EMOTION AND REASON IN MORAL JUDGMENT 1 Beyond dual-processes : The interplay of reason and emotion in moral judgment

A great deal of research in moral psychology has focused on the interplay between emotion and reason during moral judgment, characterizing the two as forces working in opposition to influence judgment. Below, we review recent psychological research on morality, with a special focus on disgust and the nature of its role in moral and political judgment. We review behavioral, neuroscience, and physiological data looking at the role of disgust in moral judgment, with a particular emphasis on the role of emotion regulation—the process of shifting emotional responses in order to meet one’s goals. We suggest that dual-process theories of moral judgment are not well-suited to understanding the role of emotion regulation in influencing moral judgments and decisions. Theories that emphasize the primacy of one process over another may ultimately be missing the complexity how these processes interact to influence moral judgment. Keywords: emotion, reason, disgust, moral judgment, emotion regulation EMOTION AND REASON IN MORAL JUDGMENT 3 “It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my own consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both” -Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886, p. 56 Stevenson’s 1886 classic novel “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” tells the tale of Dr. Jekyll, a man who wants to end the struggle between good and evil within him. In order to do so, he formulates and ingests a potion designed to split his mind into two—one personality to house his baselessness and immorality (Mr. Hyde), and one to house the morally pure traits he values most. The inner conflict that humans experience between their moral selves and their more unrestrained, egoistic selves has been a consistent theme in literature for centuries. While (largely) discarding the goodversus-evil aspects of this dichotomy, moral psychology has nonetheless embraced the basic division of mental processes into two general types—one mental system that is cold, rational, and deliberative, and another that is emotional, intuitive, and quick. This characterization has served as a basic organizational framework for understanding the processes involved in human judgment across a variety of domains, including moral and ethical judgments (e.g., Kahneman, 2011). This “dual-process” approach to the mind has motivated a great deal of research on moral judgment within the last decade, and has led psychologists to reconsider the historically dominant approaches to moral judgment, approaches which emphasized the primacy of reason. But the division of the mind into two systems, while fruitful, has encouraged researchers to characterize emotion and EMOTION AND REASON IN MORAL JUDGMENT 4 reason as forces acting upon moral judgment in opposing directions, and to focus on factors that give rise to the dominance of one over the other. This chapter will focus on a particular emotion—disgust—in order to illustrate that the simplicity of the dual-process approach may hide some of the more nuanced ways in which emotion and reason interact to produce moral judgment and behavior. In particular, it will highlight research on emotional regulation as an example in which reason guides emotion rather than battles against it. Taken together, these two bodies of research suggest that characterizing reason and emotion as separate, opposing forces in moral judgment is a caricatured description of two processes that often interact in complex ways to motivate judgment and action (Pizarro, 2000). The dethroning of reason For the majority of the twentieth century, psychologists viewed decision-making as a “cold” process in which individuals calmly and rationally weigh pros and cons to arrive at a decision that maximizes their utility (Loewenstein & Lerner, 2003). Research in moral psychology echoed this emphasis on reason: early studies of moral judgment focused on the importance of cognitive abilities across development, and on how the emergence of specific abilities shaped the child’s understanding of moral rules (Kohlberg, 1963; Piaget, 1932). As individuals matured, they would approach a higher “stage” of moral thinking, and while many would never reach the highest stages of moral reasoning, the majority of individuals would reach a stage of moral sophistication required to uphold the norms and laws of a functional society. 1 Notably, some early researchers suggested that children’s morality was largely emotionally driven (Wendorf 2001; Kline 1903). The insights from this approach were all but lost in the coming dominance of the cognitive developmental approach. EMOTION AND REASON IN MORAL JUDGMENT 5 However, as research on emotion grew it began to transform the behavioral sciences, and the study of judgment and decision making in particular. No longer was judgment characterized as a “cold” emotionless process, but as infused with emotion at every turn. In an influential paper, Haidt (2001) built upon this emerging affective science, and applied it to moral judgment by making a radical claim—that reason played a much smaller role in ethical and moral judgment than psychologists thought. Taking a note from the philosopher David Hume (1777/1960), Haidt argued that intuitions (often in the form of emotional responses) were, in fact, the primary causes of moral judgment. In what he dubbed “social intuitionism,” Haidt proposed that when individuals are faced with a moral question (e.g., “Julie and Mark are a brother and sister that had consensual sex”), and are asked to make a moral judgment (“How morally wrong was Julie and Mark’s behavior? ”) it is their experience of emotion (in this example, disgust) that gives rise to the moral judgment (“What Mark and Julie did was wrong! ”), not their ability to formulate reasons. Notably, in examples like this individuals are actually at a loss to justify their moral judgment and become “morally dumbfounded”—reduced to offering something like “it’s just gross” as their only reason for their judgment. For Haidt, ethical judgment is a great deal like aesthetic judgment: it is made quickly, effortlessly, and without a great deal of conscious deliberation (Greene & Haidt, 2002). More radically, Haidt claimed that if deliberate reasoning played a role at all in moral judgment, it was most likely as a post hoc attempt to justify an individual’s intuition-driven moral judgments (Haidt, 2001; Haidt & Bjorklund, 2008). As support for his claim, Haidt also drew on growing evidence from social psychology, demonstrating the power of nonconscious influences on judgment, as well as from cross-cultural EMOTION AND REASON IN MORAL JUDGMENT 6 research showing that cognitive-developmental theories (such as that of Kohlberg) did a poor job at predicting moral judgments in non-Western cultures (Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993; Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, & Park, 1997). Haidt’s social intuitionist model happened to coincide with a new approach to studying morality pioneered by Greene and his colleagues, who paired modern neuroimaging techniques with classic philosophical moral dilemmas to arrive at a similar conclusion—that emotions played a much larger role in moral judgment than previously thought. Greene and colleagues (2001), demonstrated that when faced with classic sacrificial moral dilemmas (in which one individual must be sacrificed to save a greater number of people), individuals often responded in a manner consistent with their gut, emotional reactions, and argued that this could be seen in the patterns of neural activation observed while individuals were reading emotionally evocative dilemmas. However, when given enough time to deliberate, individuals could overturn their initial gut reactions and reply with a more calculating (i.e., utilitarian) response. Yet for both Greene and Haidt, the emphasis was on the divided mind—one system that produces an initial moral judgment, and another capable of intervening occasionally to alter the judgment. While these approaches were influential in shifting moral psychology away from the historically dominant rationalist theories moral judgment, the pendulum swung swiftly in the direction of emotional primacy—the view that reasoning played little or no role in most moral judgments. Indeed, combined with the research emerging in other areas of judgment and decision making, it seemed fairly obvious that human judgment was driven if not solely, at least primarily by emotional and non-rational processes (Bargh & Ferguson, 2000). EMOTION AND REASON IN MORAL JUDGMENT 7 Yet a number of more recent findings have demonstrated that reason is not as inert as these accounts (or, at least, the stronger versions of these accounts) implied. For instance, there is evidence that simply temporarily encouraging rational thought can have a demonstrable effect on moral judgment. Researchers recently demonstrated that engaging in a cognitively challenging task prior to making a moral judgment can cause individuals to go against their initial intuitive moral judgment when responding to moral dilemmas (Paxton, Ungar, & Greene, 2011). In addition, when given sufficient time to deliberate, individuals are more likely to be persuaded by reasoned arguments that a seemingly wrong, yet harmless act was not, in fact, immoral (Paxton, Ungar, & Greene, 2011). Encouraging individuals to adopt a rational mindset can lead them to make judgments of moral blame that go against their intuitive initial reaction. For instance, individuals intuitively reduce their judgments of blame for harmful acts that were intended, although the causal link between the intention and the harm occurred in an unexpected fashion (Pizarro, Uhlmann, & Bloom, 2003). However, when instructed to think rationally and deliberately, individuals become insensitive to extraneous information about the caus