@article {5078, title = {Moral dynamics: Grounding moral judgment in intuitive physics and intuitive psychology}, journal = {Cognition}, volume = {217}, year = {2021}, month = {05/2021}, pages = {104890}, abstract = {

When holding others morally responsible, we care about what they did, and what they thought. Traditionally, research in moral psychology has relied on vignette studies, in which a protagonist{\textquoteright}s actions and thoughts are explicitly communicated. While this research has revealed what variables are important for moral judgment, such as actions and intentions, it is limited in providing a more detailed understanding of exactly how these variables affect moral judgment. Using dynamic visual stimuli that allow for a more fine-grained experimental control, recent studies have proposed a direct mapping from visual features to moral judgments. We embrace the use of visual stimuli in moral psychology, but question the plausibility of a feature-based theory of moral judgment. We propose that the connection from visual features to moral judgments is mediated by an inference about what the observed action reveals about the agent{\textquoteright}s mental states, and what causal role the agent{\textquoteright}s action played in bringing about the outcome. We present a computational model that formalizes moral judgments of agents in visual scenes as computations over an intuitive theory of physics combined with an intuitive theory of mind. We test the model{\textquoteright}s quantitative predictions in three experiments across a wide variety of dynamic interactions between agent and patient.

}, issn = {00100277}, doi = {10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104890}, url = {https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0010027721003139}, author = {Sosa, Felix A. and Ullman, Tomer and Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Samuel J Gershman and Gerstenberg, Tobias} }