Kurt Gray

Mind Perception Is the Essence of Morality.

Mind perception entails ascribing mental capacities to other entities, whereas moral judgment entails labeling entities as good or bad or actions as right or wrong. We suggest that mind perception is the essence of moral judgment. In particular, we suggest that moral judgment is rooted in a cognitive template of two perceived minds—a moral dyad of an intentional agent and a suffering moral patient. Diverse lines of research support dyadic morality. First, perceptions of mind are linked to moral judgments: dimensions of mind perception (agency and experience) map onto moral types (agents and patients), and deficits of mind perception correspond to difficulties with moral judgment. Second, not only are moral judgments sensitive to perceived agency and experience, but all moral transgressions are fundamentally understood as agency plus experienced suffering—that is, interpersonal harm—even ostensibly harmless acts such as purity violations. Third, dyadic morality uniquely accounts for the phenomena of dyadic completion (seeing agents in response to patients, and vice versa), and moral typecasting (characterizing others as either moral agents or moral patients). Discussion also explores how mind perception can unify morality across explanatory levels, how a dyadic template of morality may be developmentally acquired, and future directions.

Moral Typecasting: Divergent perceptions of moral agents and moral patients

Moral agency is the capacity to do right or wrong, whereas moral patiency is the capacity to be a target of right or wrong. Through 7 studies, the authors explored moral typecasting-an inverse relation between perceptions of moral agency and moral patiency. Across a range of targets and situations, good- and evil-doers (moral agents) were perceived to be less vulnerable to having good and evil done to them. The recipients of good and evil (moral patients), in turn, were perceived as less capable of performing good or evil actions. Moral typecasting stems from the dyadic nature of morality and explains curious effects such as peoples willingness to inflict greater pain on those who do good than those who do nothing.

Blaming God for Our Pain: Human Suffering and the Divine Mind

Believing in God requires not only a leap of faith but also an extension of people’s normal capacity to perceive the minds of others. Usually, people perceive minds of all kinds by trying to understand their conscious experience (what it is like to be them) and their agency (what they can do). Although humans are perceived to have both agency and experience, humans appear to see God as possessing agency, but not experience. God’s unique mind is due, the authors suggest, to the uniquely moral role He occupies. In this article, the authors propose that God is seen as the ultimate moral agent, the entity people blame and praise when they receive anomalous harm and help. Support for this proposition comes from research on mind perception, morality, and moral typecasting. Interestingly, although people perceive God as the author of salvation, suffering seems to evoke even more attributions to the divine.

Feeling Robots and Human Zombies: Mind Perception and the Uncanny Valley

The uncanny valley-the unnerving nature of humanlike robots-is an intriguing idea, but both its existence and its underlying cause are debated. We propose that humanlike robots are not only unnerving, but are so because their appearance prompts attributions of mind. In particular, we suggest that machines become unnerving when people ascribe to them experience (the capacity to feel and sense), rather than agency (the capacity to act and do). Experiment 1 examined whether a machines humanlike appearance prompts both ascriptions of experience and feelings of unease. Experiment 2 tested whether a machine capable of experience remains unnerving, even without a humanlike appearance. Experiment 3 investigated whether the perceived lack of experience can also help explain the creepiness of unfeeling humans and philosophical zombies. These experiments demonstrate that feelings of uncanniness are tied to perceptions of experience, and also suggest that experience-but not agency-is seen as fundamental to humans, and fundamentally lacking in machines.

Simulating Murder: The Aversion to Harmful Action

Diverse lines of evidence point to a basic human aversion to physically harming others. First, we demonstrate that unwillingness to endorse harm in a moral dilemma is predicted by individual differences in aversive reactivity, as indexed by peripheral vasoconstriction. Next, we tested the specific factors that elicit the aversive response to harm. Participants performed actions such as discharging a fake gun into the face of the experimenter, fully informed that the actions were pretend and harmless. These simulated harmful actions increased peripheral vasoconstriction significantly more than did witnessing pretend harmful actions or to performing metabolically matched nonharmful actions. This suggests that the aversion to harmful actions extends beyond empathic concern for victim harm. Together, these studies demonstrate a link between the body and moral decision-making processes.

More Than a Body: Mind Perception and the Nature of Objectification

According to models of objectification, viewing someone as a body induces de-mentalization, stripping away their psychological traits. Here evidence is presented for an alternative account, where a body focus does not diminish the attribution of all mental capacities but, instead, leads perceivers to infer a different kind of mind. Drawing on the distinction in mind perception between agency and experience, it is found that focusing on someones body reduces perceptions of agency (self-control and action) but increases perceptions of experience (emotion and sensation). These effects were found when comparing targets represented by both revealing versus nonrevealing pictures (Experiments 1, 3, and 4) or by simply directing attention toward physical characteristics (Experiment 2). The effect of a body focus on mind perception also influenced moral intuitions, with those represented as a body seen to be less morally responsible (i.e., lesser moral agents) but more sensitive to harm (i.e., greater moral patients; Experiments 5 and 6). These effects suggest that a body focus does not cause objectification per se but, instead, leads to a redistribution of perceived mind.

The Myth of Harmless Wrongs in Moral Cognition: Automatic Dyadic Completion From Sin to Suffering

When something is wrong, someone is harmed. This hypothesis derives from the theory of dyadic morality, which suggests a moral cognitive template of wrongdoing agent and suffering patient (i.e., victim). This dyadic template means that victimless wrongs (e.g., masturbation) are psychologically incomplete, compelling the mind to perceive victims even when they are objectively absent. Five studies reveal that dyadic completion occurs automatically and implicitly: Ostensibly harmless wrongs are perceived to have victims (Study 1), activate concepts of harm (Studies 2 and 3), and increase perceptions of suffering (Studies 4 and 5). These results suggest that perceiving harm in immorality is intuitive and does not require effortful rationalization. This interpretation argues against both standard interpretations of moral dumbfounding and domain-specific theories of morality that assume the psychological existence of harmless wrongs. Dyadic completion also suggests that moral dilemmas in which wrongness (deontology) and harm (utilitarianism) conflict are unrepresentative of typical moral cognition.

Distortions of mind perception in psychopathology

It has long been known that psychopathology can influence social perception, but a 2D framework of mind perception provides the opportunity for an integrative understanding of some disorders. We examined the covariation of mind perception with three subclinical syndromes—autism-spectrum disorder, schizotypy, and psychopathy—and found that each presents a unique mind-perception profile. Autism-spectrum disorder involves reduced perception of agency in adult humans. Schizotypy involves increased perception of both agency and experience in entities generally thought to lack minds. Psychopathy involves reduced perception of experience in adult humans, children, and animals. Disorders are differentially linked with the over- or underperception of agency and experience in a way that helps explain their real-world consequences.

The sting of intentional pain

When someone steps on your toe on purpose, it seems to hurt more than when the person does the same thing unintentionally. The physical parameters of the harm may not differ your toe is flattened in both cases but the psychological experience of pain is changed nonetheless. Intentional harms are premeditated by another person and have the specific purpose of causing pain. In a sense, intended harms are events initiated by one mind to communicate meaning (malice) to another, and this could shape the recipients experience. This study examined whether self-reported pain is indeed higher when the events producing the pain are understood as intentionally (as opposed to unintentionally) caused by another person. Although pain was traditionally conceived to be solely physical in nature (Aydede, 2005), its experience varies substantially with psychological context. The placebo analgesia effect, for example, is the reduction of pain without a change in physical stimulation when context, expectations, or sugar pills challenge the interpretation of a sensation as painful (e.g., Fields, 2008). The nocebo effect, in turn, is the experience of pain without any physical stimulation as when participants report headaches when told that a (nonexistent) electric current is passing through their heads (Schweiger & Parducci, 1981). These variations in pain experience seem to depend on the meaning of the stimulus: A sugar pill is meant to decrease pain, whereas electric current is meant to increase pain. In an interpersonal context, the meaning of an action is derived from the perceivers perceptions of the actors intention (Clark, 1996), which means that intentional harms, unlike accidental harms, are meant to cause pain. The possibility that the malicious intent of other people could be translated into additional physical pain is suggested by studies demonstrating that similar areas of cortex respond to both physical pain and social harms (Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003). Social harms, which are presumably laden with intention, have also been shown to be more painful to relive than simple physical harms (Chen, Williams, Fitness, & Newton, 2008). So, although a broken toe (or electric shock) may hurt, an intentionally broken toe (or electric shock) should hurt more. METHOD

The Moral Dyad: A Fundamental Template Unifying Moral Judgment

Felix Mendelssohn, the famous Romantic composer, sought to take the unique experiences of each human life—distinctive sorrows and personal pleasures—and give them universal expression in his music. Likewise, a key goal of science is to take diverse phenomena and ask whether such diversity can be unified at a deeper level. Darwin, for instance, saw a common process underlying the diversity of species, and Maxwell saw a common set of equations uniting both electricity and magnetism. In our target article (Gray, Young, & Waytz, this issue), we suggested that the diversity of moral judgment is underlain by the moral dyad, a psychological template of two perceived minds—a moral agent and a moral patient. This idea is inspired by decades of research from cognitive psychology suggesting that concepts1 (e.g., birds, dogs, furniture) are understood not as strict definitions but as prototypes or exemplar sets (Murphy, 2004). In the case of morality, we suggest that this prototype is interpersonal harm: an intentional moral agent causing suffering to a moral patient. This dyad not only serves to represent the most canonical and powerful examples of immorality, but—more important—acts as a cognitive working model or template through which all morality is understood (Craik, 1967). In the target article, we summarized this statement as “mind perception is the essence of morality,” which helps explains not only the general correspondence between perceptions of mind and moral judgments (Bastian, Laham, Wilson, Haslam, & Koval, 2011; H. M. Gray, Gray, &