Learning How to Make Moral Decisions

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People are equipped with multiple strategies for moral decision-making, including moral rules and cost-benefit reasoning. How does the mind determine which strategy to use? Lieder will present evidence that people’s convictions about how moral decisions ought to be made are shaped by learning from the consequences of past decisions. Consistent with our theory that reinforcement learning also operates over cognitive strategies, participants across four experiments increased their reliance on whichever strategy had previously produced morally better consequences in their view. Lieder will then show how this moral learning is gated by selective attention: attending to how their past actions have affected distant others teaches people to give them more moral consideration in future decisions, whereas attending primarily to effects on one’s ingroup teaches people to become more tribal. Guiding participants through structured reflection on the most significant consequences of a past decision reduces this attentional bias. As a result, this systematic moral reflection can expand people’s moral circle and shift subsequent decisions toward more analytical and impartial strategies, making them more willing to help strangers in need. Finally, Lieder will outline how our theory of metacognitive moral learning can explain historical changes in the extent to which people deem strangers and outgroups worthy of moral consideration. Taken together, our findings suggest that moral reinforcement learning can explain fundamental moral changes in both individuals and society.

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