From Perception to Action in Ethical Dilemmas and Climate Change

Friday, 28 August 2026, 10-11:30 am, FAB3.26, Faculty of Arts BuildingLink opens in a new window

We are delighted to welcome Dr Hong Xu from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, for a seminar entitled “From Perception to Action in Ethical Dilemmas and Climate Change”. The seminar forms part of the NTU-Warwick joint project “From Perception, Cognition, and Emotion to Action: Visual Narratives as Pathways to Pro-Environmental Behaviour under Climate Change (ViNEB)”, co-led by Dr Feng Mao from the School for Cross-faculty Studies, Dr Lory Barile from the Department of Economics, and Dr Hong Xu from NTU. The talk will be followed by an open discussion, providing an opportunity to explore the topic further and exchange perspectives with the speaker and other participants.

Refreshments will be available from 9:30 am.

From Perception to Action in Ethical Dilemmas and Climate Change

How do we visually perceive the world, make decisions and take actions? In this talk, I will present two recent studies on ethical dilemma and climate change in my lab. The first study investigated drivers’ perception and responses when they face ethical dilemmas in simulated autonomous driving. Through data mining of the moral machine experiment dataset (MME, Awad et al., 2018), in-person surveys, and a behavioral experiment, we tested drivers’ preferences, priorities, and behavioral responses in ethical dilemmas. We found that traffic rules were ranked among the top in the MME dataset, this preference was also confirmed in the in-person surveys together with possible reasons by our participants. However, this preference was overtaken by the age preference when drivers were tested in driving simulator. Our findings suggest a dual system in decision making and actions in moral dilemmas such that the action in driving simulations was prompted by an automatic, intuitive and emotional process, whereas the ethical preference revealed by surveys was more likely from a controlled, rational and cognitive process. This dual system may also exist in climate change perception and action.

The second study examines whether brief climate hazard videos affect environmental engagement. Participants watched a silent 5-minute video about sea level rise, air pollution, wildfire, or neutral urban scenes while their eye movements were recorded. They completed measures of climate perceptions, mitigation intentions, ecological worldview, emotions, donation outcomes, and individual differences. We found that the three climate videos increased negative affect, reduced positive affect, and increased willingness to donate and stated donation amount. Eye tracking showed large differences between climate videos and neutral urban scenes in saccade count and total saccade duration. These results suggest that brief climate videos can raise affective engagement and low-cost support, but they do not produce broad changes across all climate outcomes. Our findings shed light on the perceptual and cognitive processes in transportational and environmental decisions and actions.

Dr Hong XU

Associate Professor of Psychology, Associate Chair (Research) in School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore

Dr Xu obtained Ph.D. in Psychology, Master’s in Statistics, both from University of Chicago, and B.S. in Psychology from Peking University. After her postdoctoral training at Columbia University, she has been a faculty member at NTU since 2009. Her research interest is in neural mechanism of visual perception and cognition (in particular, heading perception and face perception), and its application to human-computer interaction, transportation, environment and sustainability. She founded the Visual Cognitive Neuroscience (VCN) Lab at NTU. More information about her lab can be accessed from VCN Lab website (vcn-lab.github.io).