PSYCHOLOGY.
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Reasoning in moral conflicts
Fellow: Monica Bucciarelli Authors, abstract & keywords
Authors: Monica Bucciarelli, Margherita Daniele Abstract: Following the assumptions of the mental model theory and its account of moral judgements, we argue for a main role of reasoning in moral judgements, especially in dealing with moral conflicts. In four experiments, we invited adult participants to evaluate scenarios describing moral or immoral actions. Our results confirm the predictions deriving from our assumptions: Given a moral or immoral scenario, the manipulation of the propositions which refer to norms and values results in a scenario eliciting a moral conflict (Experiment 1); when invited to create conflict versions from no-conflict versions of moral or immoral scenarios, individuals manipulate the propositions in the scenario which describe norms and values rather than emotional factors (Experiment 2); the evaluation of conflict scenarios takes longer than the evaluation of noconflict scenarios (Experiment 3), and this is because conflict scenarios involve more deliberative reasoning (Experiment 4). We discuss our results in relation to competing theories of moral judgements. Keywords: Moral judgements, Moral conflicts, Moral reasoning, Intuitions, Deliberative reasoning. |
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Moral dilemmas in females: children are more utilitarian than adults
Fellow: Monica Bucciarelli Abstract & keywords
Abstract: Influential theories on moral judgments propose that they rely either on emotions or on innate moral principles. In contrast, the mental model theory postulates that moral judgments rely on reasoning, either intuition or deliberation. The theory allows for the possibility that intuitions lead to utilitarian judgments. This paper reports two experiments involving fifth-grade children, adolescents, and adults; the results revealed that children reason intuitively to resolve moral dilemmas in which action and inaction lead to different outcomes. In particular, the results showed female children to be more utilitarian than female adults in resolving classical moral dilemmas: they preferred an action that achieved a good outcome for a greater number of people. Within the mental model theory's framework there is no reason to expect that females and males differ in their ability to reason, but at the moment the results for females cannot be generalized to males who were not properly represented in the adults groups of the two experiments. The result revealing that (female) children are more utilitarian than (female) adults, which is hard to explain via many current theories, was predicted by the mental model theory. Keywords: moraldilemmas, utilitarianism, intuitions, deliberative reasoning, mentalmodels. |
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Deontics: Meaning, Reasoning, and Emotions
Fellow: Monica Bucciarelli authors, abstract & keywords
Authors: Monica Bucciarelli, Philippe N. Johnson-Laird Abstract: This article reports psychological experiments that corroborate the following account. Deontic reasoning relies on mental models of possibilities in a deontic context. Because these models represent what is permissible rather than impermissible, individuals commit predictable fallacies in reasoning from certain sorts of deontic premise. Contrary to a tradition going back to Hume, humans reason in order to make moral judgments. Their inferences can be rapid, intuitive, and based on a single model, but they can also be slow, deliberative, and based on alternative models, as when they resolve a dilemma. Humans have an innate system of basic emotions, which is inherited from our evolutionary ancestors. These emotions are elicited by primitive cognitions that are too crude to distinguish between causes and enabling conditions. The distinction calls for a deliberative inference so subtle that some learned jurists have not realized that the two concepts differ in meaning. Unlike factual propositions, moral propositions have a striking relation with emotions. People love those moral propositions that they believe, and hate those that they disbelieve. The effect can be elicited from the mere substitution of the word ought for is in an assertion. In sum, a comprehensive theory of deontics must account for meaning, reasoning, and emotion. Keywords: Beliefs, Deontics, Emotions, Mental Models, Moral Judgments |
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Emotions and beliefs about morality can change one another
Fellow: Monica Bucciarelli Authors, abstract & Keywords
Authors: Monica Bucciarelli, Philippe N. Johnson-Laird Abstract: A dual-process theory postulates that belief and emotions about moral assertions can affect one another. The present study corroborated this prediction. Experiments 1, 2 and 3 showed that the pleasantness of a moral assertion – from loathing it to loving it – correlated with how strongly individuals believed it, i.e., its subjective probability. But, despite repeated testing, this relation did not occur for factual assertions. To create the correlation, it sufficed to change factual assertions, such as, “Advanced countries are democracies,” into moral assertions, “Advanced countries should be democracies”. Two further experiments corroborated the two-way causal relations for moral assertions. Experiment 4 showed that recall of pleasant memories about moral assertions increased their believability, and that the recall of unpleasant memories had the opposite effect. Experiment 5 showed that the creation of reasons to believe moral assertions increased the pleasantness of the emotions they evoked, and that the creation of reasons to disbelieve moral assertions had the opposite effect. Hence, emotions can change beliefs about moral assertions; and reasons can change emotions about moral assertions. We discuss the implications of these results for alternative theories of morality. Keywords: Beliefs, Deontics, Emotions, Moral assertions, Reasons, Subjective probabilities. |
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Beliefs and emotions about social conventions
Fellow: Monica Bucciarelli author, abstract & keywords
Authors: Monica Bucciarelli, Philippe N. Johnson-Laird Abstract: Deontic assertions concern what people should and shouldn't do. One sort concern moral principles, such as: People should care for the environment; and another sort concern social conventions, such as: People should knock before entering an office. The present research examined such deontic assertions and their corresponding factual assertions, such as: People care for the environment and People knock before entering an office. Experiment 1 showed a correlation between emotions and beliefs for both sorts of deontic assertion, but not for their factual counterparts in which the word “should” had been deleted (as in the preceding examples). Experiment 2 showed that changing the pleasantness of participants' emotions about social conventions changed their strength of belief in them. Experiment 3 showed conversely that changing the participants' strength of belief in social conventions changed the pleasantness of their emotions about them. These results corroborate the mental model theory of deontic assertions, which postulates that emotions and beliefs about deontics depend on parallel systems that interact with one another. Keywords: Beliefs, Deontics, Emotions, Reasons, Morality, Social conventions. |
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The role of psychology in behavioral economics: The case of social preferences
Fellow: Chiara Lisciandra Abstract
Abstract: Behavioral economics is a field of study that is often thought of as interdisciplinary, insofar as it uses psychological insights to inform economic models. Yet the level of conceptual and methodological exchange between the two disciplines is disputed in the literature. On the one hand, behavioral economic models are often presented as psychologically informed models of individual decision-making (Camerer & Loewenstein, 2003). On the other hand, these models have often been criticized for being merely more elaborated “as if” economic models (Berg & Gigerenzer, 2010). The aim of this paper is to contribute to this debate by looking at a central topic in behavioral economics: the case of social preferences. Have findings or research methods been exchanged between psychology and economics in this research area? Have scientists with different backgrounds “travelled” across domains, thus transferring their expertise from one discipline to another? By addressing these and related questions, this paper will assess the level of knowledge transfer between psychology and economics in the study of social preferences. |
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Self-conscious roots of human normativity
Fellow: Philippe Rochat Abstract & keywords
Abstract: What are the roots of human normativity and when do children begin to behave according to standards and norms? Empirical observations demonstrate that we are born with built-in (implicit and automatic) orientation toward what is predictable and of the same - henceforth what deviates from it -, what is the norm or the standard in the generic sense of the word. However, what develop in humans is self-consciousness, transforming norms from “should” to “ought” and making human normativity profoundly different from any other forms expressed in infancy, other animals, or any smart machines. Self-consciousness is the ability to objectify oneself through the evaluative eyes of others. It sets us apart as a species and is at the roots of human normativity. A developmental blueprint capturing the progressive co-emergence of self-consciousness and normativity in the human child is proposed. Keywords: Human normativity, Self-consciousness, Infancy, Child development |
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Eighteen-Month-Old Infants Correct Non-Conforming Actions by Others
Fellow: Marco F. H. Schmidt Authors & abstract
Auhors: Marco F. H. Schmidt, Hannes Rakoczy, Michael Tomasello Abstract: At around their third birthday, children begin to enforce social norms on others impersonally, often using generic normative language, but little is known about the developmental building blocks of this abstract norm understanding. Here, we investigate whether eventoddlers show signs of enforcing on others interpersonally how “we” do things. In an initial dyad, 18-month-old infants learnt a simple game-like action from an adult. In two experiments, the adult either engaged infants in a normative interactive activity (stressing that this is the way “we” do it) or, as a non-normative control, marked the same action asidiosyncratic, based on individual preference. In a test dyad, infants had the opportunity to spontaneously intervene when a puppet partner performed an alternative action. Infants intervened, corrected, and directed the puppet more in the normative than in the non-normative conditions. These findings suggest that, during the second year of life, infants develop second-personal normative expectations about their partner’s behavior (“You should do X!”) in social interactions, thus making an important step toward understanding the normative structure of human cultural activities. These simple normative expectations will later be scaled up to group-minded and abstract social norms. |
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Young Children See a Single Action and Infer a Social Norm: Promiscuous Normativity in 3-Year-Olds
Fellow: Marco F. H. Schmidt authors, abstract & keywords
Authors: Marco F. H. Schmidt, Lucas P. Butler, Julia Heinz, and Michael Tomasello Abstract: Human social life depends heavily on social norms that prescribe and proscribe specific actions. Typically, young children learn social norms from adult instruction. In the work reported here, we showed that this is not the whole story: Three-year-old children are promiscuous normativists. In other words, they spontaneously inferred the presence of social norms even when an adult had done nothing to indicate such a norm in either language or behavior. And children of this age even went so far as to enforce these self-inferred norms when third parties “broke” them. These results suggest that children do not just passively acquire social norms from adult behavior and instruction; rather, they have a natural and proactive tendency to go from “is” to “ought.” That is, children go from observed actions to prescribed actions and do not perceive them simply as guidelines for their own behavior but rather as objective normative rules applying to everyone equally. Keywords: children, cognitive development, cooperation, social cognition, social norms, open materials. |
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A pluralistic framework for the psychology of norms
Fellows: Evan Westra, Kristin Andrews Abstract & Keywords
Social norms are commonly understood as rules that dictate which behaviors are appropriate, permissible, or obligatory in different situations for members of a given community. Many researchers have sought to explain the ubiquity of social norms in human life in terms of the psychological mechanisms underlying their acquisition, conformity, and enforcement. Existing theories of the psychology of social norms appeal to a variety of constructs, from prediction-error minimization, to reinforcement learning, to shared intentionality, to domain-specific adaptations for norm acquisition. In this paper, we propose a novel methodological and conceptual framework for the cognitive science of social norms that we call normative pluralism. We begin with an analysis of the (sometimes mixed) explanatory aims of the cognitive science of social norms. From this analysis, we derive a recommendation for a reformed conception of its explanandum: a minimally psychological construct that we call normative regularities. Our central empirical proposal is that the psychological underpinnings of social norms are most likely realized by a heterogeneous set of cognitive, motivational, and ecological mechanisms that vary between norms and between individuals, rather than by a single type of process or distinctive norm system. This pluralistic approach, we suggest, offers a methodologically sound point of departure for a fruitful and rigorous science of social norms. |