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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Moral Frames. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Moral Frames. Show all posts

Thursday, May 20, 2021

Behavioral and Neural Representations en route to Intuitive Action Understanding

L. Tarhan, J. De Freitas, & T. Konkle
BioRxiv
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.08.438996

Abstract

When we observe another person’s actions, we process many kinds of information – from how their body moves to the intention behind their movements. What kinds of information underlie our intuitive understanding about how similar actions are to each other? To address this question, we measured the intuitive similarities among a large set of everyday action videos using multi-arrangement experiments, then used a modeling approach to predict this intuitive similarity space along three hypothesized properties. We found that similarity in the actors’ inferred goals predicted the intuitive similarity judgments the best, followed by similarity in the actors’ movements, with little contribution from the videos’ visual appearance. In opportunistic fMRI analyses assessing brain-behavior correlations, we found evidence for an action processing hierarchy, in which these three kinds of action similarities are reflected in the structure of brain responses along a posterior-to-anterior gradient on the lateral surface of the visual cortex. Altogether, this work joins existing literature suggesting that humans are naturally tuned to process others’ intentions, and that the visuo-motor cortex computes the perceptual precursors of the higher-level representations over which intuitive action perception operates.

From the Discussion

Intuitive Action Representations in the Mind

Our primary finding was that judgments about the similarity of actors’ goals was the best predictor of intuitive action similarity judgments. In addition, these goals accounted for the most unique variance in the intuitive similarity data. We interpret this to mean that humans naturally and intuitively process other actors’ internal motivations and thoughts, even in the absence of an explicitly social task. This conclusion adds to a rich literature showing that humans automatically represent others in terms of their mental states, even from a very young age (Gergely and Csibra, 2003; Jara-Ettinger et al., 2016; Liu et al., 2017; Reid et al., 2007; Thornton et al., 2019a,b). In addition, we found that similarity in the actors’ movements also predicted intuitive judgments moderately well and accounted for a smaller amount of unique variance in the data. This finding goes beyond our current understanding of the factors driving natural action processing, to suggest that kinematic information also contributes to intuitive action perception. In contrast, similarity in the videos’ visual appearance did not account for any unique variance in the data, suggesting that lower-level visual properties such as color, form, and motion direction do not have much influence on natural action perception.

A natural extension of these findings is to investigate the specific features that we use to calculate actors’ goals and movements. For example, how important are speed, trajectory, and movement quality (e.g., shaky or smooth) for our assessment of the similarity among actions’ movements? And, do we consider physical variables – such as facial expression – when inferring actors’ goals? Digging into these specific feature dimensions will bring further clarity to the cognitive processes driving intuitive action perception.

Wednesday, March 24, 2021

Does observability amplify sensitivity to moral frames? Evaluating a reputation-based account of moral preferences

Capraro, V., Jordan, J., & Tappin, B. M. 
(2020, April 9). 
https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/bqjcv

Abstract

A growing body of work suggests that people are sensitive to moral framing in economic games involving prosociality, suggesting that people hold moral preferences for doing the “right thing”. What gives rise to these preferences? Here, we evaluate the explanatory power of a reputation-based account, which proposes that people respond to moral frames because they are motivated to look good in the eyes of others. Across four pre-registered experiments (total N = 9,601), we investigated whether reputational incentives amplify sensitivity to framing effects. Studies 1-3 manipulated (i) whether moral or neutral framing was used to describe a Trade-Off Game (in which participants chose between prioritizing equality or efficiency) and (ii) whether Trade-Off Game choices were observable to a social partner in a subsequent Trust Game. These studies found that observability does not significantly amplify sensitivity to moral framing. Study 4 ruled out the alternative explanation that the observability manipulation from Studies 1-3 is too weak to influence behavior. In Study 4, the same observability manipulation did significantly amplify sensitivity to normative information (about what others see as moral in the Trade-Off Game). Together, these results suggest that moral frames may tap into moral preferences that are relatively deeply internalized, such that the power of moral frames is not strongly enhanced by making the morally-framed behavior observable to others.

From the Discussion

Our results have implications for interventions that draw on moral framing effects to encourage socially desirable behavior. They suggest that such interventions can be successful even when behavior is not observable to others and thus reputation is not at stake—and in fact, that the efficacy of moral framing effects is not strongly enhanced by making behavior observable. Thus, our results suggest that targeting contexts where reputation is at stake is not an especially important priority for individuals seeking to maximize the impact of interventions based on moral framing.  This  conclusion  provides  an  optimistic  view  of  the  potential  of such interventions, given that there may be many contexts in which it is difficult to make behavior observable but yet possible to frame a decision in a way that encourages prosociality—for example, when  crowdsourcing  donations  anonymously(or  nearly  anonymously)on  the Internet.Future research should investigate the power of moral framing to promote prosocial behaviour in anonymous contexts outside of the laboratory.