Department of Psychology, University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY, United States.
Department of Psychology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, United States.
Cognition. 2018 Feb;171:180-193. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.11.004. Epub 2017 Nov 24.
How we imagine and subjectively experience the future can inform how we make decisions in the present. Here, we examined a prosocial effect of imagining future episodes in motivating moral decisions about helping others in need, as well as the underlying cognitive mechanisms. Across three experiments we found that people are more willing to help others in specific situations after imagining helping them in those situations. Manipulating the spatial representation of imagined future episodes in particular was effective at increasing intentions to help others, suggesting that scene imagery plays an important role in the prosocial effect of episodic simulation. Path modeling analyses revealed that episodic simulation interacts with theory of mind in facilitating prosocial responses but can also operate independently. Moreover, we found that our manipulations of the imagined helping episode increased actual prosocial behavior, which also correlated with changes in reported willingness to help. Based on these findings, we propose a new model that begins to capture the multifaceted mechanisms by which episodic simulation contributes to prosocial decision-making, highlighting boundaries and promising future directions to explore. Implications for research in moral cognition, imagination, and patients with impairments in episodic simulation are discussed.
我们对未来的想象和主观体验可以影响我们在当下做出的决策。在这里，我们研究了想象未来事件对激励人们做出帮助有需要的他人的道德决策的一种亲社会效应，以及其潜在的认知机制。通过三项实验，我们发现，在想象帮助他人处于特定情境后，人们更愿意在特定情境下帮助他人。特别是操纵想象未来事件的空间表示形式，能够有效地增加帮助他人的意愿，这表明场景意象在情景模拟的亲社会效应中起着重要作用。路径模型分析表明，情景模拟与心理理论相互作用，促进亲社会反应，但也可以独立运作。此外，我们发现，我们对想象中的帮助事件的操纵增加了实际的亲社会行为，这也与报告的帮助意愿的变化相关。基于这些发现，我们提出了一个新的模型，开始捕捉情景模拟对亲社会决策的贡献的多方面机制，突出了边界和有前途的未来探索方向。讨论了对道德认知、想象和情景模拟障碍患者的研究的影响。
