Investigating change blindness in scenes containing moral tragressions

Humans constantly navigate social situations while pursuing their own goals. When conflicts arise, bystanders often act as judges, deciding who was at fault. Failure to intervene, or even notice, conflict often leads these bystanders to receive blame, especially when these conflicts involve moral transgressions—acts that violate widely accepted moral rules (e.g., physical or verbal altercations, robbery, etc.). Assigning blame, however, carries costs for both the transgressor and the moral critic: relationships may become strained, the critic may face retaliation, and the transgressor’s social standing may be damaged (Strimling & Erikson, 2014). Understanding when it is appropriate to assign blame is therefore important, as warranted punishment has been shown to increase cooperation (Kuwabara & Yu, 2017), whereas unwarranted punishment is less effective (Herrmann et al., 2008). People are not always consciously aware of information in their environment. The physical and cognitive limits of the visual system mean that individuals may not always have the capacity to perceive important events. One well-documented example of this limitation is change blindness—the failure to detect changes in a visual scene when those changes are not attended to or aligned with task demands (Simons & Levin, 1997). Even large changes, such as a prominent object appearing, disappearing, or changing color, can go unnoticed (Rensink, 2002; Simons & Rensink, 2005). This phenomenon underscores how easily critical information can escape conscious perception. Typically, negatively valence stimuli elicit attenuated change blindness effects (e.g., David et al., 2006). What remains unclear, though, is whether people are more likely to notice changes that involve moral transgressions above and beyond negatively valenced but not immoral changes, which is the central question of the current research. Specifically, this project will investigate whether participants’ detection rates in a change blindness paradigm vary according to the moral relevance of the change.