Amount awarded: $27,171
Moral agency describes individuals’ choices to engage in moral behavior, but it is unclear that moral judgment is solely a matter of cognitive, rational choice. Indeed, the scientific literature suggests that in some cases, the influence of emotion processes over cognition is necessary to make the morally acceptable choice. Other evidence suggests that some level of moral perception occurs in 300ms or less, much more quickly than a moral judgment, which is on the order of 2000ms. Taken together, this suggests that the role of the moral agent may be as an attentional director at a pre-conscious level, defined in part by trait characteristics of the individual. Given the continuing harm caused by antisocial behavior and lack of prosocial intervention in suffering, there remains a critical need for insight into the mechanisms underlying moral agency. Therefore, the overall objective for this project is to describe the features influencing moral perception and attention. The central hypothesis is that salient, morally relevant properties of visual content will influence moral deliberation, with individual differences influencing the tendency to detect and use these properties. This project has two specific aims: 1) To determine the extent to which attention to salient features of stimuli is adequate for moral deliberation; and 2) To identify the extent to which various individual differences correlate with moral sensitivity in attention. The first study will be an fMRI study wherein subjects (n = 30) will view moral, emotional, and neutral images for brief durations followed by a prompt to make a retrospective rating of moral content. This task will first be piloted (n = 100) behaviorally. We hypothesize that following visual presentations of moral stimuli too short to benefit from high-level cognitive influences on attention, individuals will have access to the relevant moral content (distinct from emotional content) to deliberate and make a moral evaluation. We expect this to be true for supraliminal stimuli, but not subliminal, providing important insight into the time course of moral perception. The second study will be an eye-tracking study wherein subjects (n = 50) will view moral and matched non-moral images and later will be asked to recall whether they had seen the image before. Subjects will also complete self-report measures of personality and will be given the opportunity to decide to donate a portion of their study compensation. We hypothesize that individuals who engage in greater prosocial behavior will also better attend to and remember cases of moral significance. Not only will completion of these two aims provide into the nature of moral agency, it will lay the groundwork for future development of training to leverage these individual characteristics to increase prosocial / reduce antisocial behavior.
Samantha Fede, PhD. Assistant Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, Auburn University
Doug Addleman, PhD. Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College
Marshall Bierson, PhD. Assistant Professor, School of Philosophy , Catholic University of America
Ryan Daley, PhD. Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Gordon College
Laura Soter, PhD. Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Philosophy, Duke University
Denis Buehler, PhD. Assistant Professor, Departments of Philosophy and Cognitive Science , Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris