Moral judgment as reasoning by constraint satisfaction.

May's careful examination of empirical evidence makes a compelling case against the primacy of emotion in driving moral judgments. At the same time, emotion certainly is involved in moral judgments. We argue that emotion interacts with beliefs, values, and moral principles through a process of coherence-based reasoning (operating at least partially below the level of conscious awareness) in generating moral judgments and decisions.

Misleading Health Consumers Through Violations of Communicative Norms: A Case Study of Online Diabetes Education.

Communication is a cooperative endeavor that goes well beyond decoding sentences' literal meaning. Listeners actively construe the meaning of utterances from both their literal meanings and the pragmatic principles that govern communication. When communicators make pragmatically infelicitous statements, the effects can be similar to paltering-misleading speech that evokes false inferences from true statements. The American Diabetes Association's (ADA's) "Diabetes Myths" website provides a real-world case study in such misleading communications. Calling something a myth implies that it is clearly false. Instead, the ADA's "myths" are false only because of some technicality or uncharitable reading. We compared participants' baseline knowledge of diabetes with that of participants who read either the ADA's myths or the myths rewritten as questions that do not presuppose the statement is false. As predicted, exposure to the ADA's "myths," but not to the rephrased questions, reduced basic knowledge of diabetes. Our findings underscore the need to consider psycholinguistic principles in mass communications.

Countering antivaccination attitudes.

Three times as many cases of measles were reported in the United States in 2014 as in 2013. The reemergence of measles has been linked to a dangerous trend: parents refusing vaccinations for their children. Efforts have been made to counter people's antivaccination attitudes by providing scientific evidence refuting vaccination myths, but these interventions have proven ineffective. This study shows that highlighting factual information about the dangers of communicable diseases can positively impact people's attitudes to vaccination. This method outperformed alternative interventions aimed at undercutting vaccination myths.

The Love of Large Numbers: A Popularity Bias in Consumer Choice.

Social learning-the ability to learn from observing the decisions of other people and the outcomes of those decisions-is fundamental to human evolutionary and cultural success. The Internet now provides social evidence on an unprecedented scale. However, properly utilizing this evidence requires a capacity for statistical inference. We examined how people's interpretation of online review scores is influenced by the numbers of reviews-a potential indicator both of an item's popularity and of the precision of the average review score. Our task was designed to pit statistical information against social information. We modeled the behavior of an "intuitive statistician" using empirical prior information from millions of reviews posted on Amazon.com and then compared the model's predictions with the behavior of experimental participants. Under certain conditions, people preferred a product with more reviews to one with fewer reviews even though the statistical model indicated that the latter was likely to be of higher quality than the former. Overall, participants' judgments suggested that they failed to make meaningful statistical inferences.

Marginally Significant Effects as Evidence for Hypotheses: Changing Attitudes Over Four Decades.

Some effects are statistically significant. Other effects do not reach the threshold of statistical significance and are sometimes described as "marginally significant" or as "approaching significance." Although the concept of marginal significance is widely deployed in academic psychology, there has been very little systematic examination of psychologists' attitudes toward these effects. Here, we report an observational study in which we investigated psychologists' attitudes concerning marginal significance by examining their language in over 1,500 articles published in top-tier cognitive, developmental, and social psychology journals. We observed a large change over the course of four decades in psychologists' tendency to describe a p value as marginally significant, and overall rates of use appear to differ across subfields. We discuss possible explanations for these findings, as well as their implications for psychological research.

Causal competition based on generic priors.

Although we live in a complex and multi-causal world, learners often lack sufficient data and/or cognitive resources to acquire a fully veridical causal model. The general goal of making precise predictions with energy-efficient representations suggests a generic prior favoring causal models that include a relatively small number of strong causes. Such "sparse and strong" priors make it possible to quickly identify the most potent individual causes, relegating weaker causes to secondary status or eliminating them from consideration altogether. Sparse-and-strong priors predict that competition will be observed between candidate causes of the same polarity (i.e., generative or else preventive) even if they occur independently. For instance, the strength of a moderately strong cause should be underestimated when an uncorrelated strong cause also occurs in the general learning environment, relative to when a weaker cause also occurs. We report three experiments investigating whether independently-occurring causes (either generative or preventive) compete when people make judgments of causal strength. Cue competition was indeed observed for both generative and preventive causes. The data were used to assess alternative computational models of human learning in complex multi-causal situations.

Modeling and leveraging intuitive theories to improve vaccine attitudes.

Much of the richness of human thought is supported by people's intuitive theories-mental frameworks capturing the perceived structure of the world. But intuitive theories can also contain and reinforce dangerous misconceptions. In this paper, we take up the case of misconceptions about vaccine safety that discourages vaccination. These misconceptions constitute a major public health risk that predates the coronavirus pandemic but that has become all the more dire in recent years. We argue that addressing such misconceptions requires awareness of the broader conceptual contexts in which they are embedded. To build this understanding, we examined the structure and revision of people's intuitive theories of vaccination in five large survey studies (total N = 3,196). Based on these data, we present a cognitive model of the intuitive theory surrounding people's decisions about whether to vaccinate young children against diseases like measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR). Using this model, we were able to make accurate predictions about how people's beliefs would be revised in light of educational interventions, design an effective new intervention encouraging vaccination, and understand how these beliefs were affected by real-world events (the measles outbreaks of 2019). In addition to presenting a promising way forward for promoting the MMR vaccine, this approach has clear implications for encouraging the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines, especially among parents of young children. At the same time, this work provides the foundation for richer understandings of intuitive theories and belief revision more broadly. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

When intents to educate can misinform: Inadvertent paltering through violations of communicative norms.

Paltering is a form of deception whereby true statements are used to mislead and is widely employed in negotiations, marketing, espionage, and ordinary communications where speakers hold ulterior motives. We argue that paltering is accomplished through strategic violations of communicative norms such as the Gricean cooperative principles of relevance, quantity, quality and manner. We further argue that, just as genuine paltering deceives by deliberately violating communicative norms, inadvertent violations of these norms may be just as misleading. In this work, we demonstrated that educational information presented prominently on the American Diabetes Association website violated the Gricean communicative principles and disrupted readers' performance on a test of diabetes knowledge. To establish the effects of these communicative violations, we revised the ADA's information to preserve the original content while better adhering to pragmatic principles. When these ADA explanations were judiciously revised to minimize pragmatic violations, they were transformed from misleading to educational.

Moral Severity is Represented as a Domain-General Magnitude.

The severity of moral violations can vary by degree. For instance, although both are immoral, murder is a more severe violation than lying. Though this point is well established in Ethics and the law, relatively little research has been directed at examining how moral severity is represented psychologically. Most prominent moral psychological theories are aimed at explaining first-order moral judgments and are silent on second-order metaethical judgments, such as comparisons of severity. Here, the relative severity of 20 moral violations was established in a preliminary study. Then, a second group of participants were asked to decide which of two moral violations was more severe for all possible combinations of these 20 violations. Participant's response times exhibited two signatures of domain-general magnitude comparisons: we observed both a distance effect and a semantic congruity effect. These findings suggest that moral severity is represented in a similar fashion as other continuous magnitudes.

How Large Is the Role of Emotion in Judgments of Moral Dilemmas?

Moral dilemmas often pose dramatic and gut-wrenching emotional choices. It is now widely accepted that emotions are not simply experienced alongside people's judgments about moral dilemmas, but that our affective processes play a central role in determining those judgments. However, much of the evidence purporting to demonstrate the connection between people's emotional responses and their judgments about moral dilemmas has recently been called into question. In the present studies, we reexamined the role of emotion in people's judgments about moral dilemmas using a validated self-report measure of emotion. We measured participants' specific emotional responses to moral dilemmas and, although we found that moral dilemmas evoked strong emotional responses, we found that these responses were only weakly correlated with participants' moral judgments. We argue that the purportedly strong connection between emotion and judgments of moral dilemmas may have been overestimated.

Deontological coherence: A framework for commonsense moral reasoning.

We review a broad range of work, primarily in cognitive and social psychology, that provides insight into the processes of moral judgment. In particular, we consider research on pragmatic reasoning about regulations and on coherence in decision making, both areas in which psychological theories have been guided by work in legal philosophy. Armed with these essential prerequisites, we sketch a psychological framework for how ordinary people make judgments about moral issues. Based on a literature review, we show how the framework of deontological coherence unifies findings in moral psychology that have often been explained in terms of a grab-bag of heuristics and biases. (PsycINFO Database Record

A Single Counterexample Leads to Moral Belief Revision.

What kind of evidence will lead people to revise their moral beliefs? Moral beliefs are often strongly held convictions, and existing research has shown that morality is rooted in emotion and socialization rather than deliberative reasoning. In addition, more general issues-such as confirmation bias-further impede coherent belief revision. Here, we explored a unique means for inducing belief revision. In two experiments, participants considered a moral dilemma in which an overwhelming majority of people judged that it was inappropriate to take action to maximize utility. Their judgments contradicted a utilitarian principle they otherwise strongly endorsed. Exposure to this scenario led participants to revise their belief in the utilitarian principle, and this revision persisted over several hours. This method provides a new avenue for inducing belief revision.

A Bayesian framework for knowledge attribution: evidence from semantic integration.

We propose a Bayesian framework for the attribution of knowledge, and apply this framework to generate novel predictions about knowledge attribution for different types of "Gettier cases", in which an agent is led to a justified true belief yet has made erroneous assumptions. We tested these predictions using a paradigm based on semantic integration. We coded the frequencies with which participants falsely recalled the word "thought" as "knew" (or a near synonym), yielding an implicit measure of conceptual activation. Our experiments confirmed the predictions of our Bayesian account of knowledge attribution across three experiments. We found that Gettier cases due to counterfeit objects were not treated as knowledge (Experiment 1), but those due to intentionally-replaced evidence were (Experiment 2). Our findings are not well explained by an alternative account focused only on luck, because accidentally-replaced evidence activated the knowledge concept more strongly than did similar false belief cases (Experiment 3). We observed a consistent pattern of results across a number of different vignettes that varied the quality and type of evidence available to agents, the relative stakes involved, and surface details of content. Accordingly, the present findings establish basic phenomena surrounding people's knowledge attributions in Gettier cases, and provide explanations of these phenomena within a Bayesian framework.

Array training in a categorization task.

Two components of categorization, within-category commonalities and between-category distinctiveness, were investigated in a categorization task. Subjects learned three prototype categories composed of moderately high distortions, by observing arrays containing patterns that belonged either to a common prototype category or to three different categories; a third group learned patterns presented one at a time, mirroring the standard paradigm. Following 6 learning blocks, subjects transferred to old patterns and new patterns at low-, medium-, and high-level distortions of the category prototype. The results showed that array training facilitated learning, especially when patterns in the array belonged to the same category. Transfer results showed a strong gradient effect across pattern distortion level for all conditions, with the highest performance obtained following array training on different category patterns and worst in the control condition. Interestingly, the old training patterns were classified worse than new low and no better than medium distortions. Neither this ordering nor the steepness of the gradient across prototype similarity for each condition could be predicted by the generalized context model. A prototype model better captured the steep gradient and ordinal pattern of results, although the overall fits were only slightly better than the exemplar model. The crucial role played by category commonalities and distinctiveness on categorical representations is addressed.