Does moral valence influence the construal of alternative possibilities?

Abstract

It is often thought that an agent may be held morally responsible for bringing about a negative outcome only if they could have done otherwise. Inspired by previous research linking moral judgment to free will ascriptions and representations of possibility, we probe the reverse link: Does learning about a morally undesirable outcome make preferable alternatives appear more possible? We find modest evidence that this could be the case. In a preregistered experiment, we presented 317 participants with animated footage of a traffic accident in which two bystanders fail to intervene as a third person gets run over by bus, and manipulated whether the victim was evil, virtuous, or neutral. Judging from the same visual input, people indicate that saving an evil victim would have been slightly less possible than saving a virtuous or neutral victim, and arriving at the conclusion that it would have been possible demanded more time. Using drift-diffusion modeling to better understand the underlying cognitive processes, we found that participants were biased against counterfactual attempts to save the evil victim’s life, but then gathered evidence toward their decisions at the same rate regardless of the victim’s morality.