Seminar: Virtual moral labs: How VR has changed our understanding of moral decision-making

Moral decision-making is traditionally assessed using text-based vignettes derived from philosophy, enabling systematic comparisons of moral principles. However, these scenarios are often contextually impoverished and fail to elicit the emotional reactions that might occur in real-life counterparts of the same moral conflict. To address this limitation, we have used Virtual Reality (VR) and Haptic VR technologies to recreate these dilemmas, finding a striking contrast between moral judgments in text-based scenarios and moral actions in VR scenarios. In this talk, I explore the implications of this work for models of moral decision-making and I reflect on the transformative potential of VR in moral psychology research.

Kathryn Francis, PhD, is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Psychology at the University of Leeds, where she leads the Moral Minds Lab. Her interdisciplinary research bridges experimental psychology and experimental philosophy, focusing on moral conflicts and their applications in bioethics, human-animal relations, and environmental ethics. She specializes in Virtual Reality simulations to assess and measure moral behaviour and has published in leading journals, including Nature’s Scientific Reports, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, European Journal of Social Psychology, and British Journal of Psychology.

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