Kill or Die: Moral Judgment Alters Linguistic Coding of Causality
Kill or Die: Moral Judgment Alters Linguistic Coding of Causality
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DOI：
10.1037/xlm0000369
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发表时间：
2017-08-01
影响因子：
2.6
通讯作者：
Pinker, Steven
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
De Freitas, Julian;DeScioli, Peter;Pinker, Steven
人们用来描述事件的语言与他们的道德判断之间有什么关系？我们检验了这样的假设：道德判断和使动动词依赖于人们行为的相同的潜在心理模型。实验 1a 发现，参与者选择不同的动词来描述道德困境（电车难题）的主要变体，反映了他们对错误判断的差异：他们用一个使役动词描述了直接伤害（亚当杀了那个人），用一个绕口结构的不及物动词描述了间接伤害（亚当导致那个人死）。实验 1b 和 2 通过改变受害者是人还是动物以及有害行为是拯救人还是无生命物体，将物理因果关系与道德评价分开。结果表明，人们的道德判断导致他们将因果事件描述为或多或少直接和有意的，这反过来又影响了他们的动词选择。实验 3 发现，在生产任务中，参与者自由描述发生的事情，动词使用也存在同样的基本不对称性。
What is the relationship between the language people use to describe an event and their moral judgments? We test the hypothesis that moral judgment and causative verbs rely on the same underlying mental model of people's actions. Experiment 1a finds that participants choose different verbs to describe the major variants of a moral dilemma, the trolley problem, mirroring differences in their wrongness judgments: they described direct harm with a single causative verb (Adam killed the man), and indirect harm with an intransitive verb in a periphrastic construction (Adam caused the man to die). Experiments 1b and 2 separate physical causality from moral valuation by varying whether the victim is a person or animal and whether the harmful action rescues people or inanimate objects. The results show that people's moral judgments lead them to portray a causal event as either more or less direct and intended, which in turn shapes their verb choices. Experiment 3 finds the same basic asymmetry in verb usage in a production task in which participants freely described what happened.