The Language of Creativity: Evidence from Humans and Large Language Models.

Recent developments in computerized scoring via semantic distance have provided automated assessments of verbal creativity. Here, we extend past work, applying computational linguistic approaches to characterize salient features of creative text. We hypothesize that, in addition to semantic diversity, the degree to which a story includes perceptual details, thus transporting the reader to another time and place, would be predictive of creativity.

Dual-process moral judgment beyond fast and slow.

De Neys makes a compelling case that the sacrificial moral dilemmas do not elicit competing "fast and slow" processes. But are there even two processes? Or just two intuitions? There remains strong evidence, most notably from lesion studies, that sacrificial dilemmas engage distinct cognitive processes generating conflicting emotional and rational responses. The dual-process theory gets much right, but needs revision.

Boosting the impact of charitable giving with donation bundling and micromatching.

The most effective charities are hundreds of times more impactful than typical charities. However, most donors favor charities with personal/emotional appeal over effectiveness. We gave donors the option to split their donations between their personal favorite charity and an expert-recommended highly effective charity.

Evidence for Spinozan "Unbelieving" in the Right Inferior Prefrontal Cortex.

Humans can think about possible states of the world without believing in them, an important capacity for high-level cognition. Here, we use fMRI and a novel "shell game" task to test two competing theories about the nature of belief and its neural basis. According to the Cartesian theory, information is first understood, then assessed for veracity, and ultimately encoded as either believed or not believed.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away: How temporal are episodic contents?

A prominent feature of mental event (i.e. 'episodic') simulations is their temporal orientation: human adults can generate episodic representations directed towards the past or the future.

The Psychology of (In)Effective Altruism.

The most effective charities are hundreds of times more effective than typical charities, yet few donors prioritize effectiveness. Why is that? How might we increase the effectiveness of charitable giving? We review the motivational and epistemic causes of (in)effective giving. Many donors view charitable giving as a matter of personal preference, which favors decisions based on emotional appeal rather than effectiveness.

Two Ways to Build a Thought: Distinct Forms of Compositional Semantic Representation across Brain Regions.

To understand a simple sentence such as "the woman chased the dog", the human mind must dynamically organize the relevant concepts to represent who did what to whom. This structured recombination of concepts (woman, dog, chased) enables the representation of novel events, and is thus a central feature of intelligence. Here, we use functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) and encoding models to delineate the contributions of three brain regions to the representation of relational combinations.

Veil-of-ignorance reasoning favors the greater good.

The "veil of ignorance" is a moral reasoning device designed to promote impartial decision making by denying decision makers access to potentially biasing information about who will benefit most or least from the available options. Veil-of-ignorance reasoning was originally applied by philosophers and economists to foundational questions concerning the overall organization of society. Here, we apply veil-of-ignorance reasoning in a more focused way to specific moral dilemmas, all of which involve a tension between the greater good and competing moral concerns.

Concepts and Compositionality: In Search of the Brain's Language of Thought.

Imagine Genghis Khan, Aretha Franklin, and the Cleveland Cavaliers performing an opera on Maui. This silly sentence makes a serious point: As humans, we can flexibly generate and comprehend an unbounded number of complex ideas. Little is known, however, about how our brains accomplish this.

Sacrificial utilitarian judgments do reflect concern for the greater good: Clarification via process dissociation and the judgments of philosophers.

Researchers have used "sacrificial" trolley-type dilemmas (where harmful actions promote the greater good) to model competing influences on moral judgment: affective reactions to causing harm that motivate characteristically deontological judgments ("the ends don't justify the means") and deliberate cost-benefit reasoning that motivates characteristically utilitarian judgments ("better to save more lives"). Recently, Kahane, Everett, Earp, Farias, and Savulescu (2015) argued that sacrificial judgments reflect antisociality rather than "genuine utilitarianism," but this work employs a different definition of "utilitarian judgment." We introduce a five-level taxonomy of "utilitarian judgment" and clarify our longstanding usage, according to which judgments are "utilitarian" simply because they favor the greater good, regardless of judges' motivations or philosophical commitments.

Reduced engagement of the anterior cingulate cortex in the dishonest decision-making of incarcerated psychopaths.

A large body of research indicates that psychopathic individuals lie chronically and show little remorse or anxiety. Yet, little is known about the neurobiological substrates of dishonesty in psychopathy. In a sample of incarcerated individuals (n = 67), we tested the hypothesis that psychopathic individuals show reduced activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) when confronted with an opportunity for dishonest gain, reflecting dishonest behavior that is relatively unhindered by response conflict.

The rat-a-gorical imperative: Moral intuition and the limits of affective learning.

Decades of psychological research have demonstrated that intuitive judgments are often unreliable, thanks to their inflexible reliance on limited information (Kahneman, 2003, 2011). Research on the computational underpinnings of learning, however, indicates that intuitions may be acquired by sophisticated learning mechanisms that are highly sensitive and integrative. With this in mind, Railton (2014) urges a more optimistic view of moral intuition.

Variation in the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) is associated with differences in moral judgment.

Moral judgments are produced through the coordinated interaction of multiple neural systems, each of which relies on a characteristic set of neurotransmitters. Genes that produce or regulate these neurotransmitters may have distinctive influences on moral judgment. Two studies examined potential genetic influences on moral judgment using dilemmas that reliably elicit competing automatic and controlled responses, generated by dissociable neural systems.

An architecture for encoding sentence meaning in left mid-superior temporal cortex.

Human brains flexibly combine the meanings of words to compose structured thoughts. For example, by combining the meanings of "bite," "dog," and "man," we can think about a dog biting a man, or a man biting a dog. Here, in two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments using multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA), we identify a region of left mid-superior temporal cortex (lmSTC) that flexibly encodes "who did what to whom" in visually presented sentences.

The rise of moral cognition.

The field of moral cognition has grown rapidly in recent years thanks in no small part to Cognition. Consistent with its interdisciplinary tradition, Cognition encouraged the growth of this field by supporting empirical research conducted by philosophers as well as research native to neighboring fields such as social psychology, evolutionary game theory, and behavioral economics. This research has been exceptionally diverse both in its content and methodology.

Response to anticipated reward in the nucleus accumbens predicts behavior in an independent test of honesty.

This study examines the cognitive and neural determinants of honesty and dishonesty. Human subjects undergoing fMRI completed a monetary incentive delay task eliciting responses to anticipated reward in the nucleus accumbens. Subjects next performed an incentivized prediction task, giving them real and repeated opportunities for dishonest gain.

Free will and punishment: a mechanistic view of human nature reduces retribution.

If free-will beliefs support attributions of moral responsibility, then reducing these beliefs should make people less retributive in their attitudes about punishment. Four studies tested this prediction using both measured and manipulated free-will beliefs. Study 1 found that people with weaker free-will beliefs endorsed less retributive, but not consequentialist, attitudes regarding punishment of criminals.

Social heuristics shape intuitive cooperation.

Cooperation is central to human societies. Yet relatively little is known about the cognitive underpinnings of cooperative decision making. Does cooperation require deliberate self-restraint? Or is spontaneous prosociality reined in by calculating self-interest? Here we present a theory of why (and for whom) intuition favors cooperation: cooperation is typically advantageous in everyday life, leading to the formation of generalized cooperative intuitions.

Integrative moral judgment: dissociating the roles of the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

A decade's research highlights a critical dissociation between automatic and controlled influences on moral judgment, which is subserved by distinct neural structures. Specifically, negative automatic emotional responses to prototypically harmful actions (e.g.

Are 'counter-intuitive' deontological judgments really counter-intuitive? An empirical reply to.

A substantial body of evidence indicates that utilitarian judgments (favoring the greater good) made in response to difficult moral dilemmas are preferentially supported by controlled, reflective processes, whereas deontological judgments (favoring rights/duties) in such cases are preferentially supported by automatic, intuitive processes. A recent neuroimaging study by Kahane et al. challenges this claim, using a new set of moral dilemmas that allegedly reverse the previously observed association.

Spontaneous giving and calculated greed.

Cooperation is central to human social behaviour. However, choosing to cooperate requires individuals to incur a personal cost to benefit others. Here we explore the cognitive basis of cooperative decision-making in humans using a dual-process framework.