Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(132)
- Faculty Publications (47)
- 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
- Article
Is the Moral Domain Unique?: A Social Influence Perspective for the Study of Moral Cognition
By: J. Lees and F. Gino
The nature of the cognitive processes that give rise to moral judgment and behavior has been a central question of psychology for decades. In this paper, we suggest that an often ignored yet fruitful stream of research for informing current debates on the nature of... View Details
- 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
Is Saving Lives Your Task or God's?: Religiosity, Belief in God, and Moral Judgment
By: Netta Barak-Corren and Max Bazerman
Should a Catholic hospital abort a life-threatening pregnancy or let a pregnant woman die? Should a religious employer allow his employees access to contraceptives or break with healthcare legislation? People and organizations of faith often face moral decisions that... View Details
- April 14, 2017
- Article
Companies Like United Need to Cultivate Good Judgment, and Free Their Employees to Use It
By: John A. Deighton
United Airlines has pledged to improve its training programs and empower its employees to put customers first in the wake of a video showing a passenger being dragged from a plane. Of all the U.S. air carriers, United should have known the power of social media and... 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
- 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
- 2017
- Article
True Happiness: The Role of Morality in the Concept of Happiness
By: Jonathan Phillips, Julian De Freitas, Christian Mott, June Gruber and Joshua Knobe
Recent scientific research has settled on a purely descriptive definition of happiness that is focused solely on agents' psychological states (high positive affect, low negative affect, high life satisfaction). In contrast to this understanding, recent research has... View Details
- February 2016
- Article
Positive and Normative Judgments Implicit in U.S. Tax Policy, and the Costs of Unequal Growth and Recessions
By: Benjamin B. Lockwood and Matthew Weinzierl
Calculating the welfare implications of changes to economic policy or shocks to the economy requires economists to decide on a normative criterion. One way to make that decision is to elicit the relevant moral criteria from real-world policy choices, converting a... View Details
- 2015
- Article
Beliefs About the True Self Explain Asymmetries Based on Moral Judgment
By: George E. Newman, Julian De Freitas and Joshua Knobe
Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about
(a) what a person values, (b) whether a person is happy, (c) whether a person has shown weakness
of will, and (d) whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend... View Details
- 2015
- Article
Approach, Ability, Aftermath: A Psychological Framework of Unethical Behavior at Work
By: C. Moore and F. Gino
Many of the scandalous organizational practices that have come to light in the last decade—rigging LIBOR, misselling payment protection insurance, rampant Wall Street insider trading, large-scale bribery of foreign officials, and the packaging and sale of toxic... View Details
- April 2014
- Teaching Note
iMatari
By: Joseph L. Badaracco and Matthew Preble
- 2014
- Conference Presentation
Beliefs about the True Self Explain Asymmetries Based on Moral Judgment
By: J. E. Newman, J. De Freitas and J. Knobe
- 26 Feb 2015 - 28 Feb 2015
- Conference Presentation
Is That All There Is to Happiness?
By: J. Phillips, C. Mott, Julian De Freitas, J. Gruber and J. Knobe
Happiness researchers have started to converge on a conception of
happiness that involves some combination of high positive affect,
low negative affect, and high life satisfaction. We present three
studies which demonstrate that the ordinary understanding... View Details
- March 2013 (Revised March 2015)
- Case
iMatari
By: Joseph L. Badaracco and Matthew Preble
In late 2012, recent Harvard Business School graduate Hannah Lopez is given the opportunity to lead entry into a new market for Plámo, a company that created startup companies in Europe and emerging markets based upon existing successful business models. She had only... View Details
- Article
Memory Lane and Morality: How Childhood Memories Promote Prosocial Behavior
By: F. Gino and S. Desai
Four experiments demonstrated that recalling memories from one's own childhood lead people to experience feelings of moral purity and to behave prosocially. In Experiment 1, participants instructed to recall memories from their childhood were more likely to help the... View Details
- Article
The Pot Calling the Kettle Black: Distancing Response to Ethical Dissonance
By: R. Barkan, S. Ayal, F. Gino and D. Ariely
Six studies demonstrate the "pot calling the kettle black" phenomenon whereby people are guilty of the very fault they identify in others. Recalling an undeniable ethical failure, people experience ethical dissonance between their moral values and their behavioral... View Details
- September 2012
- Article
Vicarious Dishonesty: When Psychological Closeness Creates Distance from One's Moral Compass
By: F. Gino and A. Galinsky
In four studies employing multiple manipulations of psychological closeness, we found that feeling connected to another individual who engages in selfish or dishonest behavior leads people to vicariously justify the actions of this individual and to behave more... View Details
- December 2012
- Article
Behavioral Ethics: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Moral Judgment and Dishonesty
By: Max Bazerman and Francesca Gino
Early research and teaching on ethics focused on either a moral development perspective or philosophical approaches, and used a normative approach by focusing on the question of how people should act when resolving ethical dilemmas. In this paper, we briefly describe... View Details