 It's hardly news that stealing and incest are wrong, but how do we know this to be true? We are investigating where our moral judgments come from. Specifically – how are "gut feelings" involved? How are some moral judgments different from others? And how do our brains arrive at these judgments?
GOING WITH OUR GUT
In a study with Jonathan Haidt, we hypnotized participants to feel a flash of disgust whenever they read an arbitrary word (e.g., "often"). Later, these participants read stories about people doing minor transgressions (e.g., littering). When the stories contained the hypnotic-disgust word,
moral judgments about the act were more severe than when the same stories did not contain the word. This pang of disgust was taken as a moral intuition – literally, a "gut feeling" that something
was wrong. In a follow-up study we showed that people listened to this gut feeling even in the context of a completely neutral act:
Dan is a student council representative at his school. This semester he is in charge
of scheduling discussions about academic issues. He often picks topics that appeal
to both professors and students in order to stimulate discussion. (Italics added)
Rather than abandon their misplaced disgust, some participants reasoned that Dan was "up to something" and "a popularity-seeking snob". Others abandoned reason all together, writing: ‘‘I don’t know [why it’s wrong], it just is.’’
Our findings suggest Hume was right: our moral judgments are grounded in affectively-laden moral intuition.
‘‘reason is . . . the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office than to
serve and obey them’’ Hume, 1739
THE UNITY OF MORALITY (Or, How many ways can we be immoral?)
In collaboration with Dr. Sinnott-Armstrong in the Philosophy department, we are currently investigating how the brain judges "right" and "wrong" based on the types of transgressions involved.
RELATED PUBLICATIONS
 Wheatley, T. & Haidt, J. (2005). Hypnotic disgust makes moral judgments more severe. Psychological Science, 16, 780-784.
Luo, Q., Nakic, M., Wheatley, T., Richell, R., Martin, A., & Blair, R.J.R. (2006) The neural basis of implicit moral attitude: an IAT study using event-related fMRI. NeuroImage, 30, 1449-57. |
