This link has been bookmarked by 44 people . It was first bookmarked on 12 Sep 2007, by robertwiblin.
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21 Feb 13
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26 Aug 12
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28 Jun 12
gthaberlachOur brains, like other animal brains, are constantly trying to fine tune and speed up the central decision of all action: approach or avoid. You can't understand the river of fMRI studies on neuroeconomics and decision making without embracing this principle. We have affectively-valenced intuitive reactions to almost everything, particularly to morally relevant stimuli such as gossip or the evening news. Reasoning by its very nature is slow, playing out in seconds.
Studies of everyday reasoning show that we usually use reason to search for evidence to support our initial judgment, which was made in milliseconds. But I do agree with Josh Greene that sometimes we can use controlled processes such as reasoning to override our initial intuitions. I just think this happens rarely, maybe in one or two percent of the hundreds of judgments we make each week. And I do agree with Marc Hauser that these moral intuitions require a lot of computation, which he is unpacking. -
22 Jan 12
Carol FurchnerSummarizes Haidt's thinking on moral psychology, and how it has moved away from Kohlberg's stages of moral development into new realms looking at emotion, unconscious influences, evolutionary psychology, gut feelings.
haidt moral evolutionary-psych emotion disgust decisions s1s2 moral-psychology
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28 Dec 11
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01 Nov 11
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18 Sep 11
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24 Apr 11
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06 Nov 10
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As David Hume said long ago, reason is the servant of the passions.
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08 May 10
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Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error
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morality, and rationality itself, were crucially dependent on the proper functioning of emotional circuits in the prefrontal cortex.
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Frans de Waal's Good Natured
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the building blocks of human morality are found in other apes and are products of natural selection in the highly social primate lineage
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that automatic and unconscious processes can and probably do cause the majority of our behaviors, even morally loaded actions (like rudeness or altruism) that we thought we were controlling consciously.
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people couldn't stop themselves from making up post-hoc explanations for whatever it was they had just done for unconscious reasons.
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emotion played a bigger role than the cognitive developmentalists had given it.
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12 Nov 08
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08 Nov 08
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11 Oct 08
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I recently summarized this new synthesis in moral psychology with four principles:
1) Intuitive primacy but not dictatorship. This is the idea, going back to Wilhelm Wundt and channeled through Robert Zajonc and John Bargh, that the mind is driven by constant flashes of affect in response to everything we see and hear.
Our brains, like other animal brains, are constantly trying to fine tune and speed up the central decision of all action: approach or avoid. You can't understand the river of fMRI studies on neuroeconomics and decision making without embracing this principle. We have affectively-valenced intuitive reactions to almost everything, particularly to morally relevant stimuli such as gossip or the evening news. Reasoning by its very nature is slow, playing out in seconds.
Studies of everyday reasoning show that we usually use reason to search for evidence to support our initial judgment, which was made in milliseconds. But I do agree with Josh Greene that sometimes we can use controlled processes such as reasoning to override our initial intuitions. -
2) Moral thinking is for social doing. This is a play on William James' pragmatist dictum that thinking is for doing, updated by newer work on Machiavellian intelligence. The basic idea is that we did not evolve language and reasoning because they helped us to find truth; we evolved these skills because they were useful to their bearers, and among their greatest benefits were reputation management and manipulation.
Just look at your stream of consciousness when you are thinking about a politician you dislike, or when you have just had a minor disagreement with your spouse. It's like you're preparing for a court appearance. Your reasoning abilities are pressed into service generating arguments to defend your side and attack the other. -
3) Morality binds and builds. This is the idea stated most forcefully by Emile Durkheim that morality is a set of constraints that binds people together into an emergent collective entity.
Durkheim focused on the benefits that accrue to individuals from being tied in and restrained by a moral order. In his book Suicide he alerted us to the ways that freedom and wealth almost inevitably foster anomie, the dangerous state where norms are unclear and people feel that they can do whatever they want. -
4) Morality is about more than harm and fairness. In moral psychology and moral philosophy, morality is almost always about how people treat each other. Here's an influential definition from the Berkeley psychologist Elliot Turiel: morality refers to "prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other." -
OK, so there are two psychological systems, one about fairness/justice, and one about care and protection of the vulnerable. And if you look at the many books on the evolution of morality, most of them focus exclusively on those two systems, with long discussions of Robert Trivers' reciprocal altruism (to explain fairness) and of kin altruism and/or attachment theory to explain why we don't like to see suffering and often care for people who are not our children.
But if you try to apply this two-foundation morality to the rest of the world, you either fail or you become Procrustes. Most traditional societies care about a lot more than harm/care and fairness/justice. Why do so many societies care deeply and morally about menstruation, food taboos, sexuality, and respect for elders and the Gods? You can't just dismiss this stuff as social convention. If you want to describe human morality, rather than the morality of educated Western academics, you've got to include the Durkheimian view that morality is in large part about binding people together. -
Craig Joseph (at Northwestern University) and I concluded that there were three best candidates for being additional psychological foundations of morality, beyond harm/care and fairness/justice. These three we label as ingroup/loyalty (which may have evolved from the long history of cross-group or sub-group competition, related to what Joe Henrich calls "coalitional psychology"); authority/respect (which may have evolved from the long history of primate hierarchy, modified by cultural limitations on power and bullying, as documented by Christopher Boehm), and purity/sanctity, which may be a much more recent system, growing out of the uniquely human emotion of disgust, which seems to give people feelings that some ways of living and acting are higher, more noble, and less carnal than others.
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30 Sep 08
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14 Sep 08
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10 Sep 08
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18 Mar 08
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disgust won in nearly all groups I studied
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except for groups of politically liberal college students, particularly Americans
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important cultural differences
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1) Intuitive primacy but not dictatorship.
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Reasoning by its very nature is slow, playing out in seconds.
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Studies of everyday reasoning show that we usually use reason to search for evidence to support our initial judgment, which was made in milliseconds.
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2) Moral thinking is for social doing.
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morality >
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morality is a set of constraints that binds people together into an emergent collective entity.
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3) Morality binds and builds.
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Virtues that bind people to other members of the tribe and encourage self-sacrifice would lead virtuous tribes to vanquish more selfish ones, which would make these traits more prevalent.
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4) Morality is about more than harm and fairness.
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Why do so many societies care deeply and morally about menstruation, food taboos, sexuality, and respect for elders and the Gods?
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morality is in large part about binding people together.
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fairness/justice
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harm/care
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ingroup/loyalty
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authority/respect
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purity/sanctity
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disgust, which seems to give people feelings that some ways of living and acting are higher, more noble, and less carnal than others.
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Virtues are socially constructed and socially learned, but these processes are highly prepared and constrained by the evolved mind.
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binding foundations
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individualizing foundations
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religiosity is an enormously important fact about our species.
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evolutionary, developmental, neuropsychological, and anthropological theories that can explain why human religious practices take the various forms that they do, many of which are so similar across cultures and eras.
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religion stress the role of ritual and community much more than of factual beliefs about the creation of the world or life after death.
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belief in supernatural entities may indeed be an accidental output of cognitive systems
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favored the success of individuals and groups that found ways (genetic or cultural or both) to use these gods to their advantage,
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"we" are virtuous and our opponents are evil is a crucial step in uniting people
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religion was the conduit that pulled humans through a "major transition" in evolutionary history.
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Darwin's Cathedral,
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Religions and their associated practices greatly increase the costs of defection
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increase the contributions of individuals to group efforts
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sharpen the boundaries
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The contractual approach
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The contractual approach
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problem of social life is that individuals often hurt each other
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implicit social contracts
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explicit laws
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maximize happiness and minimize suffering.
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harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity
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let people make their own choices, as long as they harm nobody else.
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the group and its territory as fundamental sources of value.
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The beehive approach
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fundamental problems of social life are attacks from outside and subversion from within.
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ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity
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order and tradition in which people are united by a shared moral code
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13 Jan 08
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In my dissertation and my other early studies, I told people short stories in which a person does something disgusting or disrespectful that was perfectly harmless (for example, a family cooks and eats its dog, after the dog was killed by a car). I was trying to pit the emotion of disgust against reasoning about harm and individual rights. I found that disgust won in nearly all groups I studied (in Brazil, India, and the United States), except for groups of politically liberal college students, particularly Americans, who overrode their disgust and said that people have a right to do whatever they want, as long as they don't hurt anyone else.
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25 Nov 07
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16 Oct 07
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13 Oct 07
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14 Sep 07
Link SoepHaidt suggests that the recent criticisms of religion don't always reflect the best psychological understanding of what are primarily social, rather than ideological, institutions, and notes that religious people tend to be happier and more altruistic.
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13 Sep 07
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12 Sep 07
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4) Morality is about more than harm and fairness. In Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris gives us a standard liberal definition of morality: "Questions of morality are questions about happiness and suffering… To the degree that our actions can affect the experience of other creatures positively or negatively, questions of morality apply." He then goes on to show that the Bible and the Koran, taken literally, are immoral books because they're not primarily about happiness and suffering, and in many places they advocate harming people.
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From a review of the anthropological and evolutionary literatures, Craig Joseph (at Northwestern University) and I concluded that there were three best candidates for being additional psychological foundations of morality, beyond harm/care and fairness/justice. These three we label as ingroup/loyalty (which may have evolved from the long history of cross-group or sub-group competition, related to what Joe Henrich calls "coalitional psychology"); authority/respect (which may have evolved from the long history of primate hierarchy, modified by cultural limitations on power and bullying, as documented by Christopher Boehm), and purity/sanctity, which may be a much more recent system, growing out of the uniquely human emotion of disgust, which seems to give people feelings that some ways of living and acting are higher, more noble, and less carnal than others.
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My UVA colleagues Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek, and I have collected data from about 7,000 people so far on a survey designed to measure people's endorsement of these five foundations. (You can take the survey at www.YourMorals.org.) In every sample we've looked at, in the United States and in other Western countries, we find that people who self-identify as liberals endorse moral values and statements related to the two individualizing foundations primarily, whereas self-described conservatives endorse values and statements related to all five foundations. It seems that the moral domain encompasses more for conservatives—it's not just about Gilligan's care and Kohlberg's justice. It's also about Durkheim's issues of loyalty to the group, respect for authority, and sacredness.
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Reading Harris is like watching professional wrestling or the Harlem Globetrotters. It's great fun, with lots of acrobatics, but it must not be mistaken for an actual contest. If we want to stage a fair fight between religious and secular moralities, we can't eliminate one by definition before the match begins. So here's my definition of morality, which gives each side a chance to make its case:
Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.
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I have italicized the two sections that show ordinary moral thinking rather than scientific thinking. The first is Dennett's claim not just that there is no evidence, but that there is certainly no evidence, when in fact widely known surveys have shown for decades that religious practice is a strong predictor of charitable giving. Arthur Brooks recently analyzed these data (in Who Really Cares) and concluded that the enormous generosity of religious believers is not just recycled to religious charities.
Religious believers give more money than secular folk to secular charities, and to their neighbors. They give more of their time, too, and of their blood. Even if you excuse secular liberals from charity because they vote for government welfare programs, it is awfully hard to explain why secular liberals give so little blood. The bottom line, Brooks concludes, is that all forms of giving go together, and all are greatly increased by religious participation and slightly increased by conservative ideology (after controlling for religiosity).
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