The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail:
A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment
Jonathan Haidt
University of Virginia
October 31, 2000
This is the manuscript that was published, with only minor copy-editing alterations, as:
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach
to moral judgment. Psychological Review. 108, 814-834
Copyright 2001, American Psychological Association
To obtain a reprint of the final type-set article, please go through your
library's journal services, or contact the author directly
Abstract
Research on moral judgment has been dominated by rationalist models, in which moral judgment is
thought to be caused by moral reasoning. Four reasons are given 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 de-emphasizes the private reasoning done by
individuals, emphasizing 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 anthropology and primatology.
Author notes
I thank Sara Algoe, Jon Baron, Fredrik Bjorklund, Talbot Brewer, Daniel Fessler, Alan Fiske, Nico
Frijda, Chip Heath, Jeff Greenberg, Dacher Keltner, Angeline Lillard, George Loewenstein, Charles
Mathewes, Ed Royzman, Paul Rozin, John Sabini, Jonathan Schooler, Stacey Sinclair, Barbara Spellman,
Stephen Stich, Stephen Stose, Daniel Wegner, Daniel Willingham, and Timothy Wilson for helpful
comments on earlier drafts. Preparation of this paper was supported by the National Institute on Drug
Abuse, grant #1-RO3-DA12606-01.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jonathan Haidt, Dept. of Psychology,
102 Gilmer Hall Box 400400, University of Virginia, Charlottesville VA 22904-4400. Electronic mail
may be sent to haidt at virginia.edu
Morality and Intuition -- 2
Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They
are traveling together in France on summer
vacation from college. One night they are
staying alone in a cabin near the beach.
They decide that it would be interesting and
fun if they tried making love. At very least
it would be a new experience for each of
them. Julie was already taking birth control
pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to
be safe. They both enjoy making love, but
they decide not to do it again. They keep
that night as a special secret, which makes
them feel even closer to each other. What
do you think about that, was it OK for them
to make love?
Most people who hear the above story
immediately say that it was wrong for the siblings to
make love, and they then set about searching for
reasons (Haidt, Bjorklund, & Murphy, 2000). They
point out the dangers of inbreeding, only to
remember that Julie and Mark used two forms of
birth control. They argue that Julie and Mark will be
hurt, perhaps emotionally, even though the story
makes it clear that no harm befell them. Eventually,
many people say something like "I don't know, I
can't explain it, I just know it's wrong." But what
model of moral judgment allows a person to know
that something was wrong, without knowing why?
Moral psychology has long been dominated by
rationalist models of moral judgment (Figure 1).
Rationalist approaches in philosophy stress "the
power of a priori reason to grasp substantial truths
about the world" (Williams, 1967, p.69 ).
Rationalist approaches in moral psychology, by
extension, say that moral knowledge and moral
judgment are reached primarily by a process of
reasoning and reflection (Kohlberg, 1969; Piaget,
1932/1965; Turiel, 1983). Moral emotions such as
sympathy may sometimes be inputs to the reasoning
process, but moral emotions are not the direct causes
of moral judgments. In rationalist models one briefly
becomes a judge, weighing issues of harm, rights,
justice, and fairness, before passing judgment on
Julie and Mark. If no condemning evidence is found,
no condemnation is issued.
This paper reviews evidence against rationalist
models and proposes an alternative: the social
intuitionist model (Figure 2). Intuitionism in
philosophy refers to the view that there are moral
truths, and that when people grasp these truths they
do so not by a process of ratiocination and
reflection, but rather by a process more akin to
perception, in which one "just sees without argument
that they are and must be true " (Harrison, 1967, p.
72). Thomas Jefferson's declaration that certain
truths are "self-evident" is an example of ethical
intuitionism. Intuitionist approaches in moral
psychology, by extension, say that moral intuitions
(including moral emotions) come first and directly
cause moral judgments (Haidt, in press; Kagan,
1984; Shweder & Haidt, 1993; J. Wilson, 1993).
Moral intuition is a kind of cognition, but it is not a
kind of reasoning.
The social part of the social intuitionist model
proposes that moral judgment should be studied as
an interpersonal process. Moral reasoning is usually
an ex-post facto process used to influence the
intuitions (and hence judgments) of other people. In
the social intuitionist model one feels a quick flash
of revulsion at the thought of incest and one knows
intuitively that something is wrong. Then, when
faced with a social demand for a verbal justification,
one becomes a lawyer trying to build a case, rather
than a judge searching for the truth. One puts forth
argument after argument, never wavering in the
conviction that Julie and Mark were wrong, even
after one's last argument has been shot down. In the
social intuitionist model it becomes plausible to say
"I don't know, I can't explain it, I just know it's
wrong."
The paper begins with a brief review of the
history of rationalism in philosophy and psychology.
It then describes the social intuitionist model and
recent relevant findings from a variety of fields.
These findings offer four reasons for doubting the
causality of reasoning in moral judgment: 1) there
are two cognitive processes at work -- reasoning and
intuition -- and the reasoning process has been
overemphasized; 2) reasoning is often motivated; 3)
the reasoning process constructs post-hoc
justifications, yet we experience the illusion of
objective reasoning; and 4) moral action covaries
with moral emotion more than with moral reasoning.
Since much of this evidence is drawn from research
outside of the domain of moral judgment, the social
intuitionist model is presented only as a plausible
alternative approach to moral psychology, not as an
Morality and Intuition -- 3
established fact. The paper therefore concludes with
suggestions for future research, and for ways of
integrating the findings and insights of rationalism
and intuitionism.
It must be stressed at the outset that the social
intuitionist model is an anti-rationalist model only in
one limited sense: it says that moral reasoning is
rarely the direct cause of moral judgment. That is a
descriptive claim, about how moral judgments are
actually made. It is not a normative or prescriptive
claim, about how moral judgments ought to be
made. Baron (1998) has demonstrated that people
following their moral intuitions often bring about
non-optimal or even disastrous consequences in
matters of public policy, public health, and the tort
system. A correct understanding of the intuitive
basis of moral judgment may therefore be useful in
helping decision makers avoid mistakes, and in
helping educators design programs (and
environments) to improve the quality of moral
judgment and behavior.
Philosophy and the Worship of Reason
Philosophers have frequently written about the
conflict between reason and emotion as a conflict
between divinity and animality. Plato's Timaeus
presents a charming myth in which the gods first
created human heads, with their divine cargo of
reason, and then found themselves forced to create
seething, passionate bodies to help the heads move
around in the world. The drama of human moral life
was the struggle of the heads to control the bodies by
channeling their passions towards virtuous ends. The
stoic philosophers took an even dimmer view of the
emotions, seeing them as conceptual errors that
bound one to the material world and therefore to a
life of misery (Solomon, 1993). Medieval Christian
philosophers similarly denigrated the emotions
because of their link to desire, and hence sin. The
17 century's continental rationalists (e.g., Leibniz,th
Descartes) worshiped reason as much as had Plato,
hoping to model all of philosophy on the deductive
method developed by Euclid.
But in the 18th century, English and Scottish
philosophers (e.g., Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume,
and Smith) began discussing alternatives to
rationalism. They argued that people have a built-in
moral sense which creates pleasurable feelings of
approval toward benevolent acts and corresponding
feelings of disapproval towards evil and vice. David
Hume in particular proposed that moral judgments
are similar in form to aesthetic judgments: they are
derived from sentiment, not reason, and we attain
moral knowledge by an "immediate feeling and finer
internal sense," not by a "chain of argument and
induction" (Hume, 1776/1965, p.24). His most
radical statement of this position was that "we speak
not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the
combat of passion and of reason. 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 " (Hume, 1739/1969, p. 462).1
The thrust of Hume's attack on rationalism was
that reason alone cannot accomplish the magnificent
role it has been given since Plato. Hume saw reason
as a tool used by the mind to obtain and process
information about events in the world, or about
relations among objects. Reason can let us infer that
a particular action will lead to the death of many
innocent people, but unless we care about those
people, unless we have some sentiment that values
human life, reason alone cannot advise against
taking the action. Hume argued that a person in full
possession of reason yet lacking moral sentiment
would have difficulty choosing any ends or goals to
pursue, and would look like what we now call a
psychopath (Hume, 1776/1965; Cleckley, 1955).
Hume's emotivist approach to ethics was not
well received by philosophers. Kant's (1785/1959)
rationalist ethical theory was created as an attempt2
to refute Hume, and Kant has had a much larger
impact than Hume on modern moral philosophers
(e.g., Hare, 1981; Rawls, 1971), many of whom
have followed Kant in attempting to deduce a
foundation for ethics from the meaning of rationality
itself.
Psychology and the Focus on Reasoning
Psychologists, however, freed themselves from
the worship of reason in the late 19 century, whenth
they abandoned the armchair and went into the
laboratory. Until the cognitive revolution of the
1960's, the major schools of psychology did not see
reason as the master of anything, and their views on
morality were compatible with Hume's emphasis on
emotions. Freud (1900/1976) saw people's
Morality and Intuition -- 4
judgments as driven by unconscious motives and
feelings, which are then rationalized with publicly
acceptable reasons. The behaviorists also saw moral
reasoning as epiphenomenal in the production of
moral behavior, explaining morality as the acts that
a society happens to reward or punish (Skinner,
1971).
Kohlberg and the Cognitive Revolution
But then came Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlberg's
work was a sustained attack on "irrational emotive
theories" (1969, p. 188), and his cognitivedevelopmental
theory was an important part of the
cognitive revolution. Kohlberg built on Piaget's
(1932/1965) pioneering work, developing an
interviewing method that was suitable for use with
adults as well as children. Kohlberg presented
participants with dilemmas in which moral and nonmoral
claims were present on both sides, and he then
looked to see how people resolved the conflict. In his
best known dilemma a man named Heinz must
decide whether he should break into a druggist's
shop to steal a drug that may save the life of his
dying wife. Kohlberg found a six level progression
of increasing sophistication in how people handled
such dilemmas. He claimed that children start as
egoists, judging actions by the good or bad
consequences they bring to the self. But as children's
cognitive abilities expand they develop the ability to
"role-take," or see a situation from other people's
perspectives. The experience of role-taking drives
the child on to the less egocentric and more
"adequate" conventional and then post-conventional
levels of moral reasoning.
Kohlberg's focus is on development, but in each
of his major papers he addresses the question of
mechanism. He consistently endorses a rationalist
and somewhat Platonic model in which affect may
be taken into account by reason (as in Figure 1), but
it is reasoning that ultimately makes the decisions:
We are claiming... that the moral force in
personality is cognitive. Affective forces are
involved in moral decisions, but affect is
neither moral nor immoral. When the
affective arousal is channeled into moral
directions, it is moral; when it is not so
channeled, it is not. The moral channeling
mechanisms themselves are cognitive (1971,
p.230-231).
Kohlberg is quite explicit that the cognitive
mechanisms he discusses involve conscious,
language based thinking. He is interested in the
phenomenology of moral reasoning, and he describes
one of the pillars of his approach as the assumption
that "moral reasoning is the conscious process of
using ordinary moral language" (Kohlberg, Levine,
& Hewer, 1983 p. 69).
After Kohlberg
Kohlberg trained or inspired most of the leading
researchers in moral psychology today (see chapters
in Kurtines & Gewirtz, 1991; and Lapsley, 1996).
Rationalism still rules, and there appears to be a
consensus that morality lives within the individual
mind as a trait-like cognitive attainment, a set of
knowledge structures about moral standards that
children create for themselves in the course of their
everyday reasoning (see Darley, 1993).
The social-interactionist perspective (Nucci &
Turiel, 1978; Turiel, 1983, 1998; Turiel, Killen, &
Helwig, 1987) is one of the most widely used
approaches at present, and can serve as an
illustrative model. This research is based on a
method developed by Nucci and Turiel (1978) in
which children are interviewed about rule violations.
After giving an initial judgment, the child is asked to
respond to a series of probe questions designed to
assess how the child thinks about the rule in question
(e.g., if there was no rule, would the action be OK?
Could the rule be changed?). Participants are also
asked to provide justifications of their judgments.
In the social-interactionist model, people are said
to think about the consequences of an action before
determining whether the action is a moral violation.
Actions that lead to injustice, to harm, or to the
violation of rights are recognized as falling within
the moral domain, and are treated differently from
other kinds of rule violations. Rules prohibiting
moral violations are judged, even by young children,
to be universally applicable and unalterable. Actions
that involve no injustice, harm, or rights violations
are treated as violations of social conventions
(involving locally agreed-upon uniformities of
behavior within social systems) or as personal issues
(areas of individual prerogative).
Researchers in this tradition are sensitive to the
ways that moral development occurs in a social
context, driven forward by children's interactions
Morality and Intuition -- 5
with peers in such contexts as turn-taking, sharing,
harming, and responding to harm. This emphasis on
social interaction is in harmony with the social part
of the social intuitionist model, and is not a source of
contention in the present paper. The central source
of contention, and the focus of the present paper,
concerns the causal role of reflective, conscious
reasoning.
Questioning the Causality of Reasoning
It is undeniable that people engage in moral
reasoning. But does the evidence really show that
such reasoning is the cause of moral judgment,
rather than the consequence? Turiel, Hildebrandt,
and Wainryb (1991) examined young adults'
reasoning about issues of abortion, homosexuality,
pornography, and incest. They found that people
who judged the actions to be moral violations also
talked about harmful consequences, whereas people
who thought the actions were not wrong generally
cited no harmful consequences. Turiel et al. interpret
these findings as showing the importance of
"informational assumptions," for example: people
who thought that life begins at conception were
generally opposed to abortion, whereas people who
thought that life begins later were generally not
opposed to abortion. But in making this
interpretation Turiel et al. made a jump from
correlation to causation. The correlation between
judgment and supporting belief does not show that
the belief caused the judgment. An intuitionist
interpretation is just as plausible: the anti-abortion
judgment (a gut feeling that abortion is bad) caused
the belief that life begins at conception (an ex post
facto rationalization of the gut feeling).
Haidt, Koller, and Dias (1993) found evidence for
such an intuitionist interpretation. They examined
American and Brazilian responses to actions that
were offensive yet harmless, such as eating one's
dead pet dog, cleaning one's toilet with the national
flag, or eating a chicken carcass one has just used
for masturbation. The stories were carefully
constructed so that no plausible harm could be
found, and most participants directly stated that
nobody was hurt by the actions in question. Yet
participants still usually said the actions were
wrong, and universally wrong. They frequently made
statements such as "it's just wrong to have sex with
a chicken." Furthermore, their affective reactions to
the stories (statements that it would bother them to
witness the action) were better predictors of their
moral judgment than were their claims about
harmful consequences. Haidt and Hersh (in press)
found the same thing when they interviewed
conservatives and liberals about sexual morality
issues, including homosexuality, incest, and unusual
forms of masturbation. For both groups, affective
reactions were good predictors of judgment, while
perceptions of harmfulness were not. Haidt and
Hersh also found that participants were often
"morally dumbfounded"(Haidt, Bjorklund, &
Murphy, 2000), that is, they would stutter, laugh,
and express surprise at their inability to find
supporting reasons, yet they would not change their
initial judgments of condemnation.
It seems, then, that for affectively charged events
such as incest and other taboo violations, an
intuitionist model may be more plausible than a
rationalist model. But can an intuitionist model
handle the entire range of moral judgment? Can it
accommodate the findings from rationalist research
programs while also explaining new phenomena, and
leading to new and testable predictions? The social
intuitionist model may be able to do so.
The Social Intuitionist Model
The central claim of the social intuitionist model
is that moral judgment is caused by quick moral
intuitions, and is followed (when needed) by slow,
ex-post facto moral reasoning. Clear definitions of
moral judgment, moral intuition, and moral
reasoning are therefore needed.
Moral Judgment
Moral philosophers have long struggled to
distinguish moral judgments from other kinds of
judgments (e.g., aesthetics, skill, or personal taste).
Rather than seeking a formal definition that lists the
necessary and sufficient features of a moral
judgment, the present paper takes a more empirical
approach, starting from a behavioral fact about
human beings: that in every society, people talk
about and evaluate the actions of other people, and
these evaluations have consequences for future
interactions (Boehm, 1999). Many of these
evaluations occur against the backdrop of specific
cultural practices, in which one praises or criticizes
Morality and Intuition -- 6
the skills or talents of an individual (e.g., "she is a
daring chef"). But an important subset of these
evaluations are made with respect to virtues or
goods that are applied to everyone in the society
(e.g., fairness, honesty, or piety in some cultures), or
to everyone in a certain social category (e.g.,
chastity for young women in some cultures, or
generosity for lineage heads). These virtues are
obligatory in that everyone (within the relevant
categories) is expected to strive to attain them.
People who fail to embody these virtues, or whose
actions betray a lack of respect for them, are subject
to criticism, ostracism, or some other punishment. It
is this subset of evaluations that is at issue in the
present paper. (For more on moral goods see Ross,
1930; Shweder & Haidt, 1993.)
Moral judgments are therefore defined as:
evaluations (good versus bad) of the actions or
character of a person that are made with respect to a
set of virtues held by a culture or subculture to be
obligatory. The definition is intentionally left broad
to allow a large gray area of marginally moral
judgments. For example, "eating a low fat diet" may
not qualify as a moral virtue for most philosophers,
yet in health-conscious subcultures, people who eat
cheeseburgers and milkshakes are seen as morally
inferior to those who eat salad and chicken (Stein &
Nemeroff, 1995).
Moral Reasoning
Everyday moral reasoners are sometimes said to
be like scientists, who learn by forming and testing
hypotheses, who build working models of the social
world as they interact with it, and who consult these
models when making moral judgments (Turiel,
1983). A key feature of the scientist metaphor is that
judgment is a kind of inference, made in several
steps. The reasoner searches for relevant evidence,
weighs evidence, coordinates evidence with theories,
and reaches a decision (Kuhn, 1989; Nisbett &
Ross, 1980). Some of these steps may be performed
unconsciously, and any of the steps may be subject
to biases and errors, but a key part of the definition
of reasoning is that it has steps, at least a few of
which are performed consciously. Galotti (1989,
p.333), in her definition of everyday reasoning,
specifically excludes "any one-step mental
processes" such as sudden flashes of insight, gut
reactions, and other forms of "momentary intuitive
response."
Building on Galotti (1989), moral reasoning can
now be defined as: conscious mental activity that
consists of transforming given information about
people in order to reach a moral judgment. To say
that moral reasoning is a conscious process means
that the process is intentional, effortful, controllable,
and that the reasoner is aware that it is going on
(Bargh, 1994).
Moral Intuition
Commentators on intuition have generally
stressed the fact that a judgment, solution, or other
conclusion appears suddenly and effortlessly in
consciousness, without any awareness of the mental
processes that led to the outcome (Bastick, 1982;
Simon, 1992). Bruner (1960 p.57) said that intuition
does not advance in careful steps; rather, it involves
"manoeuvers based seemingly on an implicit
perception of the total problem. The thinker arrives
at an answer, which may be right or wrong, with
little if any awareness of the process by which he
reached it." It must be stressed that the contrast of
intuition and reasoning is not the contrast of emotion
and cognition. Intuition, reasoning, and the
appraisals contained in emotions (Frijda, 1986;
Lazarus, 1991) are all forms of cognition. Rather,
the words "intuition" and "reasoning" are intended
to capture the contrast made by dozens of
philosophers and psychologists between two kinds of
cognition. The most important distinctions (see
Table 1) are that intuition occurs quickly,
effortlessly, and automatically, such that the
outcome but not the process is accessible to
consciousness, while reasoning occurs more slowly,
requires some effort, and involves at least some
steps that are accessible to consciousness.
Building on Bastick, Bruner, Simon, and others,
moral intuition can be defined as: the sudden
appearance in consciousness of a moral judgment,
including an affective valence (good-bad, likedislike),
without any conscious awareness of having
gone through steps of search, weighing evidence, or
inferring a conclusion. Moral intuition is therefore
the psychological process that the Scottish
philosophers talked about, a process akin to
aesthetic judgment: one sees or hears about a social
Morality and Intuition -- 7
event and one instantly feels approval or
disapproval.
The Links in the Model
The social intuitionist model is composed of four
principal links or processes, shown as solid arrows
in Figure 2. The existence of each link is well
established by prior research in some domains of
judgment, although not necessarily in the domain of
moral judgment. The model is therefore presented as
a proposal to spur thinking and new research on
moral judgment.
1) The intuitive judgment link. The model
proposes that moral judgments appear in
consciousness automatically and effortlessly as the
result of moral intuitions. Examples of this link in
non-moral cognition include Zajonc's (1980)
demonstrations that affectively valenced evaluations
are made ubiquitously and rapidly, before any
conscious processing has taken place. More recent
examples include findings that much of social
cognition operates automatically and implicitly
(Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Greenwald & Banaji,
1995).
2) The post-hoc reasoning link. The model
proposes that moral reasoning is an effortful
process, engaged in after a moral judgment is made,
in which a person searches for arguments that will
support an already-made judgment. Nisbett and
Wilson (1977) demonstrated such post-hoc
reasoning for causal explanations. Kuhn (1991),
Kunda (1990), and Perkins, Farady, and Bushey
(1991) found that everyday reasoning is heavily
marred by the biased search only for reasons that
support one's already-stated hypothesis.
3) The reasoned persuasion link. The model
proposes that moral reasoning is produced and sent
forth verbally in order to justify one's already-made
moral judgment to others. Such reasoning can
sometimes affect other people, although moral
discussions and arguments are notorious for the
rarity with which persuasion takes place. Since
moral positions always have an affective component
to them, it is hypothesized that reasoned persuasion
works not by providing logically compelling
arguments, but by triggering new affectively
valenced intuitions in the listener. The importance of
using affective persuasion to change affectively
based attitudes has been demonstrated by Edwards
and von Hippel (1995), and by Shavitt (1990).
4) The social persuasion link. Because people are
highly attuned to the emergence of group norms, the
model proposes that the mere fact that friends, allies,
and acquaintances have made a moral judgment
exerts a direct influence on others, even if no
reasoned persuasion is used. Such social forces may
elicit only outward conformity (Asch, 1956), but in
many cases people's privately held judgments are
directly shaped by the judgments of others (Berger
& Luckman, 1967; Newcomb, 1943; Sherif, 1935).
These four links form the core of the social
intuitionist model. The core of the model gives moral
reasoning a causal role in moral judgment, but only
when reasoning runs through other people. It is
hypothesized that people rarely override their initial
intuitive judgments just by reasoning privately to
themselves, because reasoning is rarely used to
question one's own attitudes or beliefs (see the
motivated reasoning problem, below).
However, people are capable of engaging in
private moral reasoning, and many people can point
to times in their lives when they changed their minds
on a moral issue just from mulling the matter over
by themselves. While some of these cases may be
illusions (see below, the post-hoc reasoning
problem), other cases may be real, particularly
among philosophers, one of the few groups that has
been found to reason well (Kuhn, 1991). The full
social intuitionist model therefore includes two ways
in which private reasoning can shape moral
judgments.
5) The reasoned judgment link. People may at
times reason their way to a judgment by sheer force
of logic, overriding their initial intuition. In such
cases reasoning truly is causal, and cannot be said to
be the "slave of the passions." However such
reasoning is hypothesized to be rare, occurring
primarily in cases in which the initial intuition is
weak and processing capacity is high. In cases where
the reasoned judgment conflicts with a strong
intuitive judgment a person will have a "dual
attitude" (Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000) in
which the reasoned judgment may be expressed
verbally, yet the intuitive judgment continues to exist
under the surface.
6) The private reflection link. In the course of
thinking about a situation a person may
Morality and Intuition -- 8
spontaneously activate a new intuition that
contradicts the initial intuitive judgment. The most
widely discussed method of triggering new intuitions
is role taking (Selman, 1971). Simply by putting
oneself into the shoes of another person one may
instantly feel pain, sympathy, or other vicarious
emotional responses. This is one of the principle
pathways of moral reflection according to Piaget,
Kohlberg, and other cognitive developmentalists. A
person comes to see an issue or dilemma from more
than one side and thereby experiences multiple
competing intuitions. The final judgment may be
determined either by going with the strongest
intuition, or by allowing reason to choose among the
alternatives based on the conscious application of a
rule or principle. This pathway amounts to having
an inner dialogue with oneself (Tappan, 1997),
obviating the need for a discourse partner.
Rationalist models focus on links 5 and 6. The
social intuitionist model, in contrast, says that moral
judgment consists primarily of links 1 through 4,
although it allows that links 5 and 6 may sometimes
contribute (such as during a formal moral judgment
interview). The next section of this paper reviews
four problems for rationalist models. For each
problem, a social intuitionist re-interpretation of the
evidence is offered, relying primarily on links 1
through 4.
Four Reasons to Doubt the
Causal Importance of Reason
1) The Dual Process Problem: There Is a Ubiquitous
and Understudied Intuitive Process at Work
It is now widely accepted in social and cognitive
psychology that there are often two processing
systems at work when a person makes judgments or
solves problems (see Table 1, and the edited volume
by Chaiken & Trope, 1999). Because these two
systems typically run in parallel and are capable of
reaching differing conclusions, these models are
usually called "dual process" models. Dual process
models have thus far had little impact on moral
judgment research, as most researchers have focused
their efforts on understanding the reasoning process
(but see Gibbs, 1991; and Eisenberg, Shea, Carlo, &
Knight, 1991). Yet there is evidence that moral
judgment works like other kinds of judgment, in
which most of the action is in the intuitive process.
Automatic evaluation. Affective evaluation
occurs so quickly, automatically, and pervasively
that it is generally thought to be an integral part of
perception. Zajonc (1980) synthesized findings from
a variety of fields to create a modern version of
Wundt's (1907) affective primacy theory, in which
he argued that feeling and thought are to some extent
separate systems with separate biological bases. The
affective system has primacy in every sense: it came
first in phylogeny, it emerges first in ontogeny, it is
triggered more quickly in real-time judgments, and it
is more powerful and irrevocable when the two
systems yield conflicting judgments (see also Reber,
1993). Research on the automatic evaluation effect
confirms that very brief or even subliminal
presentations of affectively valenced words (Bargh,
Chaiken, Raymond, & Hymes, 1996; Fazio,
Sanbonmatsu, Powell, & Kardes, 1986), facial
expressions (Murphy & Zajonc, 1993) and
photographs of people and animals (Hermans, de
Houwer, & Eelen, 1994) alter the time it takes to
evaluate a target object presented immediately
afterwards, indicating that affective processing is at
work within a quarter second of stimulus
presentation.
Automatic moral judgment. Moral judgments
typically involve more complex social stimuli than
the simple words and visual objects used in
automatic evaluation studies. Could moral
judgments be made automatically as well? The
emerging view in social cognition is that most of our
behaviors and judgments are in fact made
automatically (i.e., without intention, effort, or
awareness of process; Bargh, 1994; Bargh &
Chartrand, 1999; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995).
The literature most relevant to moral judgment is
the literature on attitudes, where a central question
has been: how do people form attitudes about other
people? The evidence indicates that attitude
formation is better described as a set of automatic
processes than as a process of deliberation and
reflection about the traits of a person. People form
first impressions at first sight (Albright, Kenny, &
Malloy, 1988), and the impressions that they form
from observing a "thin slice" of behavior (as little as
5 seconds) are almost identical to the impressions
they form from much longer and more leisurely
observation and deliberation (Ambady & Rosenthal,
1992). These first impressions alter subsequent
Morality and Intuition -- 9
evaluations, creating a halo effect (Thorndike,
1920), in which positive evaluations of non-moral
traits such as attractiveness lead to beliefs that a
person possesses corresponding moral traits such as
kindness and good character (Dion, Berscheid, &
Walster, 1972). People also categorize other people
instantly and automatically, applying stereotypes
that often include morally evaluated traits (e.g.,
aggressiveness for African Americans, Devine,
1989). All of these findings illustrate the operation
of the intuitive judgment link (link 1 in Figure 2), in
which the perception of a person or an event leads
instantly and automatically to a moral judgment
without any conscious reflection or reasoning.
Another illustration of automatic moral judgment
can be seen in the literature on persuasion. Moral
discourse in its natural setting is often a kind of
persuasion, in which one person tells others about
some event, and tries to recruit them to her reading
of the event. According to Chaiken's (1987)
heuristic-systematic model of persuasion, people are
guided in part by the "principle of least effort."
Since people have limited cognitive resources, and
since heuristic processing is easy and adequate for
most tasks, heuristic processing (the intuitive
process) is generally used unless there is a special
need to engage in systematic processing (see also
Simon, 1967). A particularly important heuristic for
the study of moral judgment is the "I agree with
people I like" heuristic (Chaiken, 1980). If your
friend is telling you how Robert mistreated her, there
is little need for you to think systematically about the
good reasons Robert might have had. The mere fact
that your friend has made a judgment affects your
own intuitions directly, illustrating the social
persuasion link (link 4). It is only if the agreement
heuristic leads to other conflicts (e.g., if Robert is a
friend of yours) that your "sufficiency threshold"
will be raised above your actual level of confidence,
triggering effortful systematic processing (links 5
and 6) to close the gap.
However the social intuitionist model posits that
moral reasoning is usually done interpersonally
rather than privately. If Robert is in fact a friend of
yours, then you and your friend might present
arguments to each other (link 3, the reasoned
persuasion link) in the hope of triggering new
intuitions, getting the other to "see" Robert's actions
in a better or worse light. Moral discussions can
then be modeled as a repeated cycle through links 1,
2, and 3 in person A, then in person B, then in
person A, etc. Link 4 would exert a constant
pressure towards agreement if the two parties are
friends, and a constant pressure against agreement if
the two parties dislike each other. If at least one of
the parties begins without a strong initial intuition
then some degree of convergence is likely. However
if both parties begin with strongly felt opposing
intuitions (as in a debate over abortion), then
reasoned persuasion is likely to have little effect,
except that the post-hoc reasoning triggered in the
other person could lead to even greater
disagreement, a process labeled "attitude
polarization" by Lord, Ross, and Lepper (1979).
Petty and Cacioppo's (1986) elaborationlikelihood
model gives a similar reading of the
standard moral judgment discussion. If you feel a
strong identification with the source of the
persuasive message (your friend) and you have no
conflict motivating elaborated thinking, then a
peripheral process is sufficient to lead to an attitude
shift, a judgment that Robert is evil. However if the
person talking to you is a stranger (a research
psychologist) who challenges your judgment at every
turn ("what if Heinz didn't love his wife, should he
still steal the drug?"), then you will be forced to
engage in extensive effortful, verbal, central
processing. Standard moral judgment interviews
may therefore create an unnaturally reasoned form
of moral judgment, leading to the erroneous
conclusion that moral judgment is primarily a
reasoning process. And since forcing people to
introspect to find reasons for their attitudes can
change those attitudes temporarily (Wilson & J.
Schooler, 1991; Wilson, Lindsey, & T. Schooler,
2000), standard moral judgment interviews might
not even provide a valid measure of people's real
moral beliefs. (See also Schooler, Fiore, &
Brandimonte, 1997, on the impairments caused by
forcing people to verbalize what they know
intuitively.)
The social intuitionist solution. The social
intuitionist model is fully compatible with modern
dual process theories. Like those theories, the model
posits that the intuitive process is the default
process, handling everyday moral judgments in a
rapid, easy, and holistic way. It is primarily when
intuitions conflict, or when the social situation
Morality and Intuition -- 10
demands thorough examination of all facets of a
scenario that the reasoning process is called upon.
Reasoning can occur privately (links 5 and 6), and
such solitary moral reasoning may be common
among philosophers and among those high on need
for cognition (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982). Yet ever
since Plato wrote his Dialogues, philosophers have
recognized that moral reasoning naturally occurs in
a social setting, between people who can challenge
each other's arguments and trigger new intuitions
(links 3 and 4). The social intuitionist model avoids
the traditional focus on conscious private reasoning,
and draws attention to the role of moral intuitions,
and of other people, in shaping moral judgments.
2) The Motivated Reasoning Problem: The
Reasoning Process Is More like a Lawyer Defending
a Client than a Judge or Scientist Seeking Truth
It appears, then, that a dual process model may
be appropriate for a theory of moral judgment. If so,
then the relationship between the two processes must
be specified. Is the reasoning process the "smarter"
but more cognitively expensive process, called in
whenever the intuitive process is unable to solve a
problem cheaply? Or is the relationship one of
master and servant, as Hume suggested, in which
reason's main job is to formulate arguments that
support one's intuitive conclusions? Research on
motivated reasoning and on everyday reasoning both
suggest that the post-hoc reasoning link (link 2) is
more important than the reasoned judgment and
private reflection links (5 and 6).
There are two major classes of motives that have
been shown to bias and direct reasoning. The first
class can be called "relatedness motives," for it
includes concerns about impression management and
smooth interaction with other people. The second
class can be called "coherence motives," for it
includes a variety of defensive mechanisms triggered
by cognitive dissonance and threats to the validity of
one's cultural worldview.
Relatedness motives. From an evolutionary
perspective it would be strange if our moral
judgment machinery was designed principally for
accuracy, with no concern for the disastrous effects
of periodically siding with our enemies and against
our friends. Studies of attitudes, person perception,
and persuasion show that desires for harmony and
agreement do indeed have strong biasing effects on
judgments. Chaiken and her colleagues incorporated
"impression motivation" into the heuristicsystematic
model, which is described as "the desire
to hold attitudes and beliefs that will satisfy current
social goals" (Chen & Chaiken, 1999, p. 78). Chen,
Shechter, and Chaiken (1996) found that people who
expected to discuss an issue with a partner whose
views were known expressed initial attitudes, before
the interaction, that were shifted towards those of
their anticipated partner. More broadly, Darley and
Berscheid (1967) found that people rate a
description of a person's personality as more
likeable if they expect to interact with the person
than if they do not expect to interact.
The existence of motivations to agree with our
friends and allies means that we can be directly
affected by their judgments (the social persuasion
link). The mere fact that your friend expresses a
moral judgment against X is often sufficient to cause
in you a critical attitude towards X. Such direct
influence, circumventing reasoning entirely, fits with
Chartrand and Bargh's (1999) recent demonstration
of the "chameleon effect," in which people
unconsciously mimic the postures, mannerisms, and
facial expressions of their interaction partners.
Chartrand and Bargh found that such automatic
mimicry is socially adaptive, for people who are "in
sync" with another person are liked better by that
person.
Coherence motives. Psychologists since Freud
have argued that people construct views of
themselves and of the world, and that they
experience potentially crippling anxiety when these
constructions are threatened (Moskowitz, Skurnik,
& Galinsky, 1999). Research on cognitive
dissonance (Festinger, 1957; Wicklund & Brehm,
1976) showed just how readily people change their
thinking and beliefs to avoid the threat of internal
contradictions. More recently, Chaiken, GinerSorolla,
and Chen (1996, p.557) defined defense
motivation as "the desire to hold attitudes and beliefs
that are congruent with existing self-definitional
attitudes and beliefs." Self-definitional attitudes
include values and moral commitments. When
defense motivation is triggered, both heuristic and
systematic thinking work to preserve self-definitional
attitudes.
The biasing effects of defense motivation can be
seen in studies that challenge participants' moral and
Morality and Intuition -- 11
political ideology. Lord, Ross, and Lepper (1979)
found that students with strong opinions about the
death penalty, when exposed to research evidence on
both sides of the issue, accepted evidence supporting
their prior belief uncritically, while subjecting
opposing evidence to much greater scrutiny.
Lerner's (1965) "just world" hypothesis stated that
people have a need to believe that they live in a
world where people generally get what they deserve.
People who suffer for no reason are a threat to this
belief, so participants adjusted their moral
judgments, derogating or blaming innocent victims
(Lerner & Miller, 1978). Tetlock et al. (2000) found
that people's willingness to use relevant baserate
information, or to engage in counterfactual thinking,
depended on whether or not their "sacred values"
were threatened by doing so. In all of these
examples, reasoning is used to defend prior moral
commitments.
Moral judgments are also affected by the
defensive motivations of terror management
(Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1991). When
people are asked to think about their own deaths,
they appear to suppress a generalized fear of
mortality by clinging more tightly to their cultural
world view. Death-primed participants then shift
their moral judgments to defend that world view.
They mete out harsher punishment to violators of
cultural values, and they give bigger rewards to
people who behaved morally (Rosenblatt et al.,
1989). Death-primed participants have more
negative attitudes towards those who do not fully
share their world view (e.g., Jews; Greenberg et al.,
1990). From a terror management perspective, moral
judgment is a special kind of judgment, since moral
judgments always implicate the cultural world view.
It is plausible to say "I don't like asparagus, but I
don't care if you eat it." It is not plausible to say "I
think human life is sacred, but I don't care if you kill
him."
Mechanisms of bias. Studies of everyday
reasoning reveal the mechanisms by which
relatedness and coherence motivations make people
act like lawyers. Kuhn (1991) found that most
people have difficulty understanding what evidence
is, and when pressed to give evidence in support of
their theories they generally give anecdotes or
illustrative examples instead. Furthermore, people
show a strong tendency to search for anecdotes and
other "evidence" exclusively on their preferred side
of an issue, a pattern that has been called the "myside
bias" (Baron, 1995; Perkins, Farady, &
Bushey, 1991). Once people find supporting
evidence, even a single piece of bad evidence, they
often stop the search, since they have a "makessense
epistemology" (Perkins, Allen, & Hafner,
1983) in which the goal of thinking is not to reach
the most accurate conclusion; it is to find the first
conclusion that hangs together well and that fits with
one's important prior beliefs.
Research in social cognition also indicates that
people often behave like "intuitive lawyers" rather
than "intuitive scientists" (Baumeister & Newman,
1994). Kunda's (1990) review of "motivated
reasoning" concludes that "directional goals"
(motivations to reach a pre-ordained conclusion)
work primarily by causing a biased search in
memory for supporting evidence only. However
Pyszczynski and Greenberg (1987) proposed a more
comprehensive "biased hypothesis testing" model, in
which self-serving motives bias each stage of the
hypothesis testing sequence, including the selection
of initial hypotheses, the generation of inferences,
the search for evidence, the evaluation of evidence,
and the amount of evidence needed before one is
willing to make an inference. Research on the
"confirmatory bias" (Snyder & Swan, 1978) shows
that people do not always seek to confirm their
initial hypothesis; sometimes they ask the right
questions to get at the truth (Higgins & Bargh,
1987; Trope & Bassok, 1982). However such
demonstrations of truth-seeking always involve
hypotheses that the participant has no need to defend
(e.g., "the person you are about to meet is an
extrovert"). When hypotheses involve one's moral
commitments (e.g., "the death penalty does not deter
murder"), the empirical findings generally show bias
and motivated reasoning (Kuhn, 1989; Lord, Ross,
& Lepper, 1979).
This review is not intended to imply that people
are stupid or irrational. It is intended to demonstrate
that the roots of human intelligence, rationality, and
ethical sophistication should not be sought in our
ability to search for and evaluate evidence in an open
and unbiased way. Rather than following the ancient
Greeks in worshiping reason, we should instead look
for the roots of human intelligence, rationality, and
virtue in what the mind does best: perception,
Morality and Intuition -- 12
intuition, and other mental operations that are quick,
effortless, and generally quite accurate (Gigerenzer
& Goldstein, 1996; Margolis, 1987).
The social intuitionist solution. The reasoning
process in moral judgment may be capable of
working objectively under very limited
circumstances: when the person has adequate time
and processing capacity, a motivation to be
accurate, no a priori judgment to defend or justify,
and when no relatedness or coherence motivations
are triggered (Forgas, 1995; Wegner & Bargh,
1998). Such circumstances may be found in moral
judgment studies using hypothetical and unemotional
dilemmas. Rationalist research methods may
therefore create an unusual and non-representative
kind of moral judgment. But in real judgment
situations, such as when people are gossiping or
arguing, relatedness motives are always at work. If
more shocking or threatening issues are being
judged, such as abortion, euthenasia, or consensual
incest, then coherence motives will be at work too.
Under these more realistic circumstances moral
reasoning is not left free to search for truth, but is
likely to be hired out like a lawyer by various
motives, employed only to seek confirmation of preordained
conclusions.
3) The Post-hoc Problem: the Reasoning Process
Readily Constructs Justifications of Intuitive
Judgments, Causing the Illusion of Objective
Reasoning
When people are asked to explain the causes of
their judgments and actions they frequently cite
factors that could not have mattered, and they fail to
recognize factors that did matter. Nisbett and
Schachter (1966), for example, asked participants to
take electric shocks, either with or without a placebo
pill that was said to produce the same symptoms as
electric shock. Participants in the pill condition
apparently attributed their heart palpitations and
butterflies in the stomach to the pill, and were able
to take four times as much shock as those who had
no such misattribution available for their symptoms.
Yet when the placebo condition participants were
asked if they had made such an attribution, only
25% of them said that they had. The remaining
participants denied that they had thought about the
pill and instead made up a variety of explanations
for their greater shock tolerance, e.g., "Well, I used
to build radios and stuff when I was 13 or 14, and
maybe I got used to electric shock" (Nisbett &
Wilson, 1977, p.237).
Nisbett and Wilson (1977) interpreted such
causal explanations as post-hoc constructions. When
asked to explain their behaviors, people engage in an
effortful search that may feel like a kind of
introspection. But what people are searching for is
not a memory of the actual cognitive processes that
caused their behaviors, for these processes are not
accessible to consciousness. Rather, people are
searching for plausible theories about why they
might have done what they did. People turn first to a
"pool of culturally supplied explanations for
behavior," which Nisbett and Wilson (1977, p.248)
refer to as "a priori causal theories." When asked
why he enjoyed a party, a person turns first to his
cultural knowledge about why people enjoy parties,
chooses a reason, and then searches for evidence that
the reason was applicable. The search is likely to be
a one-sided search of memory for supporting
evidence only (Kunda, 1990; Pyszczynski &
Greenberg, 1987).
Additional illustrations of post-hoc causal
reasoning can be found in studies in which hypnosis
(Zimbardo, LaBerge, & Butler, 1993) and
subliminal presentation (Kunst-Wilson & Zajonc,
1980) were used to make people perform actions.
When asked to explain their actions or choices,
people readily made up reasons that sounded
plausible but were false. Split brain patients show
this effect in its most dramatic form. When the left
hand, guided by the right brain, performs an action,
the verbal centers in the left brain readily make up
stories to explain it (Gazzaniga, Bogen, & Sperry,
1962). The language centers are so skilled at making
up post-hoc causal explanations that Gazzaniga
(1985) speaks of an "interpreter" module. He argues
that behavior is usually produced by mental modules
to which consciousness has no access, but the
interpreter module provides a running commentary
anyway, constantly generating hypotheses to explain
why the self might have performed any particular
behavior.
Post-hoc moral reasoning. The idea that people
generate causal explanations out of "a priori causal
theories" is easily extended into the moral domain. In
a moral judgment interview a participant is asked to
decide if an action is right or wrong, and is then
Morality and Intuition -- 13
asked to explain why she thinks so. But if people
have no access to the processes behind their
automatic initial evaluations, then how do they go
about providing justifications? By consulting their a
priori moral theories. A priori moral theories can be
defined as a pool of culturally supplied norms for
evaluating and criticizing the behavior of others. A
priori moral theories provide acceptable reasons for
praise and blame (e.g., "unprovoked harm is bad";
"people should strive to live up to God's
commandments"). Since the justifications that
people give are closely related to the moral
judgments that they make, prior researchers have
assumed that the justificatory reasons caused the
judgments. But if people lack access to their
automatic judgment processes then the reverse
causal path becomes more plausible.
If this reverse path is common, then the
enormous literature on moral reasoning can be
reinterpreted as a kind of ethnography of the a priori
moral theories held by various communities and3
age groups. Kohlberg's (1969) studies demonstrate
that young children in many cultures hold the a
priori moral theory that "acts that get punished are
wrong; acts that get rewarded are good" (stages 1
and 2), but they soon advance to the theory that
"acts that others approve of are good; acts that
others condemn are bad" (stage 3). If such
statements were the rules that children really used to
evaluate actions, then children at stages 1 and 2
would conclude that actions that are not punished
must not be bad. Yet Turiel (1983) has shown that
young children do not believe this. They say that
harmful acts, such as hitting and pulling hair, are
wrong whether they are punished or not. They even
say that such acts would be wrong if adults ordered
them to be done (Damon, 1977; Laupa & Turiel,
1986). So when a child offers the stage 1 statement
that "it's wrong because she'll get punished," the
child is not introspecting on the reasoning that led to
his condemnation; he is just giving a reason that
sounds plausible, perhaps a reason he himself has
heard from adults ("if you do that, I will punish
you").
The illusions of moral judgment. If moral
reasoning is generally a post-hoc construction
intended to justify automatic moral intuitions, then
our moral life is plagued by two illusions. The first
illusion can be called the "wag-the-dog" illusion: we
believe that our own moral judgment (the dog) is
driven by our own moral reasoning (the tail). The
second illusion can be called the "wag-the-otherdog's-tail"
illusion: in a moral argument, we expect
the successful rebuttal of an opponent's arguments
to change the opponent's mind. Such a belief is like
thinking that forcing a dog's tail to wag by moving it
with your hand should make the dog happy.
The wag-the-dog illusion follows directly from
the mechanics of the reasoning process described
above. Pyszczynski and Greenberg (1987) point out
that by going through all the steps of hypothesis
testing, even though every step can be biased by selfserving
motivations, people can maintain an
"illusion of objectivity" about the way they think.
The wag-the-dog illusion may therefore be one of the
mechanisms underlying naive realism (Griffin &
Ross, 1991; Robinson, Keltner, Ward, & Ross,
1995), the finding that people think that they see the
world as it is, while their opponents in a moral
dispute are biased by ideology and self-interest.
The bitterness, futility, and self-righteousness of
most moral arguments can now be explicated. In a
debate on abortion, politics, consensual incest, or on
what my friend did to your friend, both sides believe
that their positions are based on reasoning about the
facts and issues involved (the wag-the-dog illusion).
Both sides present what they take to be excellent
arguments in support of their positions. Both sides
expect the other side to be responsive to such
reasons (the wag-the-other-dog's-tail illusion). When
the other side fails to be affected by such good
reasons, each side concludes that the other side must
be closed-minded or insincere. In this way the
culture wars over issues such as homosexuality and
abortion can generate morally motivated players on
both sides who believe that their opponents are not
morally motivated (Haidt & Hersh, in press;
Robinson, Keltner, Ward, & Ross, 1995).
The social intuitionist solution. People have
quick and automatic moral intuitions, and when
called upon to justify these intuitions they generate
post-hoc justifications out of a priori moral theories.
They do not realize that they are doing this, so they
fall prey to two illusions. Moral arguments are
therefore like shadow boxing matches: each
contestant lands heavy blows to the opponent's
shadow, then wonders why he doesn't fall down.
Moral reasoning may therefore have little persuasive
Morality and Intuition -- 14
power in conflict situations, but the social
intuitionist model says that moral reasoning can be
effective in influencing people before a conflict
arises. Our words and ideas do affect our friends,
allies, and even strangers, via the reasonedpersuasion
link. If one can get the other person to
"see" the issue in a new way, perhaps by re-framing
a problem to trigger new intuitions, then one can
influence others with one's words. Martin Luther
King Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech was remarkably
effective in this task, using metaphors and visual
images more than propositional logic to get White
Americans to see and thus feel that racial
segregation was unjust, and un-American (see
Lakoff, 1996 on the role of metaphor in political
persuasion).
4) the Action Problem: Moral Action Covaries with
Moral Emotion More than with Moral Reasoning
The analysis thus far has focused on moral
judgment, not moral behavior. But the debate
between rationalism and intuitionism can also be
carried out using moral action as the dependent
variable. There is a literature that directly examines
the relationship between moral reasoning and moral
action, and there is a literature that examines what
happens when moral reasoning and moral emotions
become dissociated (in the case of psychopaths).
The weak link between moral reasoning and
moral action. In a major review of the literature on
moral cognition and action, Blasi (1980) concluded
that "moral reasoning and moral action are
statistically related" (p.37). But what is the nature of
this relationship? Blasi was careful to state that the
connection between moral reasoning ability and
moral behavior is only a correlation, but later
authors in the cognitive developmental tradition read
the relationship as causal, stating that higher levels
of moral reasoning cause better moral behavior (e.g.,
Lapsley, 1996). Yet Blasi's review raised the
possibility that a third variable caused both better
reasoning and better behavior: intelligence. Blasi
found that IQ was consistently related to honesty,
and he concluded that future investigators must do a
better job of controlling for IQ. Kohlberg (1969)
reported that scores on his moral judgment
interviews correlated with measures of IQ in the .30
to .50 range. Rest (1979) reports correlations of .20
to .50 between IQ and his Defining Issues Test
(DIT).
Intelligence may also be related to better moral
behavior by a pathway that does not run through
better moral reasoning. Metcalfe and Mischel (1999)
proposed a dual process model of willpower in
which two separate but interacting systems govern
human behavior in the face of temptation. The "hot"
system is specialized for quick emotional processing,
and it makes heavy use of amygdala-based memory.
The "cool" system is specialized for complex
spatiotemporal and episodic representation and
thought. It relies on hippocampal memory and
frontal lobe planning and inhibition areas. It can
block the impulses of the hot system, but it develops
later in life, making childhood and adolescence seem
like a long struggle to overcome impulsiveness and
gain self-control. This theory was proposed in part
to explain the astonishing finding that the number of
seconds pre-schoolers were able to delay choosing
an immediate small reward (one marshmallow) in
favor of a later, bigger reward (two marshmallows)
was a powerful predictor of adolescent social and
cognitive competence, including SAT scores and
ability to exert self control in frustrating situations,
measured about 13 years later (Shoda, Mischel, &
Peake, 1990).
The correlation that Blasi found between moral
reasoning and moral behavior may therefore be
explained by a third variable, the strength of the cool
system. Children start off with limited ability to
resist temptation, but as the hippocampus and
frontal cortex finish their development, children
become more able to inhibit impulsive behaviors.
Some children start off with a more effective cool
system (Kochanska et al., 1996), due to better or
faster frontal cortex development. Frontal cortex
development makes these children smarter, and they
therefore perform better on measures of moral
reasoning, but their improved moral behavior comes
more from their greater self-regulatory abilities than
from their greater moral reasoning abilities. The
development of the cool system does not represent
the triumph of reasoning over emotion; rather,
Metcalfe and Mischel (1999, p.16) see the
successful development and integration of the cool
system as an essential feature of emotional
intelligence.
Morality and Intuition -- 15
This re-interpretation is supported by the fact
that moral reasoning ability, in Blasi's (1980)
review, was most predictive of negative morality --
refraining from delinquent behavior. Criminologists
have consistently found an inverse relationship
between criminality and IQ. Even after correcting
for SES, the difference between delinquent and nondelinquent
adolescent populations is approximately
eight IQ points (Hirschi & Hindelang, 1977).
However the story for positive morality -- directly
helping others -- is less clear. Blasi found some
support for the claim that high scorers on
Kohlberg's and Rest's scales were more likely to
help other people, but more recent studies have
raised doubts. Hart and Fegley (1995), and Colby
and Damon (1992) both compared highly pro-social
moral exemplars to non-exemplars, and found that
the groups did not differ in their moral reasoning
ability assessed by Kohlbergian techniques. A recent
review of evidence supporting the utility of the
Defining Issues Test described three studies that
showed a relationship between DIT scores and
negative moral behaviors, but none showing a
relationship between DIT scores and positive
morality (Thoma, Narvaez, Rest, & Derryberry,
1999).
The relationship between moral reasoning ability
and moral behavior therefore appears to be weak
and inconsistent, once intelligence is partialled out.
Emotional and self-regulatory factors seem to be
more powerful determinants of actual behavior
(Mischel & Mischel, 1976).
The strong link between moral emotions and
moral action. Further evidence that moral reasoning
matters less than moral emotions comes from the
study of psychopaths. Cleckley's (1955) case studies
present chilling portraits of people in whom
reasoning has become dissociated from moral
emotions. Cleckley characterizes psychopaths as
having good intelligence and a lack of delusions or
irrational thinking. Psychopaths know the rules of
social behavior and they understand the harmful
consequences of their actions for others. They
simply do not care about those consequences.
Cleckley's psychopaths show a general poverty of
major affective reactions, particularly those that
would be triggered by the suffering of others
(remorse, sympathy), condemnation by others
(shame, embarrassment), or attachment to others
(love, grief). (See Hare, 1993, for a more recent
discussion of the emotional deficit.) Psychopaths
can steal from their "friends," dismember live
animals, and even murder their parents to collect
insurance benefits, without showing any trace of
remorse, or of shame when caught. The very
existence of the psychopath illustrates Hume's
statement that "`tis not contrary to reason to prefer
the destruction of the whole world to the scratching
of my little finger" (1739/1969, p.461). It is not
contrary to reason to kill your parents for money,
unless it is also contrary to sentiment.
Several lines of research are converging on the
conclusion that psychopaths and people with
antisocial personality disorder differ from normal
people in the operation of the frontal cortex.
Mednick et al. (1982) reviewed studies of EEG
differences between criminals and non-criminals,
and concluded that the bulk of the research points to
differences in the anterior regions of the brain. More
recent studies using PET techniques have narrowed
the location of interest to the pre-frontal cortex
(Raine, 1997). Samples of aggressive offenders
show reduced metabolic activity in this area, relative
to controls (Raine et al., 1994).
The importance of the prefrontal cortex for moral
behavior has been most fully explored by Damasio
and his colleagues, who have found a consistent
pattern of changes associated with damage to the
ventro-medial area of the pre-frontal cortex
(VMPFC, the area behind the bridge of the nose).
Patients with damage restricted to the VMPFC show
no reduction in their reasoning abilities. They retain
full knowledge of moral rules and social
conventions, and they show normal abilities to solve
logic problems, financial problems, and even
hypothetical moral dilemmas (Damasio, 1994). Yet
when faced with real decisions, they perform
disastrously, showing poor judgment, indecisiveness,
and what appears to be irrational behavior.
Damasio and his colleagues have demonstrated
that the central deficit resulting from destruction of
the VMPFC is the loss of emotional responsiveness
to the world in general, and to one's behavioral
choices in particular. When shown pictures that
arouse strong skin conductance responses in normal
people (nudity, mutilation, people dying) these
patients show no response (Damasio, Tranel, &
Damasio, 1990), mirroring the lack of autonomic
Morality and Intuition -- 16
responsiveness of psychopaths (Hare & Quinn,
1971). The patients know that the images should
affect them, but they report feeling nothing. Damasio
refers to this pattern of affect loss combined with
intact reasoning as "acquired sociopathy." Patients
with acquired sociopathy do not generally become
moral monsters, perhaps since they have a lifetime
of normal emotional learning and habit formation
behind them, although they do become much less
concerned with following social norms, and they
sometimes show outrageous and antisocial behavior,
as in the case of Phineas Gage (Damasio, 1994). If
we imagine a child growing up without a normal
VMPFC, who never in his life felt the stings of
shame and embarrassment, or the pain of emotional
loss or empathic distress, then it becomes almost
possible to understand the otherwise
incomprehensible behavior of Cleckley's
psychopaths. With no moral sentiments to motivate
and constrain them, they simply do not care about
the pain they cause and the lives they ruin .4
Emotions lead to altruism. If reasoning ability is
not sufficient to motivate moral action, then what is?
Batson and his colleagues have developed the
"empathy-altruism hypothesis," which states that
empathy aroused by the perception of someone's
suffering evokes an altruistic motivation directed
toward the ultimate goal of reducing the suffering
(Batson, 1987; see also Hoffman, 1982). Batson,
O'Quinn, Fulty, Vanderplass, and Isen (1983) found
that participants who experienced empathy while
watching a woman receiving (fake) electric shocks
generally volunteered to take the shocks in her place,
even when they were given the option of leaving the
scene. Participants who experienced only nonempathic
personal distress about the woman's plight
volunteered to trade places with her only when they
thought they would have to continue watching the
woman receive the shocks. Participants in the first
group seemed to be genuinely motivated to help the
distressed woman, not to relieve their own distress.
Cialdini and his colleagues have challenged the
empathy-altruism hypothesis, using a variety of
experimental designs to show that other motives can
often explain seemingly altruistic behavior (Cialdini
et al., 1987). But throughout this long debate, both
sides have consistently agreed that people are often
motivated to help others, and that the mechanisms
involved in this helping are primarily affective,
including empathy as well as reflexive distress,
sadness, guilt and shame (Cialdini, 1991).
The social intuitionist solution. It is easier to
study verbal reasoning than it is to study emotions
and intuitions, but reasoning may be the tail wagged
by the dog. The dog itself may turn out to be moral
intuitions and emotions such as empathy and love
(for positive morality) and shame, guilt, and
remorse, along with emotional self-regulation
abilities (for negative morality; see Haidt, in press,
for a review and taxonomy of the moral emotions).
A dog's tail is worth studying because dogs use their
tails so frequently for communication. Similarly,
moral reasoning is worth studying because people
use moral reasoning so frequently for
communication. But to really understand how human
morality works it may be advisable to shift attention
away from the study of moral reasoning and towards
the study of intuitive and emotional processes.
This concludes the presentation of the four
reasons to doubt the importance of reason, and to
look more closely at an alternative model, such as
the social intuitionist model.
The Mechanism of Intuition
Because intuition is the heart of the social
intuitionist model, more must be said about exactly
how intuitive moral judgments are made (link 1).
Recent work on the importance of bodily experience,
as represented in the mind, makes such an account
possible.
Gut Feelings in the Mind
The somatic marker hypothesis (Damasio, 1994)
states that experiences in the world normally trigger
emotional experiences that involve bodily changes
and feelings. Once the brain is properly tuned up by
repeated experiences of such emotional conditioning
(e.g., Pavlov, 1927), the brain areas that monitor
these bodily changes begin to respond whenever a
similar situation arises. It is then no longer necessary
for the rest of the body to be involved. At that point,
the mere thought of a particular action becomes
sufficient to trigger an "as if" response in the brain,
in which the person experiences in a weaker form the
same bodily feelings that she would experience if she
performed the action. The critical job of the VMPFC
is to integrate these feelings, or "somatic markers,"
Morality and Intuition -- 17
with the person's other knowledge and planning
functions, in order to decide quickly upon a
response. Damasio's work fits well with research in
social psychology on the "affect as information"
hypothesis, which demonstrates that people
frequently rely on their moods and momentary
flashes of feeling as guides when making judgments
and decisions (Clore, Schwartz, & Conway, 1994;
Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, & Welch, 1999;
Schwarz & Clore, 1983; see also an fMRI finding
that such flashes help explain people's varying
responses to philosophical moral dilemmas in
Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen,
2000).
Two recent studies have directly manipulated
moral judgments by manipulating somatic markers.
Batson, Engel, and Fridell (1999) used false
physiological feedback to tell participants about
their emotional reactions when listening to stories in
which the values of either freedom or equality were
threatened. When later asked to choose which value
should be selected as a theme for a week-long
program of events at their university, participants
were more likely to choose the value for which they
thought they had shown a stronger visceral reaction.
Wheatley and Haidt (2000) manipulated somatic
markers even more directly. Highly hypnotizable
participants were given the suggestion, under
hypnosis, that they would feel a pang of disgust
when they saw either the word "take" or the word
"often". Participants were then asked to read and
make moral judgments about six stories that were
designed to elicit mild to moderate disgust, each of
which contained either the word "take" or the word
"often." Participants made higher ratings of both
disgust and moral condemnation about the stories
containing their hypnotic disgust word. This study
was designed to directly manipulate the intuitive
judgment link (link 1), and it demonstrates that
artificially increasing the strength of a gut feeling
increases the strength of the resulting moral
judgment.
Metaphor and Embodiment
While Damasio focuses on the role of the
autonomic nervous system in thinking, Lakoff and
Johnson (1999; Lakoff, 1987) have shown how the
entire range of physical and emotional experience
may underlie our "embodied cognition." By
analyzing how people think and talk about love,
politics, morality, and other issues they have shown
that nearly all complex thought relies on metaphors,
drawn mostly from our experience as physical
creatures. For example, because we all have
experience with foods that are easily contaminated,
we come to equate purity and cleanliness with
goodness in the physical domain. We learn from
experience that pure substances are quickly
contaminated (e.g., by mold, dust, insects) when not
guarded, and that once contaminated, it is often
difficult to purify them again. These experiences in
the physical world then form the basis (in many
cultures) of conceptual schemes about moral purity,
e.g., that children start off in a state of purity and
innocence, but that they can be corrupted by a single
exposure to sex, violence, drugs, homosexuality, or
the devil (Haidt, Rozin, McCauley, & Imada, 1997;
Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 2000). Some losses of
purity can be rectified with great difficulty (e.g.,
exorcism after exposure to the devil), while others
cannot be rectified at all (e.g., the loss of virginity).
Moral intuition, then, appears to be the automatic
output of an underlying, largely unconscious set of
interlinked moral concepts. These concepts may
have some innate basis (see below), which is then
built up largely by metaphorical extensions from
physical experience. Metaphors have entailments,
and much of moral argument and persuasion
involves trying to get the other person to apply the
right metaphor. If Saddam Hussein is like Hitler, it
follows that he must be stopped. But if Iraq is like
Viet Nam, it follows that the United States should
not get involved (Spellman & Holyoak, 1992). Such
arguments are indeed a form of reasoning, but they
are reasons designed to trigger intuitions in the
listener.
The Origin of Intuitions
Perhaps because moral norms vary by culture,
class, and historical era, psychologists have
generally assumed that morality is learned in
childhood, and they have set out to discover how
morality gets from outside the child to inside. The
social intuitionist model takes a different view. It
proposes that morality, like language, is a major
evolutionary adaptation for an intensely social
species, built into multiple regions of the brain and
Morality and Intuition -- 18
body, which is better described as emergent than as
learned, yet which requires input and shaping from a
particular culture. Moral intuitions are therefore
both innate and enculturated. The present section
describes the ways in which moral intuitions are
innate, while the next section describes the ways in
which they are shaped by culture during
development.
Primate Proto-Morality
Darwin (1874/1998) believed that the human
"moral sense" grew out of the "social instincts" of
other animals, and modern primatological research
supports him. While all species can be said to follow
descriptive rules for behavior with conspecifics, it is
primarily the primates that show signs of
prescriptive rules, which de Waal (1991) defines as
rules that individuals "have learned to respect
because of active reinforcement by others" (p. 338).
Chimpanzee groups develop and enforce norms for
mating, for playing with or touching infants, and for
many other forms of interaction. When one
individual violates these norms, others will
sometimes look to or even get the attention of the
individual whose interests have been violated, who
may then take action to punish the transgressor (de
Waal, 1991). De Waal's work indicates that
prescriptive behavioral norms can emerge and be
understood and enforced by chimpanzees, without
the benefit of language or language-based reasoning.
Language may greatly increase the human use of
norms, but the cognitive and emotional machinery of
norm creation and norm enforcement was available
long before language existed.
It appears, furthermore, that this machinery has
been carried forward into the human mind. Alan
Fiske (1991, 1992) has identified four underlying
models of social cognition that seem to be at work in
all human cultures. His first three models fit closely
with descriptions of other primates. Fiske's first
model, "communal sharing" involves the linkage of
kindness, kinship, and empathic concern for close
others that de Waal describes both for chimpanzees
(de Waal, 1996) and for bonobos (de Waal &
Lanting, 1997). Fiske's second model, "authority
ranking," describes the ways that power and rank
regulate access to resources, but also obligate
superiors to protect their subordinates. Such mutual
obligations are clear among chimpanzees (de Waal,
1982; Goodall, 1986). Fiske's third model, "equality
matching," involves the double-edged reciprocal
altruism first described by Trivers (1971). Most
apes and many monkeys seem remarkably adept at
remembering and repaying both favors and slights
(de Waal, 1982; 1996). It is only Fiske's fourth
model, "market pricing," in which ratio values of
goods and services must be computed and
aggregated across transactions, which seems to be
uniquely human (Haslam, 1997). Given so many
close parallels between the social lives of humans
and chimpanzees, the burden of proof must fall on
those who want to argue for discontinuity, i.e., that
human morality arose ex nihilo when we developed
the ability to speak and reason.
The above considerations are not meant to imply
that chimpanzees have morality, nor that humans are
just chimps with post-hoc reasoning skills. There is
indeed a moral Rubicon that only Homo Sapiens
appears to have crossed: widespread third party
norm enforcement. Chimpanzee norms generally
work at the level of private relationships, where the
individual that has been harmed is the one that takes
punitive action. Yet human societies are marked by a
constant and vigorous discussion of norms and norm
violators, and by a willingness to expend individual
or community resources to inflict punishment, even
by those who were not harmed by the violator
(Boehm, 1999). Dunbar (1996) has even proposed
that language evolved primarily to fulfill the need for
gossip. Only with language is it possible to keep
track of who did what to whom, who is in, who is
out, who can be trusted, and who should be avoided.
While the evolution of language and intelligence may
have been driven by the Machiavellian benefits they
gave to individuals (Byrne & Whiten, 1988), the
combination of language and a full theory of mind
(Premack & Premack, 1995) made it possible for
large groups of non-kin to reap the benefits of
cooperation by monitoring each other's behavior (via
gossip), shunning or punishing cheaters, and
rewarding team players.
The social intuitionist model fits with this view of
the functions of language by including two
interpersonal links. Once morality is located in a
group's efforts to solve cooperation and commitment
problems (Darwin, 1874/1998; Frank, 1988), it
becomes clear that individuals must simultaneously
use language to influence others, while being at least
Morality and Intuition -- 19
somewhat open to interpersonal influence as specific
norms, values, or judgments spread through a
community. A group of judges independently seeking
truth is unlikely to reach an effective consensus. But
a group of people linked together in a large web of
mutual influence (an extension of Figure 2 to
multiple parties) may eventually settle into a stable
configuration, in the same way that a connectionist
network reaches a stable equilibrium after several
iterations.
The Externalization of Intuitions
If many moral intuitions (e.g., sympathy,
reciprocity, loyalty) are partially built in by
evolution then the most important developmental
question is not "how do they get in to the child" but
rather "how do they get out?" Fiske (1991) argues
that social development should be thought of partly
as a process of externalization, in which innate
cognitive models manifest themselves as a part of
normal maturation. He reviews evidence (e.g.,
Damon, 1975) showing that the four models emerge
during development in an invariant sequence:
Communal Sharing in infancy, Authority Ranking
by age three, Equality Matching around age four,
and Market Pricing during middle or late childhood.
This is the same sequence in which the models
appear to have emerged phylogenetically in the
mammalian and primate lineages.
The contrast between internalization and
externalization is particularly clear for Equality
Matching. Western parents often try to get their
young children to share and to play fairly. If moral
development was a matter of gradual internalization,
or even of reward and punishment, then children's
adherence to principles of fairness would show a
gradual increase throughout early childhood.
Instead, Fiske argues that children seem relatively
insensitive to issues of fairness until around the age
of four, at which point concerns about fairness burst
forth and are overgeneralized to social situations in
which they were never encouraged, and in which
they are often inappropriate. This pattern of sudden
similarly timed emergence with overgeneralization
suggests the maturation of an endogenous ability,
rather than the learning of a set of cultural norms.
Only after the cognitive model has externalized itself
can it be shaped and refined by cultural norms about
when and how it should be used.
The Development of Intuitions
Even if moral intuitions are partially innate,
children somehow end up with a morality that is
unique to their culture or group. There are at least
three related processes by which cultures modify,
enhance, or suppress the emergence of moral
intuitions to create a specific morality: by selective
loss, by immersion in custom complexes, and by
peer socialization.
The Selective Loss of Intuitions
The acquisition of phonology provides a useful
analogy for the acquisition of morality. Children are
born with the ability to distinguish among hundreds
of phonemes, but after a few years of exposure to a
specific language they lose the ability to make some
unexercised phoneme contrasts (Werker & Tees,
1984). Likewise, Ruth Benedict (1934/1959)
suggested, we can imagine a great "arc of culture"
on which are arrayed all the possible aspects of
human functioning. "A culture that capitalized even
a considerable proportion of these would be as
unintelligible as a language that used all the clicks,
all the glottal stops, all the labials...." (p. 24).
Similarly, a culture that emphasized all of the
moral intuitions that the human mind is prepared to
experience would risk paralysis, as every action
triggered multiple conflicting intuitions. Cultures
seem instead to specialize in a subset of human
moral potential. For example, Shweder's theory of
the "big three" moral ethics (Shweder, Much,
Mahapatra, & Park, 1997; see also Jensen, 1997)
proposes that moral "goods" (i.e., culturally shared
beliefs about what is morally good and valuable)
generally cluster into three complexes, or ethics,
which cultures embrace to varying degrees: the ethic
of autonomy (focusing on goods that protect the
autonomous individual, such as rights, freedom of
choice, and personal welfare); the ethic of
community (focusing on goods that protect families,
nations, and other collectivities, such as loyalty,
duty, honor, respectfulness, modesty, and selfcontrol);
and the ethic of divinity (focusing on goods
that protect the spiritual self, such as piety, and
physical and mental purity). A child is born prepared
to develop moral intuitions in all three ethics, but her
local cultural environment generally stresses only
one or two of the ethics. Intuitions within culturally
Morality and Intuition -- 20
supported ethics become sharper and more
chronically accessible (Higgins, 1996), while
intuitions within unsupported ethics become weaker
and less accessible. Such "maintenance-loss" models
have been documented in other areas of human
higher cognition. It seems to be a design feature of
mammalian brains that much of neural development
is "experience expectant" (Black, Jones, Nelson, &
Greenough, 1998). That is, there are
developmentally timed periods of high neural
plasticity, as though the brain "expected" certain
types of experience to be present at a certain time to
guide its final wiring.
Such sensitive periods are well documented in the
development of sensory systems (Hubel & Wiesel,
1970), and language (Johnson & Newport, 1989).
Huttenlocher (1994) reports that most synapse
selection and elimination in the human cerebral
cortex occurs in the first few years, but that in the
pre-frontal cortex the period of plasticity is greatly
delayed. Synapse selection in the pre-frontal cortex
starts later, accelerates in late childhood, and then
tails off in adolescence (see also Spear, 2000). Since
the pre-frontal cortex is the brain area most
frequently implicated in moral judgment and
behavior (Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1990;
Raine, 1997), this suggests that if there is a sensitive
period for moral learning it is likely to be later in
childhood than psychoanalysts and most American
parents suppose.
But how exactly does a culture choose and
emphasize a subset of the available intuitions?
Immersion in Custom Complexes
The "custom complex" has recently been
proposed as the key construct for understanding
development within a cultural context (Shweder,
Goodnow, Hatano, LeVine, Markus, & Miller,
1998). The custom complex was originally defined
by Whiting and Child (1953, p.27) as consisting of
"a customary practice and ... the beliefs, values,
sanctions, rules, motives and satisfactions associated
with it." The custom complex captures the idea that
cultural knowledge is far more than a set of inherited
beliefs about the right and wrong ways of doing
things. Cultural knowledge is a complex web of
explicit and implicit, sensory and propositional,
affective, cognitive, and motoric knowledge
(D'Andrade, 1984; Shore, 1996).
Custom complexes are easily found in the moral
socialization of children. For example in Orissa,
India, many spaces and objects are structured by
rules of purity and pollution. Foreigners and dogs
may be allowed near the entrance to a temple
complex, but only worshipers who have properly
bathed may be allowed into the central courtyard
(Mahapatra, 1981). In the inner sanctum, where the
deity sits, only the Brahmin priest is permitted to
enter. Private homes have a similar structure with
zones of high purity (the kitchen and the room where
the household deity is kept), and lower purity. The
human body has a similar structure, in which the
head is the zone of highest purity, while the feet are
highly polluting. Children in Orissa constantly
encounter spaces and bodies structured by purity,
and they learn to respect the dividing lines. They
learn when to remove their shoes, and how to use
their heads and feet in a symbolic language of
deference (as when one touches one's head to the
feet of a highly respected person). They develop an
intuitive sense that purity and impurity must be kept
apart. By participating in these interlinked custom
complexes, an Oriya child's physical embodiment
comes to include experiences of purity and pollution.
When such children later encounter the intellectual
content of the ethics of divinity (e.g., ideas of
sacredness, asceticism, and transcendence), their
minds and bodies are already prepared to accept
these ideas, and their truth feels self-evident (see
Lakoff, 1987).
American children, in contrast, are immersed in a
different set of practices regarding space and the
body, supported by a different ideology. When an
American adult later travels in Orissa, he may know
how rules of purity and pollution govern the use of
space, but he knows these things only in a shallow,
factual, consciously accessible way; he does not
know these things in the deep
cognitive/affective/motoric way that a properly
enculturated Oriya knows them.
Fiske (1999) reviews evidence in anthropology
that children are taught surprisingly little in most
cultures, and that they acquire most of their cultural
knowledge and expertise by observing and then
imitating the practices of older children and adults.
(See also Bandura & Walters, 1963, on imitation
and social learning.) Fiske argues that
anthropologists have generally underestimated the
Morality and Intuition -- 21
importance of motor schemas and implicit
knowledge, relying instead on the verbal reports of
informants as their primary source of ethnographic
data. In other words, there is an asymmetry between
how culture gets in to children, and how it gets out
to anthropologists. Cultural knowledge gets in
largely through non-verbal and non-conscious
means, but it gets out through conscious verbal
communication. This asymmetry brings the Nisbett
and Wilson (1977) problem straight into the heart of
anthropology: "Informants pressed to explain
practices that they themselves learned by
observation, imitation, and participation generally
have to make up concepts that have very tenuous,
often imaginary relations with the manner in which
the informants themselves actually acquired or
generate the actions in question" (Fiske, 1999, p. 1;
emphasis added).
The importance of practice, repetition, and
physical movement for the "tuning up" of cultural
intuitions is further demonstrated by Lieberman's
(2000) recent review of the neural substrates of
intuition. Lieberman finds that social learning uses
some of the same circuits in the basal ganglia that
motoric learning does, causing many social skills to
become rapid and automatic, like well-learned motor
sequences. Social skills and judgmental processes
that are learned gradually and implicitly then operate
unconsciously, projecting their results into
consciousness, where they are experienced as
intuitions arising from nowhere. (See also Reber,
1993 on implicit learning, and Clark, 1999, on the
underestimated role of the body in cognition.)
The implication of these findings for moral
psychology is that moral intuitions are developed
and shaped as children behave, imitate, and
otherwise take part in the practices and custom
complexes of their culture. Participation in custom
complexes in this way provides a cultural "front
end" for Damasio's (1994) somatic marker
hypothesis, and for Lakoff's (1987) embodied
cognition. Even though people in all cultures have
more or less the same bodies, they have different
embodiments, and therefore they end up with
different minds.
Peer Socialization
The social intuitionist model presents people as
intensely social creatures whose moral judgments are
strongly shaped by the judgments of those around
them. But whose judgments have the strongest
effects on children? Harris (1995) pointed out that
children's task in late childhood and adolescence is
not to become like their parents but to fit into their
peer group, for it is among peers that alliances must
be formed and prestige garnered. She therefore
proposed a group socialization theory in which
children acquire their culture ­ including moral
values ­ from their peers, just as they acquire their
phonology (i.e., children of immigrants copy the
accent of their peers, not their parents).
Harris's emphasis on peers receives support from
a study by Minoura (1992) of Japanese children who
spent a few years in California when their fathers
were transferred to the United States for work.
Minoura found that there was a sensitive period for
culture learning between the ages of 9 and 15. When
children spent a few years in the United States
during this period, they developed American ways of
interacting with friends, and American ways of
feeling about problems in interactions. A few years
spent in America before that period led to shallower,
non-emotional learning about norms, and left no
lasting effects. A few years spent in America after
the age of 15 lead to puzzlement and culture-shock,
but to little change in the self. These later arrivals,
like their parents, knew and could state explicitly the
American norms for interpersonal behavior,
friendship, and self-promotion, yet these norms did
not get internalized. The norms never came to be
automatic, or to feel self-evidently valid, as intuitive
knowledge would be if acquired during the sensitive
period.
Putting together all of the developmental theories
and findings presented above yields the following
expansion of the social intuitionist model: Moral
development is primarily a matter of the maturation
and cultural shaping of endogenous intuitions.
People can acquire explicit propositional knowledge
about right and wrong in adulthood, but it is
primarily through participation in custom complexes
(Shweder, et al., 1998) involving sensory, motor,
and other forms of implicit knowledge (Fiske, 1999;
Lieberman, 2000; Shore, 1996), that are shared with
one's peers during the sensitive period of late
childhood and adolescence (Harris, 1995;
Huttenlocher, 1994; Minoura, 1992) that one comes
to feel, physically and emotionally (Damasio, 1994;
Morality and Intuition -- 22
Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), the self-evident truth of
moral propositions.
Integrating Rationalism and Intuitionism
The debate between rationalism and intuitionism
is an old one, but the divide between the two
approaches may not be unbridgeable. Both sides
agree that people have emotions and intuitions,
people engage in reasoning, and people are
influenced by each other. The challenge, then, is to
specify how these processes fit together. Rationalist
models do this by focusing on reasoning and then
discussing the other processes in terms of their
effects on reasoning. Emotions matter since they can
be inputs to reasoning. Social settings and social
interactions matter because they encourage or retard
the development of reasoning, in part by providing
or blocking opportunities for role-taking. But if
researchers want to get at the heart of the process,
the place where most of the variance is located, they
should focus on moral reasoning.
The social intuitionist model proposes a very
different arrangement, one that fully integrates
reasoning, emotion, intuition, and social influence.
The discussion thus far may have given the
impression that the model dismisses reasoning as
post-hoc rationalization (link 2). However it must be
stressed that four of the six links in the model are
reasoning links, and three of these links (3, 5, and 6)
are hypothesized to have real causal effects on moral
judgment.
Link 3, the reasoned persuasion link, says that
people's (ex post facto) moral reasoning can have a
causal effect ­ on other people's intuitions. In the
social intuitionist view moral judgment is not just a
single act that occurs in a single person's mind. It is
an ongoing process, often spread out over time and
over multiple people. Reasons and arguments can
circulate and affect people, even if individuals rarely
engage in private moral reasoning for themselves.
Link 6, the reflective judgment link, allows that
people may sometimes engage in private moral
reasoning for themselves, particularly when their
initial intuitions conflict. Abortion may feel wrong to
many people when they think about the fetus, but
right when their attention shifts to the woman. When
competing intuitions are evenly matched the
judgment system becomes deadlocked and the
"master" (in Hume's metaphor) falls silent. Under
such circumstances one may go through repeated
cycles of links 6, 1, and 2, using reasoning and
intuition together to break the deadlock. That is, if
one consciously examines a dilemma, focusing in
turn on each party involved, various intuitions will
be triggered (link 6), leading to various contradictory
judgments (link 1). Reasoning can then be used to
construct a case to support each judgment (link 2). If
reasoning is more successful building a case for one
of the judgments than the others, it will begin to feel
right, and there will be less temptation (and ability)
to consider additional points of view. This is an
account of how a "makes sense" epistemology
(Perkins, Allen, & Hafner, 1983) may become a
"feels right" ethics. We use conscious reflection to
mull over a problem until one side feels right. Then
we stop.
Link 5, the reasoned judgment link, recognizes
that a person could, in principle, simply reason her
way to a judgment that contradicts her initial
intuition. The literature on everyday reasoning
(Kuhn, 1991) suggests that such an ability may be
common only among philosophers, who have been
extensively trained and socialized to follow
reasoning even to very disturbing conclusions (as in
the case of Socrates, or the more recent works of
Derek Parfit and Peter Singer). Yet the fact that
there are at least a few people among us who can
reach such conclusions on their own, and then argue
for them eloquently (link 3), means that pure moral
reasoning can play a causal role in the moral life of
a society.
If the social intuitionist model is correct as a
description of human moral judgment, it may be
possible to use the model to get reasoning and
intuition working more effectively together in real
moral judgments. One approach would be to directly
teach moral thinking and reasoning skills, thereby
encouraging people to use links 5 and 6 more often.
However attempts to directly teach thinking and
reasoning in a classroom setting generally show little
transfer to activities outside of the classroom
(Nickerson, 1994), and since moral judgment
involves "hotter" topics than are usually dealt with
in such courses, the degree of transfer is likely to be
even smaller.
A more intuitionist approach is to treat moral
judgment style as an aspect of culture, and to try to
Morality and Intuition -- 23
create a culture that fosters a more balanced,
reflective, and fair-minded style of judgment. The
"Just Community" schools that Kohlberg created in
the 1970's (Power, Higgins, & Kohlberg, 1989)
appear to do just that. By making high school
students create their own rules, enforce their own
discipline, and vote on numerous policies, Kohlberg
created an environment where students enacted
democracy. By putting students and teachers on an
equal footing (all had just one vote; all used first
name only; all sat in a circle on the floor at
community meetings), Kohlberg created an
environment where students and teachers enacted
equality. Years of such implicit learning, coupled
with explicit discussion, should gradually tune up
intuitions (Fiske, 1999; Lieberman, 2000) about
justice, rights, and fairness, leading perhaps to an
automatic tendency to look at problems from
multiple perspectives. By creating a community in
which moral talk was ubiquitous (link 3, reasoned
persuasion), and in which adults modeled good
moral thinking, Kohlberg may well have
strengthened his students' tendency to use link 6
(private reflection) on their own. (See Baron, 2000,
for more on how cultural beliefs and practices about
thinking can help or hinder good thinking.)
The social intuitionist model also offers more
general advice for improving moral judgment. If the
principal difficulty in objective moral reasoning is
the biased search for evidence (Kunda, 1990;
Perkins, Farady, & Bushey, 1991), then people
should take advantage of the social persuasion link
(link 4) and get other people to help them improve
their reasoning. By seeking out discourse partners
who are respected for their wisdom and openmindedness,
and by talking about the evidence,
justifications, and mitigating factors involved in a
potential moral violation, people can help trigger a
variety of conflicting intuitions in each other. If more
conflicting intuitions are triggered, the final
judgment is likely to be more nuanced and ultimately
more reasonable.
The social intuitionist model, therefore, is not an
anti-rationalist model. It is a model about the
complex and dynamic ways that intuition, reasoning,
and social influences interact to produce moral
judgment.
Testing the Social Intuitionist Model
The social intuitionist model is more complex
and comprehensive than most rationalist models. Is
the extra complexity necessary? Does the model do a
better job of explaining and illuminating human
moral life? That is a question that future research
must decide. There are at least three kinds of
research that may shed light on the relative merits of
the model.
1) Interfering with reasoning. If reasoning is a
slow and effortful process that demands attentional
resources, while intuition is fast, effortless, and
undemanding (see Table 1), then manipulations that
interfere with reasoning during a moral judgment
interview should affect the quality of the post-hoc
reasoning produced, without affecting the quality of
the initial judgment. Rationalist models, in contrast,
predict that the quality and speed of a judgment
should be heavily dependent on one's reasoning
ability.
2) Ecological variation. This paper has suggested
that standard moral judgment interviews represent
unique and ecologically suspect settings in which a
variety of factors conspire to maximize the amount
and quality of reasoning. If this is true then the
reasoning produced in such interviews is consistent
both with rationalist models and with the private
reflection loop of the social intuitionist model (links
1, 2, and 6). However as the conditions of the
interview are gradually changed to increase
ecological validity, the social intuitionist model
predicts that the reasoning produced should become
recognizably post-hoc. Alterations that would
increase ecological validity include using real (rather
than hypothetical) stories, asking about people
known to the participant, working questions into a
normal conversation (not a formal interview), and
conducting the conversation in front of other people
(not alone in a private room). Post-hoc reasoning
can be recognized by three features: 1) attempts to
change facts about the story or to introduce new and
tangential concerns, 2) a lack of responsiveness of
the judgment to large changes in the facts of the
story, and 3) a longer delay between the time the
evaluation is made and the time that the first
substantive reason is produced.
Morality and Intuition -- 24
3) Consilience. Edward O. Wilson (1998)
resurrected the term "consilience" to refer to the
degree to which facts and theories link up across
disciplines to create a common groundwork of
explanation. He argued that theories that contribute
to the unification of the sciences should be preferred
to those that contribute to their fragmentation. The
present paper has tried to show that the social
intuitionist model easily links findings in social and
developmental psychology to recent findings and
theories in neuroscience, primatology, and
anthropology. But perhaps a similar case can be
made for rationalist models. The debate between
rationalism and intuitionism, now over 200 years
old, is not just a debate between specific models; it is
a debate between perspectives on the human mind.
All of the disciplines that study the mind should
contribute to the debate.
Conclusion
Rationalist models made sense in the 1960's and
1970's. The cognitive revolution had opened up new
ways of thinking about morality and moral
development, and it was surely an advance to think
about moral judgment as a form of information
processing. But times have changed. Now we know
(again) that most of cognition occurs automatically
and outside of consciousness (Bargh & Chartrand,
1999), and that people cannot tell us how they really
reached a judgment (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). Now
we know that the brain is a connectionist system that
tunes up slowly, but is then able to evaluate complex
situations quickly (Bechtel & Abrahamsen, 1991).
Now we know that emotions are not as irrational
(Frank, 1988), that reasoning is not as reliable
(Kahneman & Tversky, 1984), and that animals are
not as amoral (de Waal, 1996) as we thought in the
1970's. The time may be right, therefore, to take
another look at Hume's perverse thesis: that moral
emotions and intuitions drive moral reasoning, just
as a surely as a dog wags its tail.
Morality and Intuition -- 25
1. This is one of Hume's most radical statements, taken from his first book, A Treatise of Human Nature.
His more mature work, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, raises reason from a slave to a
respected assistant of the moral sense, yet it maintains the basic position that "the ultimate ends of human
actions can never... be accounted for by reason, but recommend themselves entirely to the sentiments and
affections" (p. 131).
2. Kant responded to Hume's skepticism about the powers of reason. He argued that any rational agent
could and should figure out the morally correct thing to do by applying the categorical imperative: "I
should never act in such a way that I could not also will that my maxim should be a universal law"
(1785/1959, p.18).
3. An ironic example of an a priori moral theory used in a post-hoc way is found in Miller's (1999) recent
review of the norm of self-interest. Americans strongly embrace the theory that people act, and ought to
act, primarily out of self-interest. Americans therefore frequently make up self-interest explanations for
their attitudes, votes, and charitable actions, even in cases where they appear to be acting against their selfinterest
(see also Baron, 1997).
4. In fact, two of the only such children ever studied sound uncannily like Cleckley's psychopaths
(Anderson, Bechara, Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1999). See also Grandin's (1995) discussion of how
the emotional deficits of autism made it difficult for her to understand many social and moral rules,
although her feelings of empathy, particularly for animals, and her feelings of social anxiety, appear to
have been a sufficient foundation for a moral compass.
Footnotes
Morality and Intuition -- 26
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Morality and Intuition -- 34
Table 1
General Features of the Two Systems
The Intuitive system The Reasoning System
Fast and effortless Slow and effortful
Process is unintentional and runs automatically Process is intentional and controllable
Process is inaccessible; only results enter
awareness
Process is consciously accessible and viewable
Does not demand attentional resources Demands attentional resources, which are limited
Parallel distributed processing Serial processing
Pattern matching; thought is metaphorical,
holistic
Symbol manipulation; thought is truth preserving,
analytical
Common to all mammals Unique to humans over age 2, and perhaps some
language-trained apes
Context dependent Context independent
Platform dependent (depends on the brain and
body that houses it)
Platform independent (the process can be
transported to any rule following organism or
machine)
Note. These contrasts are discussed in Bruner (1986); Chaiken (1980); Epstein (1994); Freud (1900/1976);
Margolis (1987); Metcalfe and Mischel (1999); Petty & Cacioppo (1986); Posner and Snyder (1975);
Pyszczynski and Greenberg (1987); Reber (1993); Wegner (1994); Wilson (in press); and Zajonc (1980).
Morality and Intuition -- 35
Morality and Intuition -- 36