Is the certainty of saving a life today worth more than the less-certain possibility of saving 10 lives tomorrow? In six pre-registered studies with U.S. samples from Prolific ( = 5,095), we employed an intergenerational probability discounting task, discovering people discount the value of life as uncertainty and intergenerational distance from the present increase.
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October 2024
Humanity's long-term welfare may lie in the hands of those who are presently living, raising the question of whether people today hold the generations of tomorrow in their moral circles. Five studies (N = 1652; Prolific) reveal present-oriented bias in the moral standing of future generations, with greater perceived moral obligation, moral concern, and prosocial intentions for proximal relative to distal future targets. Yet, present-oriented bias appears stronger for socially close compared with socially distant targets and for human targets relative to non-human animals and entities in nature.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFrom close friends to people on a first date, imagining a shared future appears fundamental to relationships. Yet, no previous research has conceptualized the act of imagination as a socially constructed process that affects how connected we feel to others. The present studies provide a framework for investigating imagination as a collaborative process in which individuals cocreate shared representations of hypothetical events-what we call collaborative imagination.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDoes empathy necessarily impede equity in altruism? Emerging findings from cognitive and affective science suggest that rationality and empathy are mutually compatible, contradicting some earlier, prominent arguments that empathy impedes equitable giving. We propose alternative conceptualizations of relationships among empathy, rationality, and equity, drawing on interdisciplinary advances in altruism research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImagining helping a person in need increases one's willingness to help beyond levels evoked by passively reading the same stories. We examined whether episodic simulation can increase younger and older adults' willingness to help in novel scenarios posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Across 3 studies we demonstrate that episodic simulation of helping behavior increases younger and older adults' willingness to help during both everyday and COVID-related scenarios.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExperimental psychology's recent shift toward low-effort, high-volume methods (e.g., self-reports, online studies) and away from the more effortful study of naturalistic behavior raises concerns about the ecological validity of findings from these fields, concerns that have become particularly apparent in the field of moral psychology.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHow do we know what sort of people we are? Do we reflect on specific past instances of our own behaviour, or do we just have a general idea? Previous work has emphasized the role of personal semantic memory (general autobiographical knowledge) in how we assess our own personality traits. Using a standardized trait empathy questionnaire, we show in four experiments that episodic autobiographical memory (memory for specific personal events) is associated with people's judgments of their own trait empathy. Specifically, neurologically healthy young adults rated themselves as more empathic on questionnaire items that cued episodic memories of events in which they behaved empathically.
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