Research on moral judgment has been dominated by rationalist models, in which moral judgment is thought to be caused by moral reasoning. The author gives 4 reasons for considering the hypothesis that moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached. The social intuitionist model is presented as an alternative to rationalist models. The model is a social model in that it deemphasizes the private reasoning done by individuals and emphasizes instead the importance of social and cultural influences. The model is an intuitionist model in that it states that moral judgment is generally the result of quick, automatic evaluations (intuitions). The model is more consistent than rationalist models with recent findings in social, cultural, evolutionary, and biological psychology, as well as in anthropology and primatology.

https://www.motherjones.com/files/emotional_dog_and_rational_tail.pdf

The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment.

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

As reflected in the amount of controversy, few areas in psychology have undergone such dramatic conceptual changes in the past decade as the emerging science of heuristics. Heuristics are efficient cognitive processes, conscious or unconscious, that ignore part of the information. Because using heuristics saves effort, the classical view has been that heuristic decisions imply greater errors than do “rational” decisions as defined by logic or statistical models. However, for many decisions, the assumptions of rational models are not met, and it is an empirical rather than an a priori issue how well cognitive heuristics function in an uncertain world. To answer both the descriptive question (“Which heuristics do people use in which situations?”) and the prescriptive question (“When should people rely on a given heuristic rather than a complex strategy to make better judgments?”), formal models are indispensable. We review research that tests formal models of heuristic inference, including in business organizations, health care, and legal institutions. This research indicates that (a) individuals and organizations often rely on simple heuristics in an adaptive way, and (b) ignoring part of the information can lead to more accurate judgments than weighting and adding all information, for instance for low predictability and small samples. The big future challenge is to develop a systematic theory of the building blocks of heuristics as well as the core capacities and environmental structures these exploit.

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Heuristic Decision Making

Researchers in moral psychology and social justice have agreed that morality is about matters of harm, rights, and justice. With this definition of morality, conservative opposition to social justice programs has appeared to be immoral, and has been explained as a product of various non-moral processes, such as system justification or social dominance orientation. In this article we argue that, from an anthropological perspective, the moral domain is usually much broader, encompassing many more aspects of social life and valuing institutions as much or more than individuals. We present theoretical and empirical reasons for believing that there are in fact five psychological systems that provide the foundations for the world's many moralities. The five foundations are psychological preparations for detecting and reacting emotionally to issues related to harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Political liberals have moral intuitions primarily based upon the first two foundations, and therefore misunderstand the moral motivations of political conservatives, who generally rely upon all five foundations.

When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals May Not Recognize

Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing, but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow erroneous beliefs to persist. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: Look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and, ceteris paribus, favor conclusions for which arguments can be found.

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Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory

Five-factor inventories have a major general factor related to social desirability which can be reduced by framing items neutrally.

Here are two of the biggest questions in moral psychology: (1) Where do moral beliefs and motivations come from? (2) How does moral judgment work? All other questions are easy, or at least easier, once you have clear answers to these two questions. Here are our answers: (1) Moral beliefs and motivations come from a small set of intuitions that evolution has prepared the human mind to develop; these intuitions then enable and constrain the social construction of virtues and values, and (2) moral judgment is a product of quick and automatic intuitions that then give rise to slow, conscious moral reasoning. Our approach is therefore some kind of intuitionism. However, there is more: moral reasoning done by an individual is usually devoted to finding reasons to support the individual's intuitions, but moral reasons passed between people have a causal force. Moral discussion is a kind of distributed reasoning, and moral claims and justifications have important effects on individuals and societies. We believe that moral judgment is best understood as a social process, not as a private act of cognition. We therefore call our model the social intuitionist model (SIM). Please don't forget the social part of the model, or you will think that we think that morality is just blind instinct, no smarter than lust. You will accuse us of denying any causal role for moral reasoning or for culture, and you will feel that our theory is a threat to human dignity, to the possibility of moral change, or to the notion that philosophers have any useful role to play in our moral lives (see the debate between Saltzstein & Kasachkoff, 2004, vs. Haidt, 2004). Unfortunately, if our theory is correct, once you get angry at us, we will no longer be able to persuade you with the many good reasons we are planning on giving you below. So please, don't forget the social part. In the pages that follow we will try to answer six questions. We begin with the big two, for which our answer is the SIM. We follow up with Question 3: What is the evidence for the SIM? We then address three questions

Social intuitionists answer six questions about moral psychology.

Are moral judgments based on reason, or on intuition and emotion? Thirty participants were presented with a classic moral reasoning dilemma, and with four tasks that were designed to put intuition and reason into conflict. It was hypothesized that participants’ judgments would be highly consistent with their reasoning on the moral reasoning dilemma, but that judgment would separate from reason and follow intuition in the other four tasks. This prediction was supported. In the four intuition stories (but not in the reasoning dilemma) judgment preceded reasoning, judgments were based more on gut feelings than on reasoning, and participants more frequently laughed and directly stated that they had no reasons to support their judgments. This phenomenon -the stubborn and puzzled maintenance of a judgment without supporting reasons -was dubbed “moral dumbfounding.” The existence of moral dumbfounding calls into question models in which moral judgment is produced by moral reasoning. These findings are linked to other dual-process theories of cognition. Moral Dumbfounding 2 Moral Dumbfounding: When Intuition Finds No Reason How do we know what is right and what is wrong? On what is morality based? These questions are as old as philosophy itself. Plato (trans. 1973) held that the Form of the Good was directly apprehended through the study of philosophy. For Aristotle (trans. 1953), the good was not a mystical metaphysical unity, but rather a mixed bag of virtues. By habituating oneself to these virtues, one reaches eudaimonia, a kind of moral well-being. But both of these early philosophers agreed that the control of the passions by reason was essential to virtue and morality. For more than two thousand years after that, most philosophers have agreed with them. It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century--during the "Age of Reason," no less -that the dominance of reason in morality came under serious attack, in the writings of Scottish philosopher David Hume (1739/1969). Hume observed that "nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in common life, than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform themselves to its dictates" (p. 460). He noted that reason was held to be eternal, invariable and divine, while passion was held to be blind, inconsistent, and deceitful. "In order to show the fallacy of all this philosophy," he continued, "I shall endeavor to prove, first, that reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will; and, secondly, that it can never oppose passion in the direction of the will" (p. 460). Hume did not fully succeed in his philosophical proofs of the impotence of reason. The present study, however, tests Hume’s claims empirically. No study could show that reason can never oppose passion in the direction of the will, and indeed we think this hyperbolic claim is unlikely to be true. However we can investigate a class of moral dilemmas in which reason and passion conflict. If Hume is (generally) correct then passion will determine judgment and people will follow their feelings, even when they lack reasons to support those feelings. If Hume is incorrect then reasoning will precede judgment, and judgment will not be made without reasoning. However before we can begin an empirical test of Humean psychology we must bring its terms up to date. Hume’s most radical claim about human judgment was that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them" (1739/1969, p.462). But what, in modern terms, are passions? In other passages from the same work Hume gives examples of passions such as anger, hope, fear, grief, joy, despair or security, suggesting that he means what we now call the emotions, broadly construed. Elsewhere in the work he discusses the emotions of “aversion” and “propensity”, which motivate us to “avoid or embrace what will give us this uneasiness or satisfaction” (p.461). In modern terms he appears to be discussing a general approach-avoidance system (Davidson, 1992; Dollard and Miller, 1950). This approach-avoidance system is particularly important in the moral domain, giving us a “general appetite to good and aversion to evil” (p.464).As such Hume, like his fellow Scottsman Adam Smith (1759/1966), was proposing an innate moral sense (see Wilson, 1993, for a modern versions of the moral sense). Hume argued that this moral sense gives us certain “calm passions” which, because they do not cause as much “disorder to the soul” Moral Dumbfounding 3 as the emotions, are often mistaken for the products of reason. In modern terms these calm passions might be called intuitions, or, more popularly, “gut feelings”. In the present article we shall use the term “intuition” as the broadest modern term for what Hume meant by “passion”. Intuition should be understood to include a variety of automatic and uncontrollable cognitive processes, including emotional appraisals (Scherer, 1984) and automatic processes (Wegner & Bargh, 1998) which are largely outside the control of consciousness and independent of reasoning (see Bastick, 1982, for a review). But what about the relationship between intuition (passion) and reason? Hume used the metaphor of master and slave, which we suspect will fail to resonate (or worse) with modern audiences. We can update this metaphor while still preserving Hume’s skepticism towards reason as follows: “reason is the press-secretary of the intuitions, and can pretend to no other office than that of ex-post facto spin doctor.” In modern political life the President makes his decisions first and then dispatches the press-secretary to justify and rationalize those decisions. The press secretary may have no access to the real causes of the President’s decision, and is therefore free to make up whatever argument will sound most convincing to the general public. Everyone knows that it serves no purpose to argue with the press secretary. Convincing her that her arguments are specious or that the President’s decisions are wrong will have no effect on the president’s decisions, since those decisions were not based on the press secretary’s arguments. Several modern psychological theories have posited a similar ex-post facto role for reasoning. Nisbett and Wilson (1977) showed a variety of cases in which people’s behavior or judgment was influenced by factors outside of their awareness. Yet when asked to explain their behavior people promptly constructed plausible sounding explanations using implicit causal theories. Haidt, Koller and Dias (1993) observed a similar phenomenon when interviewing people about harmless violations of taboos, such as eating one’s (already dead) pet dog, or cleaning one’s toilet (in private) with one’s national flag. Participants often stated immediately and emphatically that the action was wrong, and then began searching for plausible reasons. Participants frequently tried to introduce an element of harm, for example by stating that eating dog meat would make a person sick, or by stating that a person would feel guilty after voluntarily using her flag as a rag. When the interviewer repeated the facts of the story (e.g., that the dog was thoroughly cooked so no germs were present), participants would often drop one argument and begin searching for another. It appeared that judgment and justification were two separate processes; the judgment came first, and then justification relied on “implicit moral theories” (paraphrasing Nisbett & Wilson, 1977), such as that moral violations have victims. Shweder and Haidt (1994) drew on such observations to support a theory of “cognitive intuitionism” in which the human mind has been built to respond to certain moral goods. These goods appear to us as self-evident truths. They are not figured out or derived from first principles, although cultures have some leeway in making some of these goods more or less selfevident to their members (i.e., the goods of equality and autonomy may or may not trump the goods of chastity and piety). Thus numerous theorists have suggested that moral judgment and moral reasoning may be two independent processes, in which moral judgment is like a form of perception (quick, nonMoral Dumbfounding 4 verbal, effortless, and utterly convincing) while moral reasoning is an ex post facto process, akin to explaining in words what one sees with one’s eyes. A very useful language for discussing these two processes comes from Margolis (1987) who calls them “seeing-that” and “reasoning why”. Margolis theorizes that the structure of the human brain cannot be radically different from its evolutionary ancestors. Our brains have been structured by millions of years of evolution for the function of pattern recognition, and our higher cognitive processes (such as reasoning) are only recent abilities being carried out by these same old structures. Although we may fancy that human cognition takes place exclusively using language and logic, the brain's structure and evolutionary history imply that most of our cognition involves lower or simpler processes of pattern matching. Realizing that human cognition is based primarily on pattern recognition and similar primitive thought processes--what Margolis (1987) calls "P-cognition", for pattern cognition-clears up a number of mysteries of human cognition. For example, as Margolis points out, human cognition is notoriously bad at logic problems, e.g., the Wason 4 card task. Because the brain's structure is set up for P-cognition, and not logic, this is understandable. Another seeming peculiarity in human cognition that is explained by P-cognition is the observations of the Gestalt psychologists. Gestaltists mostly studied visual perception, especially optical illusions. For example, Wertheimer (as cited in Wade, 1995, p. 137) often used a stimulus consisting of an image created of noth

Moral dumbfounding: when intuition finds no reason

Structural equation modeling on questionnaire data showed that prejudice toward different target groups can be represented in terms of a general prejudice factor. Distinction of classical and modern prejudice only increased model fit marginally. In two separate samples (paper and pencil vs. Internet) several structural models of the relationship between key individual difference variables and prejudice were tested, revealing highly similar results. Social dominance orientation, empathy, and right-wing authoritarianism had direct effects on generalized prejudice. The effect of participant sex on generalized prejudice, where the men scored higher, was largely mediated by empathy. The benefit of including empathy in structural models of prejudice is emphasized.

Structural modeling of generalized prejudice: The role of social dominance, authoritarianism, and empathy

Throughout the world, the labor market is clearly gender segregated More research is needed to explain women’s lower interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) majors and particularly to explain men’s lower interest in HEED (Health care, Elementary Education, and the Domestic spheres) majors We tested self-efficacy (competence beliefs) and social belongingness expectations (fitting in socially) as mediators of gender differences in interest in STEM and HEED majors in a representative sample of 1327 Swedish high school students Gender differences in interest in STEM majors strongly related to women’s lower self-efficacy for STEM careers and, to a lesser degree, to women’s lower social belongingness expectations with students in STEM majors Social belongingness expectations also partly explained men’s lower interest in HEED majors, but self-efficacy was not an important mediator of gender differences in interest in HEED These results imply that interventions designed to lessen gender segregation in the labor market need to focus more on the social belongingness of students in the gender minority Further, to specifically increase women’s interest in STEM majors, we need to counteract gender stereotypical competence beliefs and assure women that they have what it takes to handle STEM careers

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Will I Fit in and Do Well? The Importance of Social Belongingness and Self-Efficacy for Explaining Gender Differences in Interest in STEM and HEED Majors.

Fredrik Björklund

Papers

Five-factor inventories have a major general factor related to social desirability which can be reduced by framing items neutrally.

Social intuitionists answer six questions about moral psychology.

Moral dumbfounding: when intuition finds no reason

Structural modeling of generalized prejudice: The role of social dominance, authoritarianism, and empathy

Will I Fit in and Do Well? The Importance of Social Belongingness and Self-Efficacy for Explaining Gender Differences in Interest in STEM and HEED Majors.