Publications
Publications
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(120,068)
- Faculty Publications (173)
- Article
Maimonides' Ladder: States of Mutual Knowledge and the Perception of Charitability
By: Julian De Freitas, Peter DiScioli, Kyle A. Thomas and Steven Pinker
Why do people esteem anonymous charitable giving? We connect normative theories of charitability
(captured in Maimonides’ Ladder of Charity) with evolutionary theories of partner choice to test predictions on how attributions of charitability are affected by states of... View Details
- Article
Optimality Bias in Moral Judgment
By: Julian De Freitas and Samuel G.B. Johnson
We often make decisions with incomplete knowledge of their consequences. Might people nonetheless expect others to make optimal choices, despite this ignorance? Here, we show that people are sensitive to moral optimality: that people hold moral agents accountable... View Details
- Article
Moral Goodness Is the Essence of Personal Identity
By: Julian De Freitas, Mina Cikara, Igor Grossman and Rebecca Schlegal
- Article
Consistent Belief in a Good True Self in Misanthropes and Three Interdependent Cultures
By: Julian De Freitas, Hagop Sarkissian, George E. Newman, Igor Grossman, Felipe De Brigard, Andres Luco and Joshua Knobe
People sometimes explain behavior by appealing to an essentialist concept of the self, often
referred to as the true self. Existing studies suggest that people tend to believe that the true self is
morally virtuous; that is deep inside, every person is motivated to... View Details
- 2018
- Conference Presentation
From Pixels to Moral Judgment: Extracting Morally Relevant Information in Minds and Machines
By: J. De Freitas, A. Hafri, G. A. Alvarez and D. L. K. Yamins
- 2018
- Conference Presentation
Learning to Recognize Objects Provides Category-orthogonal Features for Social Inference and Moral Judgment
By: J. De Freitas, A. Hafri, G. A. Alvarez and D. L. K. Yamins
- 2018
- Conference Presentation
Strategic Mentalizing and Common Knowledge in Social Life
- Article
Your Visual System Provides All the Information You Need to Make Moral Judgments about Generic Visual Events
By: Julian De Freitas and George A. Alvarez
To what extent are people's moral judgments susceptible to subtle factors of which they are unaware? Here we show that we can change people’s moral judgments outside of their awareness by subtly biasing perceived causality. Specifically, we used subtle visual... View Details
- 30 Nov 2017
- Conference Presentation
From Pixels to Moral Judgment: Extracting Morally Relevant Information in Minds and Machines
- Article
Kill or Die: Moral Judgment Alters Linguistic Coding of Causality
By: Julian De Freitas, Peter DiScioli, Jason Nemirow, Maxim Massenkoff and Steven Pinker
What is the relationship between the language people use to describe an event and their moral judgments?
We test the hypothesis that moral judgment and causative verbs rely on the same underlying mental
model of people’s actions. Experiment 1a finds that participants... View Details
- Article
Normative Judgments and Individual Essence
By: Julian De Freitas, Kevin P. Tobia, George E. Newman and Joshua Knobe
A growing body of research has examined how people judge the persistence of identity over
time—that is, how they decide that a particular individual is the same entity from one time to the
next. While a great deal of progress has been made in understanding the types... View Details
Keywords: Concepts; Essentialism; Normative Factors; Persistence; True Self; Morality; Identity; Moral Sensibility; Perception
- Article
Ownership Dilemmas: The Case of Finders Versus Landowners
By: Peter DiScioli, Rachel Karpoff and Julian De Freitas
People sometimes disagree about who owns which objects, and these ownership dilemmas can
lead to costly disputes. We investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying people’s judgments
about finder versus landowner cases, in which a person finds an object on someone... View Details
Keywords: Ownership Dilemma; Finders; Psychology And Law; Ownership; Property; Law; Social Psychology
- 2017
- Conference Presentation
The Efficiency Principle in Moral Judgment
By: J. De Freitas and S. G. B. Johnson
- 2017
- Conference Presentation
Changing Moral Judgments by Exploiting the Visual System
By: J. De Freitas and G. A. Alvarez
- Article
Deep Down My Enemy Is Good: Thinking about the True Self Reduces Intergroup Bias
By: Julian De Freitas and Mina Cikara
Intergroup bias—preference for one's in-group relative to out-groups—is one of the most robust phenomena in all of psychology. Here we investigate whether a positive bias that operates at the individual-level, belief in a good true self, may be leveraged to reduce... View Details
- Article
Origins of the Belief in Good True Selves
By: Julian De Freitas, Mina Cikara, Igor Grossman and Rebecca Schlegel
Despite differences in beliefs about the self across cultures and relevant individual differences, recent evidence suggests that people universally believe in a ‘true self’ that is morally good. We propose that this belief arises from a general tendency: psychological... View Details