Some of the strings of letters we flashed were words, others were not. Importantly, some of the words we flashed had moral content (virtue, steal, God) and others did not (virtual, steel, pet).

Over the course of three experiments, we found that participants correctly identified strings of letters as words more often when they formed moral words (69 percent accuracy) than when they formed nonmoral words (65 percent accuracy). This suggested that moral content gave a “boost” to perceptually ambiguous stimuli — a shortcut to conscious awareness. We call this phenomenon the “moral pop-out effect.”

This phenomenon is similar to one that you may experience every day. Think about how you experience food when you are hungry compared to when you are full. When you are hungry, food seems to “pop out” and capture your attention — as with the tempting aroma of the nut carts around New York City. But when you’re full, food doesn’t register as strongly and temptation doesn’t emerge. In fact, previous work by the researchers Rémi Radel and Corentin Clément-Guillotin has shown that food-related words are easier to recognize when one is hungry than when one is satiated.

In the moral domain, such “hunger” may take the form of a desire to redress injustice. According to the social psychologist Melvin J. Lerner, people have a fundamental need to believe that they live in a fair and orderly environment, in which good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. When people are faced with unjust outcomes happening to others they often take steps to compensate the victims — or even to attribute blame to them for the harm they experienced. This helps satiate their “moral hunger.”