Margherita Daniele
Dip. di Psicologia e Centro di Scienza Cognitiva, Università di Torino
Monica Bucciarelli
Dip. di Psicologia e Centro di Scienza Cognitiva, Università di Torino
1 Introduction
The mental model theory (MMT) assumes that moral judgments rely on reasoning (Bucciarelli et al., 2008; Bucciarelli & Daniele, 2015) whereas the moral grammar theories (Hauser, 2006; Mikhail, 2011) and the socio- intuitionist theory (Haidt, 2007) deny a role for reasoning in moral judgments. The moral grammar theories assume that moral judgments rely on innate moral principles operating at an unconscious level and the socio- intuitionist theory assumes that moral evaluations come from immediate intuitions and emotions. The aim of our investigation was to test the developmental predictions descending from the MMT’s assumption that moral judgments rely on reasoning. A crucial prediction is that children are more utilitarian than adults with moral dilemmas.
From the assumption of MMT for moral judgments (Bucciarelli et al., 2008), Bucciarelli (2015) derived predictions on developmental differences in responses to moral dilemmas. The participants in her study, children, adolescents and adults, dealt with moral dilemmas in which action and inaction lead to different outcomes. The dilemmas were constructed on six moral contents in which acting means killing one person in order to save five persons. From these contents two extreme versions of scenarios were generated: one pro-permissible version and one anti-permissible version, for a total of 12 scenarios. The pro-permissible version differs from the anti- permissible version according to four variables that foster the “permissible” judgments:
• the action of killing a person is an unintended consequence • there is no physical contact between the agent and the victim • the action saves oneself along with others
• the agent is a third party, not the participant in the experiment. The following are examples from a couple of scenarios.
Pro-permissible version
You and four swimmers are drowning. George can drive a motorboat toward you at top speed. He will cause a passenger to fall in the sea, but he will save all of you. The passenger will drown because he cannot swim, but you and the four swimmers will be safe.
Is it right that Giorgio drive at top speed ? (Yes/No)
Anti-permissible version
Five swimmers are drowning. You can drive a motorboat toward them at top speed and save them if you lighten your boat. You can do that by pushing one of your passenger in the sea. He will drown because he cannot swim, but the five swimmers will be safe.
Is it right that you drown your passenger? (Yes/No)
The manipulation of the four variables was meant to affect individuals’ judgments through mechanisms of focusing and de-focusing (Legrenzi et al., 1993). Reasoning with the dilemmas requires to consider two alternative
possibilities; the pro-permissible version focuses on the possibility in which it is right to perform the action and the anti-permissible version focuses on the possibility in which it is wrong to perform the action. A developmental assumption of the MMT is that children, because of their limited cognitive resources, are more likely than adolescents and adults to construct and reason upon the model of single possibilities. Hence, adolescents and adults who are likely to construct the two alternative models of the dilemmas should be more utilitarian (i.e., decide that it is right to perform the action that sacrifices one person in place of five) with the pro-permissible version of the dilemmas. Children, who are likely to reason on a single model and keep in mind only the state of affairs described in the dilemma, should give utilitarian answers in both the versions, since they focus only on the possibility mentioned in the scenario.
The socio-intuitionist theory and the moral grammar theory have never made fully explicit their assumptions regarding age-related differences in moral judgements. Socio-intuitionist theorists could argue that the pro-permissible versions are less emotional than the anti-permissible versions and, therefore, are more likely to lead both children, adolescents and adults to utilitarian judgments. Moral grammar theorists could argue that the pro-permissible versions differ from the anti-permissible versions in terms of universal principles that are at work from very early on in the scenario (i.e. no physical contact with the victim and killing as an unintended consequence versus physical contact with the victim and killing as an intended action); on these grounds children, adolescents and adults should judge it more permissible to act on utilitarian grounds with the pro-permissible version of the dilemmas. The global results confirmed the MMT’s prediction that adolescents and adults, but not children, are affected by the experimental manipulation and that, as a consequence, children are more utilitarian than adults. However, an alternative explanation of the results could be that the participants in the adult group were almost all females and females tend to be less utilitarian than males (see, e.g., Friesdorf et al., 2015). Our aim in the present investigation was to balance by gender the group of the adults in Bucciarelli’s study, in order to make good of such a possible confound.
dilemmas
The participants in the experiment dealt with the same moral dilemmas as those in the experiment by Bucciarelli (2015).
a. Method
Participants
The participants in the original experiment were 42 children in each of the following age groups and balanced by gender, randomly selected from two junior schools in Turin, Italy: 9 to 10 years (mean age 9;7 years), 13 to 14 years (mean age 13;6 years), and forty-two adults (41 females and 1 male), university students attending a course of general psychology at the University of Turin. We tested further forty-two adults from the same population of students, for a total of eighty-four adults (42 females and 42 males; mean age 22 years).
Design and Procedures
The design and the procedures were the same as in the experiment by Bucciarelli. Each dilemma was printed on a sheet of paper and the sheets were assembled in a booklet, in random order. The participants were instructed to read the scenarios one by one and to decide whether it was right or wrong to perform a certain action. The participants wrote their decision below each scenario.
b. Results
The data for the children and the adolescents are those collected by Bucciarelli (2015) and confirmed the predictions. Children were not affected by the experimental manipulation: the production of ‘permissible’ judgments was comparable in the two versions of the dilemmas (80% versus 75% of the judgments in the pro- and the anti-permissible version, respectively: Wilcoxon test: z=.88, p>.250, Cliff’s δ=.02). Adolescents were affected by the experimental manipulation: they gave more ‘permissible’ judgments in the pro-permissible version as compared with the anti-permissible version
δ=.51).
The data for the adults are new. As predicted, adults gave more ‘permissible’ judgments in the pro-permissible version as compared with the anti-permissible version (58% versus 29%, respectively: Wilcoxon test: z=6.26, p<.0001, Cliff’s δ=.42).
The global results confirmed the developmental prediction: children were more utilitarian than adults. In the anti-permissible version of the dilemmas the production of ‘permissible’ judgments decreased from children, to adolescents to adults (Kruskal-Wallis test: x2=40.64, p<.0001) and the Bonferroni-corrected post-hoc comparisons revealed differences between the groups of children with adolescents and adults (p<.0001, in both cases) but not between adolescents and adults (p=.22). Also, in the pro-permissible version of the dilemmas the production of ‘permissible’ judgments decreased from children, to adolescents to adults (Kruskal-Wallis test: x2=11.55, p<.003) and the Bonferroni-corrected post-hoc comparisons revealed
differences between the groups of children with adolescents and adults (p<.03 and <.001, respectively) but not between adolescents and adults (p=.40).
4 Discussion and Conclusions
The results of our extension of the study by Bucciarelli (2015) confirm the prediction deriving from the assumption that individuals, at any age, reason in order to make a decision in a moral dilemma. A main implication is that children are more utilitarian than adults. In particular, the results exclude the possibility that the results formerly obtained by Bucciarelli were due to an unproper balance by gender of the participants in the adult group. Future studies might explore more in depth the possibility that choices are affected by working memory capacity; they might employ the same set of dilemmas but the task of the participants would be to choose between the two different alternatives made fully explicit.
References
Bucciarelli, M. (2015) Moral dilemmas in females: Children are more utilitarian than adults. Frontiers in Psychology: Cognition,
doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01345
Bucciarelli, M., Daniele, M. (2015) Reasoning in moral conflicts. Thinking & Reasoning, 21, 265-294
Bucciarelli, M., Khemlani, S., Johnson-Laird, P.N. (2008) The psychology of moral reasoning. Judgment and Decision Making, 3, 121-139
Friesdorf, R., Conway, P., Gawronski, B. (2015) Gender differences in responses to moral dilemmas. A process dissociation analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41, 696–713
Haidt, J. (2007) The new synthesis in moral psychology. Science, 316, 998- 1002
Hauser, M.D. (2006) Moral minds: How nature designed our universal sense of right and wrong. New York: Harper Collins
Legrenzi, P., Girotto, V., Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1993) Focussing in reasoning and decision making. Cognition 49, 37–66
Mikhail, J. (2011) Elements of moral cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
l’esempio del Sarcasm Detection
Mattia Antonino Di Gangi
Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italia
Marco Elio Tabacchi
Gruppo di Ricerca SCo2 - Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica,
Università degli Studi di Palermo
Istituto Nazionale di Ricerche Demopolis, Italia
[email protected]
1. L’approccio statistico e l’Intelligenza Computazionale nel programma di ricerca sull’IA
Dopo un periodo prolungato in cui vigeva uno scarto persistente tra l’ottimismo dato dai grandi proclami di ricerca e la scarsità e frammentarietà di risultati veri e tangibili, viviamo (finalmente) nell’era delle grandi conquiste dell’Intelligenza Artificiale. I risultati nei diversi settori sono chiaramente visibili, e solo come rimando a recenti successi applicativi, possiamo evidenziare, tra la mole di risorse di ricerca specialmente nel settore interdisciplinare delle Scienze Cognitive, e l’amplificazione operata dai media, almeno due importanti pietre miliari: il recente trionfo del programma di ricerca IBM Watson, il cui principale obiettivo è di eguagliare o superare le prestazioni umane in compiti di stretta natura cognitiva, come giochi competitivi e diagnosi mediche; e i diversi progetti, competitivi e interconnessi, volti a sviluppare auto a guida autonoma, le cui abilità sono maturate, da sforzi ottimistici seppur incoraggianti ma astratti e futuristici, a prototipi di successo in grado di percorrere migliaia di chilometri in relativa sicurezza, e di scatenare una competizione feroce tra i maggiori protagonisti della scena ICT (con Google al primo posto), e start-up innovative (ovviamente viene in mente Tesla).
Tali progetti hanno sicuramente un grande debito da pagare al mondo della ricerca sui Big Data. Nel caso di IBM Watson, questo è chiaramente auto-