The project investigates the role of conventionality in people’s sampling of possibilities and decision-making. Social conventions prescribe implicit rules that govern our behaviors and that are not grounded in positive laws or moral principles. Actions that violate conventionality – abnormal actions – are socially unacceptable but morally permissible. Previous research shows that conventionality and morality constrain people’s sampling of possibilities differently. While immoral actions tend to be intuitively judged as impossible, simply abnormal actions are not. The present project studies people’s intuition about conventionality by surveying and analyzing their judgments of given normal/abnormal actions in relation to various criteria (normality, morality, possibility, rationality), as well as the possible actions generated by the participants themselves for a given scenario. These studies will help us answer the larger question of why we follow rules – even when it could be effortful and lacks objective justification – by delineating an underlying cognitive model.
Project in progress.