Moral coherence processes: constructing culpability and consequences

Clark, Cory J.; Chen, Eric Evan; Ditto, Peter H.

doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.07.016

Cited by 43 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 75 publications

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“…Moral judgments also demonstrate coherence, in which lower-level features are shaped by our top-down understanding (Clark, Chen, & Ditto, 2015;DeScioli, Gilbert, & Kurzban, 2012;Gray et al, 2014). Specifically, once a moral judgment is formed, feedback processes cause coherence within all elements of a dyadic template, a process we have labeled dyadic completion (Gray, 2012;Gray et al, 2014).…”

Section: Coherencementioning

confidence: 99%

The Visual Guide to Morality: Vision as an Integrative Analogy for Moral Experience, Variability and Mechanism

Schein

Hester

2016

Social & Personality Psych

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Analogies help organize, communicate and reveal scientific phenomena. Vision may be the best analogy for understanding moral judgment. Although moral psychology has long noted similarities between seeing and judging, we systematically review the "morality is like vision" analogy through three elements: experience, variability and mechanism. Both vision and morality are experienced as automatic, durable and objective. However, despite feelings of objectivity, both vision and morality show substantial variability across biology, culture and situation. The paradox of objective experience and cultural subjectivity is best understood through constructionism, as both vision and morality involve the f lexible combination of more basic ingredients. Specifically, both vision and morality involve a mechanism that demonstrates Gestalt, combination and coherence. The "morality is like vision" analogy not only provides intuitive organization and compelling communication for moral psychology but also speaks to debates in the field, such as intuition versus reason, pluralism versus universalism and modularity versus constructionism."I know it when I see it." -Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart (on identifying pornography; Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964) Conversations about morality often reference vision, with laypersons and Supreme Court Justices alike "seeing" an action's wickedness or righteousness. Similarities between morality and vision were first noted by Hume (1777) -who likened moral judgment to aesthetic judgments -and have been echoed by more contemporary scholars, who suggest that moral judgment is more about "seeing-that" than "reasoning-why" (Haidt, 2001;Wilson, 1997). Despite the general acknowledgement that morality is often experienced like vision, we suggest that this analogy is underappreciated and under-explored. Vision captures not only the experience of making moral judgments but also the variability and mechanism of these judgments. We suggest that vision provides an intuitive way to summarize and communicate moral psychology research and also offers perspectives on current debates in the field.Analogies have long played a central role in the development of scientific theory and its dissemination (Glucksberg & Keysar, 1990). In psychology, prominent analogies include Wundt's comparison of psychology to chemistry (Blumenthal, 1975) and Freud's model of the unconscious as an iceberg. Within moral psychology, the mind has been analogized as a camera with easy automatic settings (i.e., emotion) and more difficult manual settings (i.e., cognition; Greene, Morelli, Lowenberg, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2008; Greene, 2014), and to an elephant (i.e., emotion) with a rider (i.e., cognition; Haidt, 2012) who erroneously believes herself to be in control.While these analogies are intuitive, they apply to any dual-process account of judgmentwhether moral or not -and capture only one aspect of moral judgment. We suggest that the

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Section: Coherencementioning

confidence: 99%

The Visual Guide to Morality: Vision as an Integrative Analogy for Moral Experience, Variability and Mechanism

Schein

Hester

2016

Social & Personality Psych

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“…On the other hand, people sometimes employ moral rules opportunistically -but in a manner allowing them to plausibly deny that they do so. For instance, the appropriate level of blame for a given moral violation can be adjusted up or down depending on whether you side with the violated or the violator (e.g., Eftedal & Thomsen, 2020), and the criteria for what is a moral violation in the first place could also be shifted, from one situation to the next (Clark, Chen, & Ditto, 2015). In other words, people generally endorse universal moral standards, but they systematically shift these standards to better serve their interests.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disentangling principled and opportunistic motives for reacting to injustice: A genetically-informed exploration of justice sensitivity

Kleppestø

Czajkowski

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Moral judgments may be driven by both principled and opportunistic motivations. Being morally principled is to consistently adhere to a single set of rules about morality and justice. Opportunistic morality rather involves selectively enforcing rules when they are beneficial to one's interests. These two kinds of motivations sometimes pull in the same direction, other times not. Prior studies on moral motivations have mostly focused on principled morality. Opportunistic morality, along with its phenotypic and genetic correlates, remains largely unexamined. Here, utilizing a sample from the Norwegian Twin Registry, consisting of 312 monozygotic-and 298 dizygotic twin pairs (N = 1220), we measure people's propensity to react to injustice as victims, observers, beneficiaries, and perpetrators of injustice, using the Justice Sensitivity scale. Our genetically informative sample allows a biometric modeling approach that provides increased stringency in inferring latent psychological traits. We find evidence for two substantially heritable traits explaining correlations between Justice Sensitivity facets, which we interpret as a principled justice sensitivity (h 2 = .45) leading to increased sensitivity to injustices of all categories, and an opportunistic justice sensitivity (h 2 = .69) associated with increased victim sensitivity and a decreased propensity to feel guilt from being a perpetrator. These heritable justice traits share a genetic substrate with broad strategies for cooperation (as measured by altruism and trust) and for selectively benefitting oneself over the adaptive interests of others (as measured by social dominance orientation and support for monopolizing territory and resources), and differ genetically and phenotypically from Big Five personality traits.

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“…Moreover, people wish to be and to appear cognitively consistent (Festinger 1957) and want their moral judgments to appear rational and justifiable (Clark et al 2017). These desires compel individuals to alter supposedly objective features of moral cases (such as how much control a moral actor had or whether a particular action caused harm) to appear morally coherent (Clark et al 2015; Schein & Gray 2018). Thus, the reasons people produce for their moral actions and assessments will be designed to signal virtue and justifiability rather than to describe the true underlying cognitive processes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Coherence-based reasoning is a domain-general mechanism that applies to moral reasoning as a special case. Its operation has been observed in a variety of complex decisions in which moral issues arise, such as legal cases (Holyoak & Simon 1999;Simon 2012), attitudes to war (Spellman et al 1993), and attributions of blame and responsibility (Clark et al 2015). A key property of coherence-based reasoning is that values, beliefs, and emotions may change to increase their coherence with the emerging decision (contrary to the usual assumption that these core elements are typically fixed over the course of a reasoning episode).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cautiously optimistic rationalism may not be cautious enough

Landy

2019

Behav Brain Sci

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May expresses optimism about the source, content, and consequences of moral judgments. However, even if we are optimistic about their source (i.e., reasoning), some pessimism is warranted about their content, and therefore their consequences. Good reasoners can attain moral knowledge, but evidence suggests that most people are not good reasoners, which implies that most people do not attain moral knowledge.

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Moral coherence processes: constructing culpability and consequences

Cited by 43 publications

References 75 publications

The Visual Guide to Morality: Vision as an Integrative Analogy for Moral Experience, Variability and Mechanism

The Visual Guide to Morality: Vision as an Integrative Analogy for Moral Experience, Variability and Mechanism

Disentangling principled and opportunistic motives for reacting to injustice: A genetically-informed exploration of justice sensitivity

Cautiously optimistic rationalism may not be cautious enough

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