Thank you Yoonseo Zoh (zohyos7.github.io) for sharing your work with us on "Intuitive Theories in Moral Cognition". Intuitive theories structure how people represent dilemmas, how they generalize to new contexts, and how they switch between representations based on resource-rational constraints.
Thanks so much, Tobi! It was a pleasure to share my work with your lab :)
New preprint: Empathy, Thick and Thin
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
It is perhaps foolhardy to attempt to say something new about a topic as widely studied as empathy. I tried anyway! 1/
I’m still getting started on Bluesky and just realized I hadn’t added my collaborators here 😅 Thanks again to my amazing collaborators for all their support!💖 @psyhongbo.bsky.social @annayahprosser.bsky.social @brainapps.bsky.social @stevewcchang.bsky.social
I’m deeply grateful to my collaborators and my advisor, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, for their guidance on this project. I’m also extending this line of research to examine how resource-rational constraints shape how we represent others’ moral character. Stay tuned🤩⭐️!
There are more fascinating results in the paper that I couldn’t fit here—go check it out! 👉
static1.squarespace.com/static/538ca...
More broadly, these findings help explain the often mixed relationship between people’s explicit moral endorsements and their concrete moral decisions, showing that intuitive moral theories shape moral cognition at a representational level beyond overt behavior.
The results were striking: Even when two people made different choices, their brains represented those choices similarly if they endorsed the two utilitarian principles to a similar degree. In other words, alignment in intuitive moral theories shaped how people mentally represented moral problems🧠
This approach allowed us to test whether people who endorse similar moral theories also show similar neural representations of ambiguous moral problems—beyond what can be explained by their overt decisions.
We used a moral decision-making task that was not explicitly aligned with either theory, making its relevance intentionally ambiguous. Using neuroimaging, we examined neural representational similarity across participants while controlling for similarities in their behavioral choices.
We conceptualized these dimensions as distinct intuitive moral theories that frame different patterns of moral judgment and behavior.
Recent research suggests that individual differences in utilitarian tendencies fall along two dimensions: a permissive attitude toward harming others for greater good (instrumental harm) and an impartial concern for others’ welfare (impartial beneficence).
In this work, we asked: what are the consequences of holding different intuitive moral theories? Do distinct moral theories shape how people represent and reason about moral problems—and do these effects extend beyond contexts directly tied to a theory’s content? 🤔
I’m thrilled to share that our paper is now published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General!🧵👇 psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...
