Virtual morality: emotion and action in a simulated three-dimensional "trolley problem"

Experimentally investigating the relationship between moral judgment and action is difficult when the action of interest entails harming others. We adopt a new approach to this problem by placing subjects in an immersive, virtual reality environment that simulates the classic "trolley problem." In this moral dilemma, the majority of research participants behaved as "moral utilitarians," either (a) acting to cause the death of one individual in order to save the lives of five others, or (b) abstaining from action, when that action would have caused five deaths versus one. Confirming the emotional distinction between moral actions and omissions, autonomic arousal was greater when the utilitarian outcome required action, and increased arousal was associated with a decreased likelihood of utilitarian-biased behavior. This pattern of results held across individuals of different gender, age, and race.     

Subjective confidence in one's answers: the consensuality principle

In answering general-information questions, a within-person confidence-accuracy (C-A) correlation is typically observed, suggesting that people can monitor the correctness of their knowledge. However, because the correct answer is generally the consensual answer--the one endorsed by most participants--confidence judgment may actually monitor the consensuality of the answer rather than its correctness. Indeed, the C-A correlation was positive for items with a consensually correct answer but negative for items with a consensually wrong answer. Results suggest that the consensuality-confidence correlation may be mediated by 2 internal mnemonic cues that are correlated with consensuality: Consensual answers are reached faster and are selected more consistently by the same person on different occasions than nonconsensual answers. The results argue against a direct-access view of confidence judgments and suggest that such judgments will be accurate only as long as people's responses are by and large correct across the sampled items, thus stressing the criticality of a representative design.     

Can People Identify “Deceptive” or “Misleading” Items that Tend to Produce Mostly Wrong Answers?

In many domains, two‐alternative forced‐choice questions produce more correct responses than wrong responses across participants. However, some items, dubbed “deceptive” or “misleading”, produce mostly wrong answers. These items yield poor calibration and poor resolution because the dominant, erroneous response tends to be endorsed with great confidence, even greater than that of the correct response. In addition, for deceptive items, group discussion amplifies rather than mitigates error while enhancing confidence in the erroneous response. Can participants identify deceptive items when they are warned about their existence? It is argued that people's ability to discriminate between deceptive and non‐deceptive items is poor when the erroneous responses are based on the same process assumed to underlie correct responses. Indeed, participants failed to discriminate between deceptive and non‐deceptive perceptual items when they were warned that some of the items (Experiment 1) or exactly half of the items (Experiment 2) were deceptive. A similar failure was observed for general‐knowledge questions (Experiment 3) except when participants were informed about the correct answer (Experiment 4). Possibly, for these tasks, people cannot escape the dangers lurking in deceptive items. In contrast, the results suggest that participants can identify deceptive problems for which the wrong answer stems from reliance on a fast, intuitive process that differs from the analytic mode that is likely to yield correct answers (Experiment 5). The practical and theoretical implications of the results were discussed. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Involuntary strategy-dependent dual task performance

Previous studies showed that some dual tasks can be performed simultaneously without costs. Yet, a variable SOA between the inputs to such tasks leads to strategic, often involuntary, prioritization of one of the two tasks. Here we explore the boundary conditions for this involuntary or exogenous strategy. In Experiment 1, subjects were initially trained on dual task performance where the input to the two tasks is presented simultaneously (0 SOA). We used two tasks that under such conditions can be performed without costs and indeed subjects displayed perfect sharing of the tasks. Subjects then performed the same two tasks but with a variable SOA (0, 50, 150, 800?ms). This manipulation led to a serial-like performance of the two tasks even in trials with 0 SOA. In Experiment 2, subjects participated in eight sessions. Within each session, they performed in alternation blocks with a fixed 0 SOA and blocks with a variable SOA. Subjects displayed perfect sharing in the pure 0 SOA blocks but performed the two tasks serially in the mixed SOA blocks despite receiving identical instructions. These findings demonstrate that task context is a powerful factor in dual task performance and may lead subjects to involuntarily exhibit dual task costs even in conditions where they can perform the tasks without any costs. Moreover, these findings strongly suggest that costs observed in PRP studies reflect the use of such exogenous strategies rather than a general structural dual task limitation.     

Strategic regulation of grain size in memory reporting

To increase their report accuracy, rememberers may either withhold information that they feel unsure about or provide relatively coarse information that is unlikely to be wrong. In previous work (A. Koriat & M. Goldsmith, 1996c), the authors delineated the metacognitive monitoring and control processes underlying the decision to volunteer or withhold particular items of information (report option) and examined how these processes are used in the strategic regulation of memory accuracy. This article adapts that framework to address control over the grain size (precision-coarseness) of the information that people report. Results show that rememberers strategically regulate the grain of their answers to accommodate the competing goals of accuracy and informativeness. The metacognitive processes underlying this regulation are elucidated.     

What do we know about what we cannot remember? Accessing the semantic attributes of words that cannot be recalled

Two experiments examined access to the semantic attributes of words that participants failed to retrieve. The results indicated access to all 3 dimensions of the semantic differential--evaluation, potency, and activity, as revealed by attribute judgments and by the nature of the commission errors made. There was no evidence for superior access to the emotional-evaluative dimension, inconsistent with what may be expected from the claimed primacy of emotion. In comparison with complete recall, partial recall exhibited a slower rate of forgetting and a stronger tendency to elicit know rather than remember responses. The results were discussed in terms of the processes that lead to partial recall and in terms of the possibility that the affective primacy hypothesis does not apply to memory retrieval.