Morality constrains the default representation of what is possible

Abstract

The capacity for representing and reasoning over sets of possibilities, or modal cognition, supports diverse kinds of high-level judgments: causal reasoning, moral judgment, language comprehension, and more. Prior research on modal cognition asks how humans explicitly and deliberatively reason about what is possible but has not investigated whether or how people have a default, implicit representation of which events are possible. We present three studies that characterize the role of implicit representations of possibility in cognition. Collectively, these studies differentiate explicit reasoning about possibilities from default implicit representations, demonstrate that human adults often default to treating immoral and irrational events as impossible, and provide a case study of high-level cognitive judgments relying on default implicit representations of possibility rather than explicit deliberation.modality | high-level cognition | morality | norms | possibility

Is the most representative skunk the average or the stinkiest? Developmental changes in representations of biological categories

“…If this is the case, then we might find more stability in these age-related trends, both across cultures as well as across domains. We suspect that ideals are especially salient for young children due to a combination of factors, including a general bias to focus on prescriptive norms (Kalish & Shiverick, 2004; Phillips & Cushman, 2017; Roberts et al, 2017). However, because the present studies focused only on animal categories, it is unclear whether the patterns observed in the current studies might be unique to biological reasoning or rather reflect more domain general features of conceptual structure.…”

“…Young children are also more likely to prioritize prescriptive norms over other information to infer what category members will be like (Kalish & Lawson, 2008; Kalish & Shiverick, 2004). Preschoolers even conflate judgments of probability, possibility, and permissibility (e.g., saying it would be immoral for someone to float in the air and impossible for someone to steal or tell a lie; Shtulman & Phillips, 2018; see also Phillips & Cushman, 2017; Shtulman & Carey, 2007; Tisak & Turiel, 1988). Given this tendency to conflate descriptive and prescriptive information (and to readily adopt prescriptive views), we thought that young children might value exemplars that they view as best exemplifying category norms, even if such exemplars are unusual (e.g., to focus on the belief that cheetahs should run fast over information indicating that actual cheetahs vary in their running speed, and thus to view the very fastest cheetah as better representing cheetahs than an average one).…”

The developmental and cultural psychology of free will

“…Initially, young children have trouble imagining alternatives to improbable or immoral events and so tend to say that they are impossible (Lane, Ronfard, Francioli, & Harris, ). It is not until age 7 that they fully differentiate impossible events from unlikely or immoral ones (Shtulman & Carey, ; Shtulman & Phillips, ; see also Phillips & Cushman, , for ways in which this reaction persists in adults under cognitive load). For young children, a rule of thumb seems to be that any credible cause, whether it be a statistical regularity, a mental state, or a moral rule, is also a credible constraint on possibility, and thus on freedom of choice.…”

The psychological representation of modality

“…Recent research actually provides a test of this hypothesis by comparing adults' judgments of possibility when they reflectively deliberate to their judgments of possibility when they are forced to respond extremely quickly (and thus are less able to engage in any kind of sophisticated or effortful reasoning). When adults are unable to engage in sophisticated reasoning, their judgments of what is possible begin to strongly resemble than those of young children (Phillips & Cushman, ).…”