Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Evaluating the morality of an action is affected by thoughts about whether the outcome might have turned outdifferently. We report experimental results that show a moral action effect occurs for judgments about morally good actions.Participants read stories about a morally elevating situation, e.g., an agent is found to be a match as a bone-marrow donor forsomeone else. The agent decided to act or not to act, and the outcome turned out well or it did not turn out well. Participantscreated counterfactual thoughts and they also made judgments about whether the agent should have acted, and whether theagent was morally responsible for the outcome. The results show a moral action effect: participants judged that the actionshould have been taken, and that the agent was morally responsible for the outcome, when the agent acted compared to whenthey did not act, regardless of the outcome.