The role of attention in moral learning from the consequences of past decisions.

Despite their adaptive moral learning mechanisms, people don't learn optimal decision procedures for moral dilemmas. We resolve this puzzle by experimentally examining the effect of attention on moral learning. Our findings suggest that people learn from their moral mistakes only if they attend to their decisions' most morally significant consequences. This suggests that prompting people to reflect on the moral consequences of past decisions could be a promising approach to moral education.