There's an interesting paper (free PDF version) Elinor Amit and Joshua Greene in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, on the role of visualization in moral judgment. They show that visualizing the effects of our choices has an affect on the type of reasoning we use to make moral judgments. In essence, when we "see" our actions, we tend not to consider their effects, and therefore make choices based less on the consequences of those actions than on the moral valence of the actions themselves.
Before we get to the study, however, a little background information is in order. The dominant theory of moral judgment in psychology right now is a dual process theory, which argues that moral judgments are made either through a quick, intuitive system, or through a slower, conscious, deliberative system. The intuitive system, which is largely affect-driven (that is, emotion plays a big role), and unconscious, tends to favor deontological moral judgments, which is to say, moral judgments that strictly adhere to a rule like "Thou shalt not kill." The conscious, deliberative system tends to favor consequentialist judgments, which is to say, judgments that consider the outcome and try to choose actions that will leave to the best possible one.
The now classic Trolley and Footbridge problems are often used to illustrate the difference between the two sorts of judgments. The trolley problem, in which an out of control trolley is headed towards five unsuspecting people, whom it will surely kill, asks you whether you would flip a switch which will cause the trolley to change tracks and kill one unsuspecting person, or let the trolley continue on to kill the five. In most cases, people say they would flip the switch, thereby killing one and saving five. This is generally considered to be an example of consequentialist thinking: causing the death of one person to save a greater number of people.
The footbridge problem also involves an out of control trolley that is headed down a track on which five unsuspecting people are waiting, and will surely be killed if the trolley is not diverted. This time, however, you are on a footbridge overlooking the tracks, and the only way to divert the train is by throwing a person standing next to you off the bridge and on the track, resulting in that person's death, but causing the trolley to stop or derail or otherwise be diverted, and thereby saving the five. When given this dilemma, most people choose not to throw the person off the bridge, and therefore not sacrificing the one to save the five. This is generally treated as an instance of deontological moral reasoning.
I won't get into the wealth of research over the last decade that explores the differences between these two types of moral judgments, and under what sorts of conditions we use one or the other, except to say that one conclusion from that research, as I've already suggested, is that when we make these moral decisions quickly and intuitively, without conscious deliberation, we tend to judge deontologically, whereas when we make them consciously and slowly, usually without a personal emotional commitment, we tend to make them using consequentialist reasoning. Hence the dual process theory. Most of this research uses trolley and footbridge-like moral dilemmas, and while there are issues with those two particular dilemmas, several others (e.g., Sophie's choice, which, as in the movie, involves choosing one child or no children, the "crying baby" dilemma in which you have to smother a crying baby or sacrifice everyone in a room, etc.) that make up for some of those issues are also used.
This gets us to the Amit and Greene paper. They conducted three studies designed to assess the effects of visualization on moral judgment, under they hypothesis that visualizing would increase intuitive, deontological judgments and reduce consequentialist ones. I won't go into the first study, which used individual differences in cognitive style (visual vs. verbal), because that would require a great deal of background on cognitive style. Instead, I'll start with the second. In that study, they had participants perform either a visual or a verbal working memory task (along with a third condition in which participants did not perform any working memory task). These tasks are designed to tax, or interfere, with specific types of processing: by performing a visual working memory task, the visual reasoning system is overloaded, leaving less processing capacity for other visual information, and by performing a verbal task, the processing of verbal information is interfered with in the same way. When given footbridge-like problems in which people usually make deontological choices (that is, not throwing the poor bastard off the bridge), participants in the visual interference task were more likely to make consequentialism-based, or deliberative judgments that considered the consequences, than those in the verbal or no-interference tasks.
In their third study, Amit and Greene asked participants who reported visualizing their choice to rate whether their visualizations had focused more on the action they chose or on its consequences (e.g., on throwing the person onto the tracks or on the five people dying). As you might expect, most people focused on the action, and not the consequences, and this focus was correlated with making deontological rather than consequentialist moral decisions.
Amit and Greene conclude, then, that visualization triggers the more emotional, intuitive decision-making process, and thus deontologically-based moral decisions. I wouldn't get too caught up in the deontological vs. consequentialist distinction. As the third study seems to show, it's not so much a lack of the consideration of consequences that results in people not choosing to save the many with the sacrifice of one, but instead which consequences people focus on when they're visualizing their decisions. If you focus on killing the one, you're less likely to choose to do so then if you focus on the death of the five. However, it is consistent with the dual process theory: visualizing the unpleasant, even horrific direct consequences of one's actions, e.g., the person's falling off the bridge to their death when you push them, makes it difficult to disinterestedly deliberate on the consequences of not doing so (the death of the five). Plus, it suggests another way in which the intuitive system works: through visualizations that prime emotions, which then guide the decision process.
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