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Imagination, Feelings, and Morality

OUR POINT OF VIEW

Some memories are painful, and some are happy. But you’re not completely locked into how you feel about them. You can actually change your feelings about them by reimagining them in different ways.

One of the unexpected effects of reimagining is whether you picture the scene in a first-person or third-person point of view. Computer game players are likely very familiar with this concept—in a first-person point of view, it’s as though you’re looking out of your own eyes. You can’t see your head. A third-person point of view, on the other hand, pictures you in the scene as though you were watching yourself on a video. Think back to eating breakfast this morning. You can picture the peanut butter toast getting closer and finally disappearing in the bottom of your mind’s eye as the toast enters your mouth. That’s first person. You can also picture the very same scene in the third person, with yourself pictured in front of you, like a character in a movie. The fact that we can do this, even though it’s not at all how we experienced it, is evidence of how memory recall is reconstructive. We can switch between these perspectives in our imaginations at will.

What’s surprising is that the point of view you use affects your feelings about the imagining. The first-person point of view makes people focus on sensory qualities, such as the feel of the fork in the hand, the brightness of the sun, and so on. It is more in the moment and focused on your response in the situation.

The third person is a visual stepping back, but it’s also a metaphorical stepping back—people picturing scenes in this way are more reflective on the meaning of what they’re doing, and how it fits into their lives in general. For example, if you ask people to imagine going through a door, the people you ask to use first-person perspective say things like “I can feel the knob. I am turning it.” Whereas people asked to use the third-person perspective say things like “I’m trying to get out.”

The first-person perspective is also more emotional. When people imagine emotional events from their past, they tend to use the first-person perspective. In fact, you can reduce the emotional punch of a memory by deliberately switching to third-person when recalling it. So if you have experienced a traumatic event, such as being mugged, you might find yourself reliving the event in your imagination and also re-living the negative emotions you associate with it. But if you force these imaginings to be in the third person, they won’t be so frightening.¹

MORALITY

Imagination is also important for figuring out what is going on in the heads of other people.² It is a facet of our ability to empathize, but the two can often be at odds. We misunderstand other people a lot. One of the ways we get it wrong is that we reliably underestimate how nice other people are going to be. We like to think of ourselves as good people, but think of everybody else as more selfish.

This is shown in one popular experimental setup called the “prisoner’s dilemma.” In it, you and another person can independently choose to cooperate or “defect” (screw each other over). If you both cooperate, it’s best for both of you. But if the other person defects, it’s also better for you to have defected. One study by business researcher Eugene Caruso found that people will typically cooperate about 60 percent of the time. However, this percentage changes when they are asked to empathize with the other person involved with the dilemma. But contrary to what you might expect, because people think of themselves as more good than others, after considering the thoughts of others, the probability of cooperation goes down to 27 percent!³

Chillingly, empathy does not always help.⁴

It’s well known that our emotions are an important part of our moral feelings. You might feel moral outrage, or jealousy, for example. Because imagination can generate emotions, it can also affect our feelings of moral judgment. A moral judgment is when you experience or hear about some scenario in which somebody does something, and then judge whether the person was behaving ethically or not.

In experiments, these scenarios use the imagination. People construct imagined situations in their heads based on what they are told, and then they think about them to make some kind of moral decision. For example, philosophers Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe gave people the following scenario:

“Imagine a universe (Universe A) in which everything that happens is completely caused by whatever happened before it. This is true from the very beginning of the universe, so what happened in the beginning of the universe caused what happened next, and so on, right up until the present. For example, one day John decided to have french fries at lunch. Like everything else, this decision was completely caused by what happened before it. So if everything in this universe was exactly the same up until John made his decision, then it had to happen that John would decide to have french fries.”

Fewer than 5 percent of people thought that people were morally responsible for their actions in Universe A. When we think about acting morally, or immorally, we think about free will and making choices. For many people, a deterministic universe as that described in the text makes moral choices seem kind of impossible. So, they reason, people in Universe A have about as much moral responsibility as a lawn mower does. The example in the text above involves eating french fries. What happens when we make the example a bit more visceral?

“In Universe A, a man named Bill has become attracted to his secretary, and he decides that the only way to be with her is to kill his wife and three children. He knows that it is impossible to escape from his house in the event of a fire. Before he leaves on a business trip, he sets up a device in his basement that burns down the house and kills his family.”

This gets you in the gut a bit more than the french fries story, doesn’t it? Indeed, when given this scenario, a full 72 percent of people said that Bill is morally responsible for his actions, even in this universe where everything is caused deterministically from what came before. Just changing the action in the story affects people’s idea of whether there is free will or not, and that affects their moral judgment, to the tune of a whopping 67 percentage points.⁵

Let’s look at another example: suppose a runaway train is about to kill five people. In this situation, is it okay to push an innocent person into the path of a runaway train, killing that one person, to save the five that would have died otherwise? Think about what your opinion on this is before you read on.

There are two answers to this question. The first is a rights-based approach, called “deontology,” which favors the rights of the individual being pushed. According to deontology, you may not violate the rights of the pushed person, even if it would save more lives. The other view is a more public-good view, called “utilitarianism,” which says that the act is good because it saves five lives rather than one. Different people give different answers to this question, and many find it difficult to decide what’s right and wrong.

One can think about this problem rather abstractly, say, in words, or one can try to vividly picture the scenario. Elinor Amit looked at a bunch of people and ran tests on them to see if they were more visual or more verbal thinkers (visualizers versus verbalizers). She found that their intellectual style predicted their answer to this moral dilemma: the visualizers were more likely to think of it as wrong (the deontological stance), and the verbalizers were more likely to think it right (the utilitarian stance).

Asking people what was in their “mind’s eye” when they were deciding revealed that people were more likely to imagine killing the person pushed, rather than imagining the five lives saved. That is, when imagining, they tended to image the harmful means rather than the beneficial ends.

So it looks like people who naturally visualize had more rights-based judgments. If the act of visualizing was causing this shift, then, she reasoned, if you interfere with their ability to visualize, the effect should be reduced. She did exactly this. In the experiment, she had them do a challenging visual task while making the moral decisions about pushing someone in front of the train. The task was this: they saw a series of shapes on a computer screen, and for each, shape they were asked if the shape they were looking at was the same or different from the shape they saw two shapes ago. This interferes with imagination and visual imagery, because it requires holding several shapes in mind at once. This made it much harder to vividly picture the runaway train situation because it kept the visual areas of their brains pretty busy while they were supposed to be making moral judgments. As predicted, the visual interference made people more utilitarian. That is, when she interfered with their ability to visualize, they favored the “greater good” moral stance, and thought it was more acceptable to push the person in front of the train.⁶

So it seems pretty clear that visualizing a moral situation makes you think more about rights than the greater good. We also see, from the french fries versus murdering your family example, morals are triggered more by visceral scenarios. But why would this be? To make sense of this, recall the distinction between the old, emotional brain and the new, more analytical brain.

The emotional and visual systems are all a part of the old brain. The old brain has more of an animal-based, intuitive morality. This means that it has evolved to have a kind of morally appropriate to respond to situations one is likely to face in a preindustrial society. And one of the hallmarks of preindustrial societies is that it’s difficult to physically hurt someone from a great distance.

In one version of the train problem I described above (called “trolley problems” in the literature), two similar situations are compared. In both, a train is headed to kill five people, and you are judging whether to choose to have one person die instead. But in one, you’re pushing somebody in front of the train, and in the other, you’re pulling a switch to redirect the train to another track, where it will kill only the one person instead. So in both, the idea is that you’re sacrificing one person to save five. But people tend to give different answers for these two problems. In general, more people are willing to pull a switch to kill one person to save five than they are to push somebody to have the same effect.

One of the important differences between these situations is that pushing somebody means actively putting your hands on them. This is a very visceral thing to do and relates more to the kind of situations our ancient ancestors might have faced. It’s kind of like pushing somebody over a cliff or onto some sharp rocks. Because our ancestors faced similar ones, they evolved to feel that these situations are morally wrong.

But there’s nothing in the ancient world like pulling a switch to do anything at all, let alone kill somebody. As a result, for many people, pulling a switch doesn’t feel as bad, even if you (or more specifically, your new brain) “knows” that the effect is ultimately the same—sacrificing one innocent person who would otherwise live. This is one of the reasons offered for why people differ in their moral responses to these hypothetical imaginings, but we don’t know for sure of what’s going on in the brain quite yet.⁷

So, the theory goes, because imagination is closely tied to evolved morality, engaging in visual imagery activates more of those old circuits, resulting in an older, evolved, rights-based moral judgment, and a relative deactivation of the rule-based, cool reasoning that the new brain specializes in. If you think about some moral situation visually, you’re more likely to think about it using evolved morality, as opposed to a more principled, reason-based morality.⁸

Those are some examples of how imagining a moral situation can affect your judgment about it. But can you use your imagination to make yourself a better person? Judging others is one thing, but what about how you actually act in the world? If you imagine doing good things, will that encourage you to actually do good things?

The answer seems to be yes. Brendan Gaesser found that when he had people imagine helping people in need, they were more likely to intend to help people in real life. And the more vivid the imagining was, the stronger the desire to help people.⁹ This seems to jibe with the fact that morality is closely tied to emotion and feelings about morality. Similarly, Arber Tasimi found that children who thought about their own good past behavior (but, interestingly, not others’) acted more generously.¹⁰

It sounds like it makes sense, but it also seems to contradict some other findings. Recall that imagining the steps one takes to achieve a goal (such as studying for an exam) helped people study, but imagining the goal being fulfilled (such as getting a good grade) did not. In fact, it hindered it.¹¹ Imagining your goal being completed gives you a great feeling that can, ironically, sap your motivation to achieve that goal in real life. Gaesser had people imagining helping others, which presumably involved imagining both the steps involved, as well as the positive outcome of helping. So if they were imagining the outcome, why didn’t this sap their desire to actually do it like it did in the studying for exams experiment?

Another reason to think it wouldn’t work is because of something called the “moral credential effect,” which is how your feeling like you are a good person allows you to license yourself to do bad things—or to not do good things. Sonya Sachdeva found that people who wrote self-congratulatory essays chose to donate only about a fifth as much money to charity as those who wrote self-critical essays. Many experiments involving subjects, such as racial prejudice, diet and health practices, and energy consumption, have shown similar “licensing” effects.¹² And, as we see in many studies, imagining doing something is treated the same way by much of your mind, as actually doing it. So when you imagine doing good, we have two reasons to think that it might inhibit your tendency to do good in real life, not the other way around.

These studies come from different literatures and seem to come up with opposite conclusions. Moral licensing predicts compensatory behavior, making you act badly, and work from the “moral identity” literature suggests that it makes you more good. What the hell, psychology?

I think Paul Conway might have figured out the answer to this paradox. In his study, he showed that thinking about good things you’ve done in a more specific, concrete way (rather than an abstract one), or thinking about good things you’ve done recently, causes a compensatory behavior. That is, it makes you less likely to do good deeds. But if people think about being good in an abstract way, or about good things done in the distant past, it reinforces a moral identity and results in people being more likely to act in a good way.¹³ So does thinking about being good make you more good? Well, it depends on how you think about being good! If you think about it in the abstract, or about the steps involved with doing good, or about things you’ve done that were good in the distant past, or about being good as part of your identity, it might help you be a better person. But if you imagine being good vividly, perhaps using mental imagery, or think about good things you’ve done recently, or focus too much on how great it would feel to do good, you are likely to think you’re already “good enough” and choose not to do as many good things.¹⁴

A study by Gert Cornelissen also sheds light on this problem. When asked to imagine having done something good, people with a more outcome-based mind-set were less likely to be good in the future, and people with a rule-based mind-set were more likely to be good.¹⁵ These mind-sets roughly correspond to utilitarian and deontological ethical theories.

So thinking about being good can, if done correctly, encourage you to be a better person. There’s also evidence that you can use your imagination to become less prejudiced. Irene Blair found that you can change certain stereotypes simply by imagining people of a certain gender or race, doing or being something that is counter to your stereotype. Across five experiments it reduced multiple kinds of stereotypes.¹⁶

So, used with care, imagination can make you act better. Can it make you feel better? Can you use your imagination to become kinder, less prejudiced, and just happier? It certainly seems like thinking about sad things makes us sadder, and thinking about happy things makes us happier. What does the science say?

HAPPINESS

Thinking about the bad things in your life can be harmful. Len Lecci showed that pondering the regrets of your life encourages reduced life satisfaction and discourages effective coping with life events.¹⁷ But what happens when you think of how your life could be worse than it currently is?

When you imagine how the world might be, rather than how it is, it’s called “counterfactual thinking,” because it’s counter to the facts. Counterfactual thinking is one aspect of imagination that can influence our happiness and general satisfaction with life. Keith Markman showed that thinking about how your life could be better tends to make you feel worse, with increased negative feelings, such as regret, remorse, and disappointment. The quality of something is often judged in comparison with some other specific thing. So if you think about how much better your life could be, you are likely to have a dimmer view of your actual life. Just as a candy will taste less sweet to you after eating gummy worms all day, imagining what your life could be like affects what you think of your life as it is.

But wait a minute—isn’t imagining how your life could be better a form of fantasizing? And doesn’t fantasizing feel good? I mentioned earlier that imagining achieving your goals can sap your motivation to do the steps you need to do to actually achieve them. This is because it feels good to imagine your goal being achieved, and that reward kind of makes you feel like you’ve already achieved it. But why does this work, given Markman’s finding that imagining your life better tends to make you sadder, not happier?

Fantasizing feels good, but there’s a dark side to it. Gabriele Oettingen found that fantasizing about a happy future leads to a short-term boost in happiness, but more depressive symptoms down the road.¹⁸

So, if thinking about how great your life could be makes you feel worse, can thinking about how bad your life could be make you feel better? Yes. Keith Markman also showed in his experiments that if you think about how your life could be worse, it increases positive feelings, such as surprise, joy, and relief in avoiding disaster.¹⁹ It sounds simple, right? When thinking about a bad life, yours looks good, and vice versa.

But it’s not that simple.

One time, when I was a child, my sister and I were sitting in the back seat while my mother was driving. My mother was trying to pull out onto a road. Visibility wasn’t good, and at one point she considered moving forward. She didn’t, though, and a good thing, too. A big truck zoomed right where she would have been. If she had pulled out, we might all have been in a terrible car accident. But since she didn’t, if she then thought about this past that almost was, it would have been like thinking about how her life could have been worse and should have made her really happy. Right?

She wasn’t. She was rattled and upset and kept thinking about how she almost killed herself and her children. Counterfactual thoughts like this often lead to mixed emotions: there are positive emotions resulting from feeling fortunate that the bad thing didn’t happen to you, paired with anxiety—that could have been me.²⁰

Why does this happen?

Suppose a golfer is thinking about Tiger Woods. Mr. Woods is a great golfer, and comparing herself to him might make her feel bad about her own ability. But if she was a member of a minority group, the idea of Tiger Woods might be inspiring. By considering herself in the same class as Mr. Woods, she could share in the joy of his success. If she contrasts herself with Mr. Woods, it could make her feel bad. If she identifies with Mr. Woods, she won’t feel bad. She might feel good.

The reverse happens with thinking about how your life could be worse. If, in your imagination, you put yourself in the situation, then you might feel anxiety or some other negative emotion. But if you focus on the contrast between your life and what you’ve imagined, it can feel good. One of the reasons the car example above is compelling is that my mother might feel both of these contradictory emotions at once, caused by different processes in her mind trying to make sense of them.

What all this means is that you can use your imagination to improve your mood, but you have to be strategic about it. Thinking about how your life could be worse can help you have gratitude about your life as it is. For example, I love being a university professor, and sometimes I think about what my life might be like if I had another job. Any other job. This makes me happy in that it fosters appreciation. But if I think about losing my professor job in the future, or about someone else who lost their job whom I can identify with, it freaks me out and causes anxiety.

Reflecting on what you’re grateful for can provide even more benefits than downward counterfactuals. Gratitude is a complex phenomenon involving both beliefs, attention to memories, and emotion. You can think of it as the perception that one has received some benefit because of chance, of the good intentions of another (rather than some benefit earned, deserved, or worked for).

One way to exercise your gratitude muscle is to keep a gratitude journal, writing regularly about what you’re grateful for. A study by Robert Emmons compared people who kept a gratitude journal to people who journaled about things that were wrong with their life, and even to people who recorded how their lives were better than the lives of the less fortunate. Relative to these other groups, the gratitude group reported being more alert, enthusiastic, determined, attentive, and to have higher energy. They were also more likely to help someone else or provide emotional support. They experienced physical benefits, too, such as longer and better sleep, and engaged in more exercise. Friends and family of people who practice gratitude report that they seem happier, more pleasant, outgoing, trustworthy, and optimistic—it’s also better for your health.²¹

What does gratitude have to do with imagination? Well, deliberately recalling episodes from your life, and evaluating them in terms of gratitude is a kind of imagination, but because people vary so much in how vivid their imagery is, some are using imagery and many are not. Although studies have not distinguished imagery versus nonimagery gratitude interventions, because we have seen how imagery is so closely related to the emotional parts of the brain, it would not surprise me if deliberately engaging in imagery while doing gratitude practice enhanced its effects.

Gratitude is thinking about your life as it is, but we often use our imagination to think about what might have been. These are things we know to be false, but temporarily suppose to be true. It is a sandbox where we can build an imagined reality and see what happens. It’s a simple imagining of a possible world, a world that might be, or might have been.²²

When do we engage in counterfactual thinking? Typically, we do it when we want to change or feel the need to understand the world. For example, we often will do it for negative or exceptional events, but less so for things that are routine. People will spontaneously think of counterfactuals when things almost happen. For example, people think of more counterfactuals when they miss an airplane by five minutes than when they miss a plane by an hour.²³ If the world treats you well, or you missed something good by a long shot, why question it?

We often create imagined worlds simply to help us understand what people say. For example, when you read a novel or hear a story, your imagination is active and is, indeed, necessary for comprehension. Sometimes we can get so drawn into these stories, recreated in our own imagination, that we stop attending to our actual surroundings. For example, in a particularly exciting part of a book, it might not even enter your mind for several minutes that you’re sitting in a chair, at home, or even reading at all. Psychologists call this “transportation,” because you feel transported to the world created by the author—or at least, the version of it you are creating in your own mind.

Psychologists have devised clever experiments to figure out what makes a story compelling, what kinds of people are more likely to experience transportation, and why people seek it out. At first blush, it might seem an impossible phenomenon to study scientifically. Although measuring transportation is not as straightforward as, say, measuring the mass of a rock, Melanie Green and Timothy Brock devised a questionnaire that reliably measures people’s tendency to get lost in a good book. It includes statements that respondents are asked to agree or disagree with, such as “I could easily picture the events taking place.”²⁴

Transportation is closely linked to the concept of flow, pioneered by creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which is the good feeling you get when you are completely absorbed in a task and lose track of time, forgetting about other concerns in your life for a while. People can experience flow when creating art, engaging in sports, or numerous other activities. Interestingly, reading creates the flow experience more than any other activity.²⁵

Why do people seek out transportation experiences? One of the reasons is mood control. When feeling bad, sometimes people will read a happy or funny story to put them in a better mood,²⁶ and indeed, literary transportation is more appealing to people who are feeling bad about themselves. Perhaps because they are using transportation as a kind of escape, people in the laboratory made to feel bad spent more subsequent time watching television, presumably to make themselves feel better.²⁷

People also get better transportation effects if they can relate to the story. For example, it’s easier to experience transportation if the season in the story matches the actual season, or if the social environment is one you’re familiar with, such as a fraternity or an arts organization.²⁸

Many parts of our minds believe what is happening in the story is actually real, and transportation can make these stories seem even more real. What ends up happening is that stories that we know full well are complete fictions can end up changing beliefs we have about the real world. One study, by Elizabeth Marsh, found that avid readers of romance are less likely to use condoms, presumably because they are influenced by the “swept away by romance” trope in the literature they read.²⁹

Of course, transportation has beneficial effects, too. Steven Pinker suggests that the introduction of literature to the masses is one of the driving factors in reducing violence worldwide—because fiction, perhaps more than any other art form, has the ability to bring the reader intimately into the head of another, which encourages empathy with people who are different from you.³⁰ A lifetime of reading correlates with having social skills, such as perceiving what others are feeling and thinking.³¹ One striking study found that fiction promoted compassion even more so than real-life experiences. In an experiment by Phyllis Katz, one group of white children worked on a shared task with some African American children, while another group read a story with African American fictional characters. The students who read the story had more positive attitudes toward African Americans than the students who actually interacted with them.³²

Writing a novel, and even just reading one, is a profound act of imagination and perhaps a key to a better future.

I think I’ll take a break from writing this and work on my novel. . . .