The moral landscape of war: A registered report testing how the war context shapes morality's constraints on default representations of possibility

Publication date: November 2019Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 85Author(s): Hanne M. Watkins, Mark BrandtAbstractMental representations of possibility in everyday contexts incorporate descriptive and prescriptive norms. People intuitively think that Mr. X cannot perform an immoral action; even when upon deliberation they realize that the immoral action is in fact possible (Phillips & Cushman, 2017). We replicate this “moral-possibility constraint”, providing further support for the notion that default representations of possibility are - at first pass - limited to moral alternatives. We also test how context affects representations of possibility by asking whether the same findings hold in a war context. This context has different prescriptive norms (e.g., it is permissible to kill combatants, but not non-combatants), and we use Phillips and Cushman's (2017) reaction-time paradigm to test whether these prescriptive norms shape people's representations of what is possible in war. We find that the moral-possibility constraint is sensitive to variation in degree of immorality (e.g., killing a person vs. torturing a child); however the war context did not influence the constraint in the way we expected. The results further advance our understanding of the relationship between morality and domain-general cognition, and provide insight into the moral landscape of war.

Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology - July 20, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research