Amount awarded: $25,000
Abstract: When people encounter evidence that challenges morally important beliefs, they often resist changing their minds. This resistance is well documented in work on motivated reasoning, motivated skepticism, moral conviction, and the ethics of belief, but we still know too little about where in the evidence-processing sequence resistance occurs. This one-year proof-of-concept project tests a staged model of moral belief revision. We propose that revision depends on two evidence-processing stages — sampling and weighting — and two moderators: threat sensitivity, or whether counterevidence is experienced as threatening to one’s moral self-conception, and perspective sensitivity, or whether reframing the issue from an alternative standpoint increases openness to revision. In the first, desktop part of the project, participants will complete a controlled moral counterevidence task while we measure belief revision, evidence choice, gaze allocation, pupil-linked arousal, and self-reported evidence acceptance and threat. These data will be used to build an interpretable, task-specific individualized belief-revision model—what we call a narrow digital twin—that estimates each participant’s sampling, evidential-weighting, threat-sensitivity, and perspective-sensitivity profile and tests whether this profile predicts belief revision on held-out trials. In the second, situated part, we will test whether these profiles generalize to a structurally matched extended-reality version of the task, where participants are perceptually situated within the moral scenario. This will test whether situational presence and self-location alter how participants sample and weight moral counterevidence while preserving the same judgment-and-counterevidence structure as the desktop task. The project will deliver a normed scenario set, a behavioral and eye-tracking paradigm, a pilot dataset, an interpretable individualized model, and a feasibility package for future personalized interventions on moral belief revision. Philosophically, the project contributes to moral cognition by distinguishing psychological mechanisms that are often grouped together under “resistance,” and it informs debates on intellectual character and epistemic situationism by testing whether resistance to moral counterevidence reflects stable evidence-handling tendencies or varies with features of the situation.
Description: People often resist changing moral beliefs even when confronted with relevant counterevidence, but the processes underlying revision or resistance remain unclear. Here, moral belief refers to a normative judgment about what is right, wrong, permissible, or obligatory; factual beliefs that bear on such judgments will be treated as supporting or challenging evidence rather than as the primary target of revision. This project tests whether moral belief revision depends on two evidence-processing stages: whether people sample belief-challenging evidence and how strongly they weigh it once encountered. It further tests whether threat sensitivity weakens counterevidence sampling or weighting, and whether perspective sensitivity increases openness to revision when the issue is reframed. The long-term goal is to develop individualized models of moral belief revision in controlled moral-conflict contexts, while contributing to conceptual clarification in the philosophy of moral cognition.
Maxi Becker, PhD. Research Scholar, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University
Carme Isern-Mas, PhD. Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy and Social Work, University of the Balearic Islands
Elay Shech, PhD. Professor, Department of Philosophy, Auburn University
Mariana Fernandez-Espinosa, PhD Candidate, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame
Sanja Sreckovic, PhD. Research Associate, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade