Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Concerns about moral contamination shape peoples attitudes towards the objects they encounter in daily life. For example,money seems less desirable when it comes from a robbery (Tasimi & Gelman, 2017). Drawing on the theory of dyadicmorality, we hypothesized that increasing an individuals sense of agency would reduce the salience of moral contagionand make people feel less vulnerable to moral contamination. Across two experiments, we adapted the study design ofTasimi and Gelman (2017), asking participants how much they desired a $1 (Experiment 1) or $100 (Experiment 2) billassociated with different negative moral histories. We modified the stimulus language so that participants were framed aseither the moral agent or patient for all scenarios. As predicted, participants in the agent language condition expressednearly the same level of desire regardless of the bills moral history, highlighting the role that feelings of agency play inmoral decision-making.