this process is carried out in the brain and offer directions for future interdisciplinary investigations of social perception.
Behavioral and neural representations en route to intuitive action understanding
2021, Neuropsychologia
Citation Excerpt :
As adults, we also naturally describe actions in terms of their goals, suggesting that they are a particularly salient property — we say that someone “gave money to a homeless person,” rather than that they “grasped a dollar and extended it to a homeless person” (Spunt et al., 2011). In addition, we attribute motives and agency even to simple shapes that move in a way that indicates animacy (Heider and Simmel, 1944; see also De Freitas and Alvarez, 2018; Isik et al., 2018). Finally, neuroimaging work suggests that we naturally represent other people in terms of the mental states that they habitually experience (Thornton et al., 2019a).
When we observe another person's actions, we process many kinds of information – from how their body moves to the intention behind their movements. What kinds of information underlie our intuitive understanding about how similar actions are to each other? To address this question, we measured the intuitive similarities among a large set of everyday action videos using multi-arrangement experiments, then used a modeling approach to predict this intuitive similarity space along three hypothesized properties. We found that similarity in the actors' inferred goals predicted the intuitive similarity judgments the best, followed by similarity in the actors' movements, with little contribution from the videos' visual appearance. In opportunistic fMRI analyses assessing brain-behavior correlations, we found suggestive evidence for an action processing hierarchy, in which these three kinds of action similarities are reflected in the structure of brain responses along a posterior-to-anterior gradient on the lateral surface of the visual cortex. Altogether, this work joins existing literature suggesting that humans are naturally tuned to process others' intentions, and that the visuo-motor cortex computes the perceptual precursors of the higher-level representations over which intuitive action perception operates.
Moral dynamics: Grounding moral judgment in intuitive physics and intuitive psychology
2021, Cognition
Citation Excerpt :
However, like recent video-based research, it infers mental states and causal roles based on morally relevant perceptual information. Rather than assuming a direct mapping from visual features to moral judgments (see, e.g., De Freitas & Alvarez, 2018; Iliev et al., 2012; Nagel & Waldmann, 2012), we propose that the route from visual input to moral judgment is mediated by an intuitive understanding of how the world works, one that encompasses both an intuitive theory of mind (Jara-Ettinger, Gweon, Schulz, & Tenenbaum, 2016; Wellman & Gelman, 1992), and an intuitive theory of physics (Battaglia, Hamrick, & Tenenbaum, 2013; Gerstenberg & Tenenbaum, 2017; Goodman, Tenenbaum, & Gerstenberg, 2015; Kubricht, Holyoak, & Lu, 2017; Ullman, Spelke, Battaglia, & Tenenbaum, 2017). These intuitive theories support rapid inferences about a person's mental states from their actions (Baker, Jara-Ettinger, Saxe, & Tenenbaum, 2017; Baker, Saxe, & Tenenbaum, 2009; Battaglia et al., 2013), and discern the causal role that a person's action played in bringing about the outcome (Gerstenberg, Goodman, Lagnado, & Tenenbaum, 2021; Gerstenberg, Peterson, Goodman, Lagnado, & Tenenbaum, 2017).
When holding others morally responsible, we care about what they did, and what they thought. Traditionally, research in moral psychology has relied on vignette studies, in which a protagonist's actions and thoughts are explicitly communicated. While this research has revealed what variables are important for moral judgment, such as actions and intentions, it is limited in providing a more detailed understanding of exactly how these variables affect moral judgment. Using dynamic visual stimuli that allow for a more fine-grained experimental control, recent studies have proposed a direct mapping from visual features to moral judgments. We embrace the use of visual stimuli in moral psychology, but question the plausibility of a feature-based theory of moral judgment. We propose that the connection from visual features to moral judgments is mediated by an inference about what the observed action reveals about the agent's mental states, and what causal role the agent's action played in bringing about the outcome. We present a computational model that formalizes moral judgments of agents in visual scenes as computations over an intuitive theory of physics combined with an intuitive theory of mind. We test the model's quantitative predictions in three experiments across a wide variety of dynamic interactions.
A counterfactual simulation model of causation by omission
2021, Cognition
When do people say that an event that did not happen was a cause? We extend the counterfactual simulation model (CSM) of causal judgment (Gerstenberg, Goodman, Lagnado, & Tenenbaum, 2021) and test it in a series of three experiments that look at people's causal judgments about omissions in dynamic physical interactions. The problem of omissive causation highlights a series of questions that need to be answered in order to give an adequate causal explanation of why something happened: what are the relevant variables, what are their possible values, how are putative causal relationships evaluated, and how is the causal responsibility for an outcome attributed to multiple causes? The CSM predicts that people make causal judgments about omissions in physical interactions by using their intuitive understanding of physics to mentally simulate what would have happened in relevant counterfactual situations. Prior work has argued that normative expectations affect judgments of omissive causation. Here we suggest a concrete mechanism of how this happens: expectations affect what counterfactuals people consider, and the more certain people are that the counterfactual outcome would have been different from what actually happened, the more causal they judge the omission to be. Our experiments show that both the structure of the physical situation as well as expectations about what will happen affect people's judgments.
The Perception of Relations
2021, Trends in Cognitive Sciences
The world contains not only objects and features (red apples, glass bowls, wooden tables), but also relations holding between them (apples contained in bowls, bowls supported by tables). Representations of these relations are often developmentally precocious and linguistically privileged; but how does the mind extract them in the first place? Although relations themselves cast no light onto our eyes, a growing body of work suggests that even very sophisticated relations display key signatures of automatic visual processing. Across physical, eventive, and social domains, relations such as support, fit, cause, chase, and even socially interact are extracted rapidly, are impossible to ignore, and influence other perceptual processes. Sophisticated and structured relations are not only judged and understood, but also seen — revealing surprisingly rich content in visual perception itself.

View all citing articles on Scopus

View full text

Original ArticlesYour visual system provides all the information you need to make moral judgments about generic visual events

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

Visual Illusions, and the distinction between perception and cognition

Experiment 1: illusory moral wrongs

Results & discussion

Experiment 2: extinguishing the effect with millisecond manipulations of task-irrelevant factors

Experiment 3: conceptual replication with a subtler manipulation

General discussion

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Cognition

Cognition

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part A

Cognition

Cognition

Cognition

Ethology and Sociobiology

Current Biology

Consciousness and Cognition

Vision Research

Cognition

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Computers in Human Behavior

Cognitive Psychology

Journal of Memory and Language

Lightness perception and lightness illusions

Culpable control and the psychology of blame

Psychological Bulletin

Causal conceptions in social explanation and moral evaluation: A historical tour

Perspectives on Psychological Science

You see, the ends don’t justify the means: Visual imagery and moral judgment

Psychological Science

The perception of apparent movement

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B

How the brain perceives causality: An event-related fMRI study

NeuroReport

Causal contraction: Spatial binding in the perception of collision events

Psychological Science

Slow motion increases perceived intent

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Effects of grouping and attention on the perception of causality

Perception & Psychophysics

Perceiving causality after the fact: Postdiction in the temporal dynamics of causal perception

Perception

Cognitive phenomenology: Feelings and the construction of judgment

The waterfall illusion

Analysis

Voluntary action and causality in temporal binding

Experimental Brain Research

Evaluating Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as a tool for experimental behavioral research

PLoS ONE

Origins of the belief in morally good true selves

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Kill or die: Moral judgment alters linguistic coding of causality

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Normative judgments and individual essence

Cognitive Science

Rationality, perception, and the all-seeing eye

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

Spatiotemporal priority as a fundamental principle of object persistence

Virtues and vices and other essays in moral philosophy

An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment

Science

Listen to your heart: When false somatic feedback shapes moral behavior

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion

Affect, culture, and morality, or is it wrong to eat your dog?

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Graded causation and defaults

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

Original Articles
Your visual system provides all the information you need to make moral judgments about generic visual events