Morality and the imagination: Real-world moral beliefs interfere with imagining fictional content

Abstract

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper was to test whether imaginative resistance – a term used in the philosophical literature to describe the reluctance to imagine counter-moral worlds – is experienced by people when they are asked to do something rather than just imagine it. Prior research suggests that people find it more difficult to imagine morally deviant worlds. Here, in a within-subjects design, we asked participants to describe in writing morally deviant, dystopian, and fantastical worlds; tell us if they had successfully completed the task, and if not, why not; and report how easy it was for them to imagine the fictional world. Despite producing more words in the morally deviant condition, participants were more likely to believe they had failed to describe a world in which the prescribed scenario was true. Associations between creativity, moral identity, need for cognition, disgust sensitivity, and personality and task performance were explored.