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Our plan was to increase the amount of dumbfounding by having Scott play devil’s advocate rather than gentle interviewer. When Scott succeeded in stripping away arguments, would people change their judgments? Or would they become morally dumbfounded, clinging to their initial judgments while stammering and grasping for reasons?
Scott convinced an extra 10 percent to sip the juice, and an extra 17 percent to sign the soul-selling paper. But most people in both scenarios clung to their initial refusal, even though many of them could not generate good reasons.
Only 20 percent of subjects said it was OK for Julie and Mark to have sex, and only 13 percent said it was OK for
Jennifer to eat part of a cadaver.
In this transcript and in many others, it’s obvious that people were making a moral judgment immediately and emotionally.
Reasoning was merely the servant of the passions, and when the servant failed to find any good arguments, the master did not change his mind.
People made moral judgments quickly and emotionally. Moral reasoning was mostly just a post hoc search for reasons to justify the judgments people had already made.
Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition, by Howard Margolis,
Margolis was trying to understand why people’s beliefs about political issues are often so poorly connected to objective facts, and he hoped that cognitive science could solve the puzzle.
Muller-Lyer illusion (figure 2.2), in which one line continues to look longer than the other even after you know that the two lines are the same length.
Wason 4-card task,
Findings such as these led Wason to the conclusion that judgment and justification are separate processes.
Margolis proposed that there are two very different kinds of cognitive processes at work when we make judgments and solve problems: “seeing-that” and “reasoning-why.”
“Seeing-that” is the pattern matching that brains have been doing for hundreds of millions of years.
It’s the sort of rapid, automatic, and effortless processing that drives our perceptions in the Muller-Lyer illusion.
“Reasoning-why,” in contrast, is the process “by which we describe how we think we reached a judgment, or how we think another person could reach that judgment.”34
Margolis’s ideas were a perfect fit with everything I had seen in my studies: rapid intuitive judgment (“That’s just wrong!”) followed by slow and sometimes tortuous justifications (“Well, their two methods of birth control might fail, and the kids they produce might be deformed”).
Not wanting to drink roach-tainted juice isn’t a moral judgment, it’s a personal preference. Saying “Because I don’t want to” is a perfectly acceptable justification for one’s subjective preferences. Yet moral judgments are not subjective statements; they are claims that somebody did something wrong.
We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.36
After failing repeatedly to get cognition to act independently of emotion, I began to realize that the dichotomy made no sense.
Emotions were long thought to be dumb and visceral, but beginning in the 1980s, scientists increasingly recognized that emotions were filled with cognition.
Emotions occur in steps, the first of which is to appraise something that just happened based on whether it advanced or hindered your goals.
Emotions are a kind of information processing.39 Contrasting emotion with cognition is therefore as pointless as contrasting rain with weather, or cars with vehicles.
His work helped me see that moral judgment is a cognitive process, as are all forms of judgment.
The crucial distinction is really between two different kinds of cognition: i...
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Intuition is the best word to describe the dozens or hundreds of rapid, effortless moral judgments and decisions that we all make every day.
In The Happiness Hypothesis, I called these two kinds of cognition the rider (controlled processes, including “reasoning-why”) and the elephant (automatic processes, including emotion, intuition, and all forms of “seeing-that”).
When human beings evolved the capacity for language and reasoning at some point in the last million years, the brain did not rewire itself to hand over the reins to a new and inexperienced charioteer. Rather, the rider (language-based reasoning) evolved because it did something useful for the elephant.
The rider can do several useful things.
It can see further into ...
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It can learn new skills and master new technologies,
the rider acts as the spokesman for the elephant,
The rider is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done, and it is good at finding reasons to justify whatever the elephant wants to do next.
This simple change converted the model into a Humean model in which intuition (rather than passion) is the main cause of moral judgment (link 1), and then reasoning typically follows that judgment (link 2) to construct post hoc justifications.
I also wanted to capture the social nature of moral judgment.
We make our first judgments rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments.
Yet friends can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves: they can challenge us, giving us reasons and arguments (link 3) that sometimes trigger new intuitions, thereby making it possible for us to change our minds.
Far more common than such private mind changing is social influence.
That form of influence is link 4, the social persuasion link. Many of us believe that we follow an inner moral 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,46 without giving us any reasons or arguments.
Because of these two changes I called my theory the “social intuit...
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judgm...
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“The Emotional Dog and Its Rat...
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intuitions (including emotional responses) are a kind of cognition.
The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog’s tail wags to communicate. You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.
book How to Win Friends and Influence People, Carnegie repeatedly urged readers to avoid direct confrontations. Instead he advised people to “begin in a friendly way,” to “smile,” to “be a good listener,” and to “never say ‘you’re wrong.’
The persuader’s goal should be to convey respect, warmth, and an openness to dialogue before stating one’s own case.
“If there is any one secret of success it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from their angle as well as your own.”50
The rider and the elephant work together smoothly to fend off attacks and lob rhetorical grenades of our own. The performance may impress our friends and show allies that we are committed members of the team, but no matter how good our logic, it’s not going to change the minds of our opponents if they are in combat mode too.
Plato believed that reason could and should be the master; Jefferson believed that the two processes were equal partners (head and heart) ruling a divided empire; Hume believed that reason was (and was only fit to be) the servant of the passions.
