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August 21 - November 10, 2024
to appraise something that just happened based on whether it advanced or hindered your goals.38 These appraisals are a kind of information processing; they are cognitions.
compass, but the history of social psychology richly demonstrates that other people exert a powerful force, able to make cruelty seem acceptable45 and altruism seem embarrassing,
Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.
student at UVA, she had
It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one’s own faults. One shows the faults of others like chaff winnowed in the wind, but one conceals one’s own faults as a cunning gambler conceals his dice.5
all in order to optimize the brain’s answer to the fundamental question of animal life: Approach or avoid? In
Every emotion (such as happiness or disgust) includes an affective reaction, but most of our affective reactions are too fleeting to be called emotions (for example, the subtle feelings you get just from reading the words happiness and disgust).
The second process—thinking—is an evolutionarily newer ability, rooted in language and not closely related to motivation. In other words, thinking is the rider; affect is the elephant.
when beautiful people are convicted, judges give them lighter sentences, on average.17
Immorality makes us feel physically dirty, and cleansing ourselves can sometimes make us more concerned about guarding our moral purity.
Those told to stand near the sanitizer became temporarily more conservative.27
Wth
Roughly one in a hundred men (and many fewer women) are psychopaths. Most are not violent, but the ones who are commit nearly half of the most serious crimes, such as serial murder, serial rape, and the killing of police officers.28 Robert Hare, a leading researcher, defines psychopathy by two sets of features. There’s the unusual stuff that psychopaths do—impulsive antisocial behavior, beginning in childhood—and there are the moral emotions that psychopaths lack.
Psychopaths do have some emotions. When Hare asked one man if he ever felt his heart pound or stomach churn, he responded: “Of course! I’m not a robot. I really get pumped up when I have sex or when I get into a fight.”29 But psychopaths don’t show emotions that indicate that they care about other people. Psychopaths seem to live in a world of objects, some of which happen to walk around on two legs. One psychopath told Hare about a murder he committed while burglarizing an elderly man’s home:
Do you know any?
Psychopathy does not appear to be caused by poor mothering or early trauma, or to have any other nurture-based explanation. It’s a genetically heritable condition31 that creates brains that are unmoved by the needs, suffering, or dignity of others.32 The elephant doesn’t respond with the slightest lean to the gravest injustice.
The rider is perfectly normal—he does strategic reasoning quite well. But the rider’s job is to serve the elephant, not to act as a moral compass.
brain-damaged patients show that the emotional areas of the brain are the right places to be looking for the foundations of morality, because losing them interferes with moral competence.
you’ve probably heard of the famous “trolley dilemma,”39 in which the only way you can stop a runaway trolley from killing five people is by pushing one person off a bridge onto the track below.
Utilitarianism is the philosophical school that says you should always aim to bring about the greatest total good, even if a few people get hurt along the way, so if there’s really no other way to save those five lives, go ahead and push. Other philosophers believe that we have duties to respect the rights of individuals, and we must not harm people in our pursuit of other goals, even moral goals such as saving lives. This view is known as deontology (from the Greek root that gives us our word duty).
have argued that the Humean model (reason is a servant) fits the facts better than the Platonic model (reason could and should rule) or the Jeffersonian model (head and heart are co-emperors).
When does the elephant listen to reason? The main way that we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with other people. We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor, just as we are quite good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs. When discussions are hostile, the odds of change are slight. The elephant leans away from the opponent, and the rider works frantically to rebut the opponent’s charges.
And finally, it is possible for people simply to reason their way to a moral conclusion that contradicts their initial intuitive judgment, although I believe this process is rare. I
Psychopaths reason but don’t feel (and are severely deficient morally). • Babies feel but don’t reason (and have the beginnings of morality).
The elephant (automatic processes) is where most of the action is in moral psychology. Reasoning matters, of course, particularly between people, and particularly when reasons trigger new intuitions. Elephants rule, but they are neither dumb nor despotic. Intuitions can be shaped by reasoning, especially when reasons are embedded in a friendly conversation or an emotionally compelling
But in an unjust city, one group’s gain is another’s loss, faction schemes against faction, the powerful exploit the weak, and the city is divided against itself. To make sure the polis doesn’t descend into the chaos of ruthless self-interest, Socrates says that philosophers must rule, for only they will pursue what is truly good, not just what is good for themselves.4
If philosophers must rule the happy city, then reason must rule the happy person. And if reason rules, then it cares about what is truly good, not just about the appearance of virtue.
people care a great deal more about appearance and reputation than about reality.
the guy who realized that the most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences.
Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.
For millions of years, our ancestors’ survival depended upon their ability to get small groups to include them and trust them, so if there is any innate drive here, it should be a drive to get others to think well of us. Based on his review of the research, Leary suggested that self-esteem is more like an internal gauge, a “sociometer” that continuously measures your value as a relationship partner. Whenever the sociometer needle drops, it triggers an alarm and changes our behavior.
Do some people truly steer by their own compass?
Everyone had to sit alone in a room and talk about themselves for five minutes, speaking into a microphone. At the end of each minute they saw a number flash on a screen in front of them. That number indicated how much another person listening in from another room wanted to interact with them in the next part of the study.
Their self-esteem sank. But the self-proclaimed mavericks suffered shocks almost as big. They might indeed have steered by their own compass, but they didn’t realize that their compass tracked public opinion, not true north. It was just as Glaucon said.
Leary’s conclusion was that “the sociometer operates at a nonconscious and preattentive level to scan the social environment for any and all indications that one’s relational value is low or declining.”
The only people known to have no sociometer are psychopaths.
Wason called this phenomenon the confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out and interpret new evidence in ways that confirm what you already think.
“Here is some evidence I can point to as supporting my theory, and therefore the theory is right.”
The difference between can and must is the key to understanding the profound effects of self-interest on reasoning. It’s also the key to understanding many of the strangest beliefs—in UFO abductions, quack medical treatments, and conspiracy theories.
making consumer choices and interpersonal judgments,52 but they are often disastrous as a basis for public policy,
Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. To explain this principle I used the metaphor of the mind as a rider (reasoning) on an elephant (intuition), and I said that the rider’s function is to serve the elephant. Reasoning matters, particularly because reasons do sometimes influence other people, but most of the action in moral psychology is in the intuitions.
“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”
The authors pointed out that nearly all research in psychology is conducted on a very small subset of the human population: people from cultures that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD). They
that WEIRD people are statistical outliers; they are the least typical, least representative people you could study if you want to make generalizations about human nature. Even within the West, Americans are more extreme outliers than Europeans, and within the United States, the educated upper middle class (like my Penn sample) is the most unusual of all. Several of the peculiarities of WEIRD culture can be captured in this simple generalization: The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships.
For example, when asked to write twenty statements beginning with the words “I am …,” Americans are likely to list their own internal psychological characteristics (happy, outgoing, interested in jazz), whereas East Asians are more likely to list their roles and relationships (a son, a husband, an employee of Fujitsu).
Most people think holistically (seeing the whole context and the relationships among parts), but WEIRD people think more analytically (detaching the focal object from its context, assigning it to a category, and then assuming that what’s true about the category is true about the object).5 Putting
But when holistic thinkers in a non-WEIRD culture write about morality, we get something more like the Analects of Confucius, a collection of aphorisms and anecdotes that can’t be reduced to a single rule.6 Confucius talks about a variety of relationship-specific duties and virtues (such as filial piety and the proper treatment of one’s subordinates). If WEIRD and non-WEIRD people think differently and see the world differently, then it stands to reason that they’d have different moral concerns. If you see a world full of individuals, then you’ll want the morality of Kohlberg and Turiel—a
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psychology: There’s more to morality than harm and fairness. I’m going to try to convince you that this principle is true descriptively—that
They found three major clusters of moral themes, which they called the ethics of autonomy, community, and divinity.10
The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted.12 People are not just animals with an extra serving of consciousness; they are children of God and should behave accordingly. The body is a temple, not a playground.
could see beauty in a moral code that emphasized self-control, resistance to temptation, cultivation of one’s higher, nobler self, and negation of the self’s desires. I could see the dark side of this ethic too: once you allow visceral feelings of disgust to guide your conception of what God wants, then minorities who trigger even a hint of disgust in the majority (such as homosexuals or obese people) can be ostracized and treated cruelly. The ethic of divinity is sometimes incompatible with compassion, egalitarianism, and basic human rights.23
were effective responses to the exploitation and terrible working conditions they faced. Franklin
