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    Morality and the imagination: Real-world moral beliefs interfere with imagining fictional content
    with Jessica Black
    Philosophical Psychology 33 (7): 1018-1044. 2020.
    The purpose of this paper was to test whether imaginative resistance – a term used in the philosophical literature to describe the reluctance to imagine counter-moral worlds – is experienced by peo...
  • Measuring the unimaginable: Imaginative resistance to fiction and related constructs
    with Jessica Black
    Personality and Individual Differences 111 (1): 71-79. 2017.
    Imaginative resistance refers to a perceived inability or unwillingness to enter into fictional worlds that portray deviant moralities (Gendler, 2000): we can all easily imagine that dragons exist, but many people feel incapable of imagining fictional worlds in which morality works differently. Although this phenomenon has received much attention from philosophers, no one has attempted to operationalize the construct in a self-report scale. In Study 1, we developed the Imaginative Resistance Sca…Read more
  • Impossible or improbable: The difficulty of imagining morally deviant worlds.
    with Black Jessica
    Imagination, Cognition and Personality 36 (1): 27-40. 2016.
    Prior research has investigated children’s ability to distinguish between possible and impossible events in our own world, but relatively little empirical research has investigated adults’ intuitions about the boundaries or limitations of imaginary worlds. Here, we presented participants with brief scenarios that were either Morally Deviant, Factually Unlikely, or Conceptually Contradictory. Participants rated how easy it was for them to imagine a world in which each description held true and as…Read more