Event: MAKS Research Seminar: Moral Decision-Making: A Talk in Three Acts
Date: Friday 26 May 2023
Time: 12:15 (Malta time)
Venue: Room MKS507, Level 5, MAKS Building, University of Malta
Speaker: Prof. Diego Fernandez-Duque, U.S.A.
This research seminar will be hosted by the Department of Cognitive Science, Faculty of Media & Knowledge Sciences.
Programme
- 12:15 - Moral Decision-Making: A Talk in Three Acts
Speaker: Prof. Diego Fernandez-Duque, Department of Psychology - Villanova University College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, USA
- 13:00 - Q & A session/informal discussion
Admission is free, but kindly reserve a place by sending an email.
Abstract
I will describe three related projects, as follows:
Which Life to Save? Decision Avoidance and Preference for the Young
- The Covid-19 pandemic brought to the forefront questions in the past reserved for emergency doctors and ethicists, such as “should we choose a life over another?” and if so, “which life should we save?”. In 4 experiments, I show that although people prefer saving young lives, this preference is unstable, easily manipulated by framing, and sometimes overshadowed by decision avoidance.
The ‘Unit Asking’ Effect for Charitable Donations: Cognitive and Affective Mechanisms
- When requesting a hypothetical donation toward children in need, asking participants to first consider how much they would donate to a single child leads to increased donations for the whole group, a finding known as the Unit Asking effect (UA). In 3 experiments, I show that the UA effect is insensitive to group size, is independent of feelings of sympathy, and is robust to memory distractions. I conclude that the UA effect is instantiated as a simple categorical rule: ‘if I give X to one child, I should give more than X to a larger group’.
When Choosing a Charity, Food Donations are favoured over Direct Cash Transfers
- In 3 experiments, I show that most people prefer charities that give food rather than money, and display an uneasiness with applying a market-based solution to the problem of effective giving.
Speaker's Profile
Prof. Fernandez-Duque grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina. After attaining a medical degree in 1993, he moved to University of Oregon in Eugene to work with Mike Posner on issues of attention and executive function, with Ian Thornton on change blindness. and with the philosopher Mark L. Johnson on metaphors of attention. In 2000, he moved to Toronto for postdoc work under the supervision of Sandy Black, a cognitive neurologist at the Rotman Research Institute and Sunnybrook Hospital. There, he did research on attention and executive function in Alzheimer's disease and fronto-temporal dementia (FTD). Since 2004, he has a faculty position at Villanova University in Philadelphia, where he pursues research on judgment and decision making, and on social cognition.
