Intuition versus Reason: Strategies that People Use to Think about Moral Problems - eScholarship

Intuition versus Reason: Strategies that People Use to Think about Moral Problems Mark Fedyk (mfedyk@mta.ca) Department of Philosophy, Mount Allison University Sackville, NB, E4L 1G9, Canada Barbara Koslowski (bmk2@cornell.edu) Department of Human Development, Cornell University Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA Abstract We asked college students to make judgments about realistic moral situations presented as dilemmas (which asked for an either/or decision) vs. problems (which did not ask for such a decision) as well as when the situation explicitly included affectively salient language vs. non-affectively salient language. We report two main findings. The first is that there are four different types of cognitive strategy that subjects use in their responses: simple reasoning, intuitive judging, cautious reasoning, and empathic reasoning. We give operational definitions of these types in terms of our observed data. In addition, the four types characterized strategies not only in the whole sample, but also in all of the subsamples in our study. The second finding is that the intuitive judging type comprised approximately 26% of our respondents, while about 74% of our respondents employed one of the three styles of reasoning named above. We think that these findings present an interesting challenge to models of moral cognition which predict that there is either a single, or a single most common, strategy – especially a strategy of relying upon one’s intuitions – that people use to think about moral situations. Keywords: Moral Judgment; Moral Reasoning; Verbal Behavior; Cognitive Strategies. Introduction A significant amount of the recent and most influential research in adult moral psychology has focused on the intuitive processes that are frequently represented as the main sort of cognition that occurs when people are asked to make moral judgments about moral situations. This intuition-focused research frequently relies upon so-called “trolley dilemmas” to elicit this intuitive cognition in research participants. Trolley dilemmas are easy-to- understand fictional moral situations that present an either/or choice between one of two ethically appealing courses of action. Participants are asked to decide one of the two courses of action, and this decision is customarily treated as a paradigmatic representation of a moral judgment. (Mikhail, Sorrentino, & Spelke 1998, Mikhail 2012, Nichols & Mallon 2006, Cushman & Greene 2012) In one of the better-known lines of research in this area, Mikhail (2007) proposes that an innate and subconscious ‘universal moral grammar’ determines the semantic content of people’s moral judgments. The universal moral grammar is defined using the concepts of deontic logic augmented with a variety of psychological concepts like ‘intentional action’. Moreover, the computations that the universal moral grammar is hypothesized to perform and that generate moral judgment are entirely intuitive. Thus, evidence for the existence of the universal moral grammar comes from studies in which subject’s intuitive decisions about trolley dilemmas are shown to be consistent with theoretical predictions about the content and logical structure of the moral grammar. (Mikhail 2008, Mikhail 2012) Similarly, Waldmann and Dieterich (2007) argue that the content of moral judgments about trolley dilemmas and similar moral situations is determined by a different kind of intuitive knowledge, namely knowledge of a causal map. This map symbolizes causal pathways in the moral situation that a person is considering, dividing the causal pathways into those that involve agents and patients and those that do not. Agents play an active role in realizing a harmful effect, and patients experience the harmful effects caused by agents. Accordingly, the either/or choice at the heart of the situation is intuitively represented as choice between two actions (interventions), each of which can alter in different ways the causal relations that hold between agents and patients. Waldmann and Dieterich test whether a “focus on action may sometimes lead to what we call intervention myopia”, such that people will focus primarily on interventions on causal pathways involving patients and agents, and focus less on interventions on causal pathways that do not involve agents and patients. (Waldmann and Dieterich 2007) Their data leads them to conclude, “the locus of intervention is one key factor contributing to moral intuitions.” That may be, but the important point for our purposes is that, like Mikhail’s theory, Waldmann and Dieterich’s proposal is that judgments about moral either/or choices are computed by intuitive cognitive processes. We mention these studies in some detail because we want to use them as evidence for the following claim: if you want to “nudge” subjects towards using intuitive cognitive processes to produce moral judgments about moral situations, one approach which seems likely to have this effect is to present subjects with a moral situation that embeds an explicit either/or choice – that is, a moral dilemma. After all, both studies described above are examples of experimental subjects producing moral intuitions in response to situations that contain explicit either/or choices, and there are many other studies like this. (Lombrozo 2009)

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