Amount awarded: $26, 860
Group membership impacts how we remember and judge others, but this phenomenon is underexplored. Moreover, studies on memory and group membership typically present participants with others’ explicitly moral (e.g., helping) or immoral (e.g., harming) actions. Yet, a third category of behaviors often occurs - those that appear to be morally ambiguous - when one cannot tell whether the agent's motivations for an action are moral, immoral, or a mix. In these cases, the way that we remember and judge the agent and their actions may be impacted by their group membership (e.g. ingroup/outgroup status or relationship to other group members) and this in turn may result in practical and/or epistemic harms for those who are misremembered (known as mnemonic injustice). The present proposal investigates this phenomenon through pursuing three aims which examine how group membership can bias memory and evaluation of agents’ morally ambiguous actions and character. Our first two aims address whether group membership impacts memory prioritization and third-person evaluation of agents’ morally ambiguous actions in ecologically valid contexts, and through assigned minimal groups. Our third aim addresses how memory prioritization and third-person evaluations are impacted by the (in)consistency of agents’ morally ambiguous actions with the actions of other members of their ingroup. We will run separate online behavioral studies to evaluate each of these three AIMs. During all three studies, participants will be presented with twelve vignettes in which a different agent engages in a morally ambiguous action (i.e. the participant is presented with possible moral and immoral motivations for the action of the agent). In Study 1, the agent is either the same race or a different race from the participant; in Study 2, the agent is in either the minimal assigned ingroup or outgroup of the participant; and in Study 3, a sentence is inserted into the vignette to manipulate the (in)consistency of the agent’s actions with their ingroup. Then, in each of the Studies 1-3, following a delay, participants will be asked to recall as much as they can about each vignette and then make evaluations about the moral status of each agent’s action and character. We hypothesize that in all three studies: 1) the independent variable—group membership or action (in)consistency—will bias memory for the motivations of agents’ actions and 2) this explicitly retrieved memory content will impact moral evaluations of the agent. Completion of these three studies will help further illuminate the behavioral mechanisms involved in the relationship between memory and moral judgment in group membership contexts, and in so doing, will also provide crucial empirical support for the phenomenon of mnemonic injustice. This will in turn serve as a foundation for further investigation of the neural underpinnings of these behavioral mechanisms as well as the practical strategies for combating and remedying mnemonic injustice.
Ryan Daley, PhD. Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Gordon College
Kate Finley, PhD. Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Hope College
Marina Trakas, PhD. Postdoctoral Scholar, Institute of Philosophical Research
Laura Soter, PhD. Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Philosophy, Duke University
Cecilia Forcato, PhD. Associate Professor, Buenos Aires Technological Institute
Laura Kaczer, PhD. Assistant Professor, Universidad of Buenos Aires