Study finds people equate immorality with impossibility
Imagine you’re getting hungry at work and you see a candy bar on a co-worker’s desk. Why not just eat it while she’s out of the room? Some people might not do it because they know it’s wrong; risk might dissuade others. But a new study suggests that for many people, the immediate response might be that taking the candy isn’t even possible. The study, co-authored by Assistant Professor of Psychology Fiery Cushman and postdoctoral fellow Jonathan Phillips, suggests a surprisingly common default in human behavior: the view that immoral actions are simply impossible. The research is described in an April 17 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “When people do something immoral, people tend to say things like, ‘No, that can’t be right,’ or ‘I can’t believe it,’” Phillips said. “There’s a sense that the brain treats these kind of things similarly to how it would react if...