General Discussion

The present study illustrates two related influences on moral judgment: the affective valuation of actions, and the simulation of an agent perspective. In Experiments 1 and 2, individual differences in action focus (but not outcome focus) were correlated with moral judgment, such that greater focus on actions was associated with deontological moral judgment on personal moral dilemmas and greater condemnation of purity violations. Participants who reported making moral judgments by focusing on the action were likely to focus on the aversive character of the actions involved in purity and personal harm violations, and condemn these actions even in the face of consequentialist reasons to condone them. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated the causal role of agent perspective-taking in the condemnation of purity and harm violations. When induced to adopt the agent‘s perspective in our vignettes, participants condemned moral violations significantly more than when induced to adopt a passive bystander‘s perspective, matching level of detail across conditions.

These findings help to resolve the precise role of affect in the judgment of moral dilemmas that involve a trade-off among lives. The affective response to the footbridge version of the trolley problem, for instance, appears to arise principally not from empathy for the victim being pushed, but rather from an aversion to performing harmful actions, like pushing, that typically bring about harm. As we saw in Chapter 3, moral

judgment is sensitive to motor features of the evaluated action, such as whether the agent directly applies muscular force to the victim (Greene et al., 2009). The results reported here suggest that this may be because we unconsciously adopt the agent‘s perspective and mentally simulate their behavior when judging third parties. This simulation in turn elicits an aversive affective response congruent with own performance of the action, which promotes moral condemnation. This might be termed ―evaluative simulation‖, an act of perspective-taking that functions not to describe, predict or explain another‘s behavior (Gallese & Goldman, 1998; Goldman, 2006; Gordon, 1986), but rather to judge it (Miller & Cushman, 2013; Miller et al., 2013). Prior evidence of the role of own disgust sensitivity in the condemnation of third-party purity violations, along with our present finding that agent perspective-taking moderated this relationship, suggests that processes of evaluative simulation are responsible for condemnation in the domain of purity too. Lastly, further evidence of the interference of visual (Amit & Greene, 2012; Schnall et al., 2008) and olfactory (Inbar et al., 2012) systems with processes of moral judgment bolsters the case for a mechanism of moral evaluation that makes use of sensorimotor representations in condemning the behavior of others.

The mechanism of action-aversion, and its extension to the task of third-party moral judgment, help to explain some familiar yet puzzling aspects of our moral psychology as it is deployed in everyday contexts. Actions that some people find personally aversive yet do not cause obvious direct harm – such as swearing, nudism and homosexual intercourse – may become a target of condemnation. Conversely, actions that are not typically associated with harm and thus fail to elicit a learned action aversion – for instance, using powerful fertilizers for home lawn care, or purchasing sweatshop-manufactured clothing – may be condoned regardless of the harmful outcomes that they ultimately bring about.

An important area for further investigation is the relationship between the evaluative focus on actions versus outcomes and the dyadic theory of moral judgment (Gray, Young & Waytz, 2012). According to the dyadic theory, all moral evaluation involves the perception of a harm-doing agent and a suffering patient, a phenomenon that is termed dyadic completion. There is an evident connection between these agent and patient roles and the emphasis on action versus outcome that we have discussed here. For our present purposes we remain agnostic on whether all moral evaluation

necessarily involves the perception of both dyadic roles; however, our research does

suggest that there may be individual differences in the extent to which an agent‘s action, versus its outcomes to patients, are the primary target of focus during moral evaluation.

One limitation of the present study is the small-to-medium effect sizes reported throughout. Even in the examination of purity violations, where the conceptual case for the role of agent focus is strong, we did not observe large effects on moral judgment. This weakness may owe to our methodological approach. For example, we sought to measure individual differences in action and outcome foci, processes arguably at a cognitive-attentional level, by employing a psychometric scale perhaps better suited to capture higher-level attitudinal and personality differences. That is, the items on the self-regulation scale express beliefs and attitudes about morality that may signal an underlying action or outcome focus, but they do not directly target the lower-level processes of interest. This methodological ―distance‖ from the target psychological variables may have reduced the validity and accuracy of our indices of action and outcome foci and (if the theoretical framework is correct) could be responsible for the modest effect sizes we observed. Our perspective manipulation similarly did not yield large effects. One reason for this may be the lack of time pressure during exposure to the vignettes, giving participants the opportunity to counteract the manipulation by mentally ―shifting out‖ of the induced perspective.

Additionally, in contrast to the significant effect of manipulating perspective- taking through narrative focus, perspective-taking via self report did not consistently predict moral judgment. We have suggested that the relevant processes of agent and victim foci may operate automatically and unconsciously (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Hauser et al., 2007), but this hypothesis awaits systematic investigation.

Still, the present study offers some promising first steps in establishing the source of aversive affect in moral judgment. Proponents of the affective revolution in moral psychology have largely taken empathy to be the basis of moral judgment, at least in the harm domain. These studies highlight an alternative account: Moral condemnation largely depends upon an intrinsic aversion to performing harmful actions extended to third parties through an automatic process of evaluative simulation. Outcome-focused affect such as empathy may play a key role in the developmental acquisition of action aversion (Blair, 1995; Blair et al., 1997), but apparently plays a relatively weaker role in generating the widespread condemnation of welfare sacrifices in personal dilemmas. At the level of psychological processing, the analogy to the purity domain seems fruitful: our attitudes concerning the categorical immorality of eating pet dogs and pushing people off bridges depend to a surprising extent on imagining how disturbing it would be to do those things ourselves.