Selective attention can bias moral learning from consequences.

Previous research found that people's decision-making is shaped by learning from the consequences of past decisions. We hypothesized that the decision strategy people learn depends on which of the outcomes of their previous decisions they attend to. We ran four pre-registered experiments to test whether manipulating people's attention could be an effective strategy for fostering moral learning in a social dilemma. Our findings show that when people attend to how a previous decision affected distant others, they learn to make subsequent decisions in a way that is less parochial. When they attend to how a previous decision affected an ingroup, they learn to make more parochial decisions.