As arti® cial intelligence moves ever closer to the goal of producing fully autonomous agents, the question of how to design and implement an arti ® cial moral agent (AMA) becomes increasingly pressing. Robots possessing autonomous capacities to do things that are useful to humans will also have the capacity to do things that are harmful to humans and other sentient beings. Theoretical challeng...

The conflict between pro-self and pro-social behaviour is at the core of many key problems of our time, as, for example, the reduction of air pollution and the redistribution of scarce resources. For the well-being of our societies, it is thus crucial to find mechanisms to promote pro-social choices over egoistic ones. Particularly important, because cheap and easy to implement, are those mecha...

Recent research suggests that self-righteousness is bounded, arising more reliably in evaluations of immoral actions than in evaluations of moral actions. Here, we test four implications of this asymmetry in self-righteousness and the mechanism explaining it. We find that people are less likely to make negative character inferences from their own unethical behavior than from others' unethical b...

We suggest that in some instances the apparent logical inconsistency of moral hypocrisy stems from different evaluations of a weak argument, rather than dishonesty per se. Extending Corner, Hahn, and Oaksford’s (2006) analysis of slippery slope arguments, we propose that inferences of hypocrisy depend on perceived similarity of actions to previous standards. In Experiment 1, dissimilar actions ...

Within the past decade, the field of moral psychology has begun to disentangle the mechanics behind moral judgments, revealing the vital role that emotions play in driving these processes. However, given the well-documented dissociation between attitudes and behaviors, we propose that an equally important issue is how emotions inform actual moral behavior – a question that has been relatively i...