Imagined alternatives to episodic memories of morally good acts

ABSTRACT

When people witness an act of moral excellence, they wish to emulate it. Five experiments examine a striking difference: for episodic memories of a morally good act, people imagine how things could have been worse, by mentally subtracting something that happened, and they form a general aspiration to emulate; in contrast, for memories of a morally bad act, they imagine how things could have been better, by mentally adding something new, and form specific plans (Experiments 1 and 2). They do so for memories of a good act with a good outcome, but not a bad outcome, and their spontaneous helping is greater for the former (Experiments 3 and 4). The differences in intentions to emulate occur when people imagine how things could have been different, not when they think about what actually happened (Experiment 5). The results shed light on the role of the counterfactual imagination in moral judgments.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral-elevation
• imagination
• counterfactual-thinking
• episodic-memory
• intentions

Acknowledgments

The research was funded by a John Templeton Foundation grant, number 48054, awarded to Ruth Byrne, a Trinity College Dublin PhD studentship awarded to Shane Timmons, and an Irish Research Council PhD scholarship awarded to Eoin Gubbins. We thank Maria Whelan and the staff at the Science Gallery TCD for facilitating the data collection for Experiments 1 and 2, Sabrina Haimovici for all her help and especially constructive discussions, and Evie Alkin, Iseult Cremen, Maedhbh Kelly, Mary Parkinson, and Meg Ryan for help with data entry and coding.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Irish Research Council;John Templeton Foundation [48054].