Mature moral judgments rely both on a perpetrator’s intent to cause harm, and also on the actual harm caused–even when unintended. Much prior research asks how intent information is represented neurally, but little asks ...

Most psychological research on reinforcement learning has depicted two systems locked in battle for control of behavior: a flexible but computationally expensive “model-based” system and an inflexible but cheap “model-free” ...

By many accounts cooperation appears to be a default strategy in social interaction. There are, however, several documented instances in which reflexive responding favors aggressive behaviors: for example, interactions ...

We study how people reconcile conflicting moral intuitions by juxtaposing two versions of classic moral problems: the trolley problem and the footbridge problem. When viewed separately, most people favor action in the ...

A central tenet of contemporary moral psychology is that people typically reject active forms of utilitarian sacrifice. Yet, evidence for secularization and declining empathic concern in recent decades suggests the possibility ...

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 ...

In some cases people judge it morally acceptable to sacrifice one person’s life in order to save several other lives, while in other similar cases they make the opposite judgment. Researchers have identified two general ...

When a cooperative partner defects, at least two types of response are available: Punishment, aimed at modifying behavior, and ostracism, aimed at avoiding further social interaction with the partner. These options, termed ...