The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment.

2001/01/01 by Jonathan Haidt · 96 citations
Neuroscience · Social Sciences · Psychology · #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Emotions and Moral Behavior

paper · doi:10.1037/0033-295x.108.4.814

Abstract

Research on moral judgment has been dominated by rationalist models, in which moral judgment is thought to be caused by moral reasoning. The author gives 4 reasons for considering the hypothesis that moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached. The social intuitionist model is presented as an alternative to rationalist models. The model is a social model in that it deemphasizes the private reasoning done by individuals and emphasizes instead the importance of social and cultural influences. The model is an intuitionist model in that it states that moral judgment is generally the result of quick, automatic evaluations (intuitions). The model is more consistent that rationalist models with recent findings in social, cultural, evolutionary, and biological psychology, as well as in anthropology and primatology.

Citations

• Where is the child's environment? A group socialization theory of development.
• Thin slices of expressive behavior as predictors of interpersonal consequences: A meta-analysis.
• A hot/cool-system analysis of delay of gratification: Dynamics of willpower.
• Critical period effects in second language learning: The influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language
• The unbearable automaticity of being.
• The case for motivated reasoning.
• The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism

Cited by

• Individual differences in sensitivity to threat predict greater moral condemnation
• Epistemological Fault Lines Between Human and Artificial Intelligence
• ‘Meating’ the animal and moral emotions: Exploring animal caring and cruelty appeals for dietary change
• Pro-Life Policy Preferences Partly Reflect Desires to Suppress Casual Sexual Behavior, Not Solely Sanctity of Life Concerns
• Is Management Theory Too “Self-ish”?
• Indicadores de resultados ("Performances") en la producción del broiler
• Moral illusions
• Human newborns spontaneously attend to prosocial interactions
• Can emotions be demystified?
• Altruistic Atheists
• Intuitive ethics: how innately prepared intuitions generate culturally variable virtues
• What Kinds of Value Motives Guide People in Their Moral Attitudes? The Role of Personal and Prescriptive Values at the Culture Level and Individual Level
• Dropouts in Confidence: Moral Uncertainty in Human-LLM Alignment
• Anger, Fear, or Sadness: Faculty Members' Emotional Reactions to Collective Pay Disadvantage
• Differences in the Moral Foundations of Large Language Models
• In the Mind or in the World? Types of Beliefs and the Locality of Evidence
• Moralization and Foreign Policy Attitudes
• The sexual overperception bias is associated with sociosexuality
• Political diversity will improve social psychological science
• Cultural Threat, Outgroup Discrimination, and Attitudes toward Transgender Rights
• Assessing the Effect of Deservingness Cues on Tolerance for Administrative Burdens
• Attached to monogamy? Avoidance predicts willingness to engage (but not actual engagement) in consensual non-monogamy
• Walking the moral plank: using virtual reality to investigate moral decision-making under threat
• Thinking and feeling: Moral deliberation in a dual-process framework
• Imaginative Thought
• Learning by Laughing: Humour as Moral Error Detection and the Ethics of Immoral Jokes
• Who did it? Moral wrongness for us and them in the UK, US, and Brazil
• Issue Fields and Echo Chambers: Increasing field contestation fueled by moral emotions
• Contouring Emotion Dynamics Through Metaphor: A Related-Event Approach to Emotion Nouns in Japanese and English
• The Alignment Target Problem: Divergent Moral Judgments of Humans, AI Systems, and Their Designers
• Large-Scale Patterns of Entertainment Gratifications in Linguistic Content of U.S. Films
• A Computational Model of Commonsense Moral Decision Making
• Who are your people? – The effect of political ideology and social identity on climate-related beliefs and risk perceptions
• Moral Selves: Organizational character and the pursuit of purpose
• Dissolving the moral-conventional distinction
• Beyond crisis management: ethical principles and trauma-informed care in outdoor learning and outdoor adventure therapies
• Moral Minds in Gaming
• Broadening the study of morality in multiparty settings through a novel dictionary translation and validation methodology
• Decoding the intent-to-outcome developmental shift in moral judgment, from infancy to preschool age: A critical review and a novel proposition
• Morality and Prosocial Behavior: The Role of Awareness, Responsibility, and Norms in the Norm Activation Model
• Motivational pathways to STEM career choices: Using expectancy–value perspective to understand individual and gender differences in STEM fields
• Why do people seem to be more utilitarian in VR than in questionnaires?
• Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda
• How does morality work in the brain? A functional and structural perspective of moral behavior
• Morality shifting in the context of intergroup violence
• Moral psychology of nursing robots: Exploring the role of robots in dilemmas of patient autonomy
• A mutualistic approach to morality: The evolution of fairness by partner choice
• Moral judgment of close relationship behaviors
• Taking a SEAT: Predicting Value Interpretations from Sentiment, Emotion, Argument, and Topic Annotations
• Chimpanzee normativity: evidence and objections
• EvalMORAAL: Interpretable Chain-of-Thought and LLM-as-Judge Evaluation for Moral Alignment in Large Language Models
• Pragmatic Inference for Moral Reasoning Acquisition: Generalization via Distributional Semantics
• Cognition-of-Thought Elicits Social-Aligned Reasoning in Large Language Models
• Educating for character in imperfect societies: the right and responsibility to learn to say that 2 + 2 = 4
• Modesty’s inoffensive self-presentation
• Is Online Disinhibition Related to Cyberdating Abuse Perpetration through Moral Disengagement? The Moderating Role of Gender, Sexism, and Cybervictimization
• Virtue for affective engines
• An Emotional Deliberation Approach to Risk
• The Impact of War Exposure on Morality: Evidence From the Battle of Mosul
• Health Behaviors Are Moralized When Perceived to Cause Harm
• Cross-national evidence for political philosophers’ civic behavior
• The Psychology of Victimhood in the Law
• Towards sustainable food security: Exploring the potential of duckweed (Lemnaceae) in diversifying food systems
• Schema Replacement and Reducing Meat Consumption
• A Theory of Appropriateness That Accounts for Norms of Rationality
• Preference reversals in ethicality judgments of medical treatments
• Public beliefs about good teaching
• How Long‐Held Perceptions of Deservingness Continue to Shape Public Attitudes About Program Eligibility
• Is Deliberate Control of Behavior Rare? A Test of the Automaticity Dominance Perspective
• Don’t Mind Meat? The Denial of Mind to Animals Used for Human Consumption
• The Psychology of Eating Animals
• Evaluating the validity of Myers‐Briggs Type Indicator theory: A teaching tool and window into intuitive psychology
• How Do People Morally Judge Corruption? A Comparison Between the Netherlands and Indonesia
• How do LLMs reflect human moral foundations? a study using the moral foundations framework
• Stripped of Agency: The Paradoxical Effect of Employee Monitoring on Deviance
• Public Opinion on Geopolitics and Trade
• Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory
• Brand activism: Does courting controversy help or hurt a brand?
• Rule-Based Moral Principles for Explaining Uncertainty in Natural Language Generation
• Risk Communication, Public Engagement, and Climate Change: A Role for Emotions
• Modeling Wise Decision Making: A Z-Number Fuzzy Framework Inspired by Phronesis
• A tale of two processes: On Joseph Henrich’s the secret of our success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter
• Animal freedom and its importance in the lives of persons
• Psychological elitism
• Anthropology in Cognitive Science
• Honesty Requires Time (and Lack of Justifications)
• Ethically aligned Deep Learning: Unbiased Facial Aesthetic Prediction
• Do Large Language Models Understand Morality Across Cultures?
• Black Box Deployed -- Functional Criteria for Artificial Moral Agents in the LLM Era
• Preschoolers' retrospective and prospective judgements of immanent justice following distributive actions
• Being of two minds: Ultimatum offers under cognitive constraints
• Can Talk Reveal Nondeclarative Culture? Deliberation Strategies in Talking About Social Controversies1
• Wisdom in time: Advancing dynamic models of wisdom, intellectual humility, open-mindedness, and perspective-taking
• Inferential self-knowledge reimagined
• Structured Moral Reasoning in Language Models: A Value-Grounded Evaluation Framework
• Exploring Cultural Variations in Moral Judgments with Large Language Models

Related

• The disunity of moral judgment: Evidence and implications
• Thinking and feeling: Moral deliberation in a dual-process framework
• Dissolving the moral-conventional distinction
• Rational intuitions: How reason underlies deontological moral judgments
• Methods, Models, and the Evolution of Moral Psychology