Cognitive Biases and Moral Foundations: Understanding Human Judgment
Foundations of Moral Psychology
Theories of Moral Origin
Three primary perspectives on the source of morality:
- Nativism: Morality stems from inborn traits (Nature).
- Empiricism: Morality is derived from experience (starting as blank slates) (Nurture).
- Rationalism: Morality is self-constructed through logical reasoning.
Defining Rationalism (Heidt)
A Rationalist is anyone who believes logical reasoning is the best way to obtain knowledge and insight about the world.
The Heinz Dilemma
A classic ethical problem used to study moral reasoning, involving a husband (Heinz) who must steal medicine to save his dying wife.
Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development
- Preconventional Stage: Focus on avoiding punishment and self-interest.
- Conventional Stage (Adolescence): Grappling with conflicting social roles and expectations (e.g., duties to society versus personal relationships).
- Postconventional Stage (Adulthood): Based on universal ethical principles and the principle of justice (a more sophisticated stage).
Moral Rules vs. Social Conventions (Turiel)
Research (e.g., Turiel’s studies on school uniforms versus violence) shows that children understand the fundamental difference between universal Moral Rules and context-dependent Social Conventions.
Purity, Pollution, and Moralizing Non-Harmful Acts
- This foundation involves moralizing non-harmful things, such as certain rules regarding food, work, and sex.
- WEIRD Populations: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic populations tend to emphasize the harm/care foundation significantly more than purity, authority, or loyalty.
Key Cognitive and Political Biases
Ingroup-Outgroup Bias
The tendency to hold more positive perceptions of members within one’s own group (ingroup) and more negative perceptions of members outside that group (outgroup).
Hypocrisy and Double Standards
There are two main hypotheses regarding why people appear hypocritical:
- People are knowingly holding double standards.
- People are actually perceiving the world differently based on their initial beliefs, leading to an unwitting double standard.
Specific Cognitive Biases
Partisan Bias
A general tendency for people to think or act in ways that unwittingly favor their own political group or cast their ideologically based beliefs in a favorable light. This is a form of ingroup bias applied specifically to political identities (e.g., Democrat vs. Republican, Left vs. Right).
- People interpret facts, news, and events through a party loyalty lens.
- A policy may be judged as good or bad not based on its content, but based on which party proposed it.
Myside Bias
The tendency to evaluate arguments in a way that favors your preexisting beliefs, regardless of the evidence.
- Unlike partisan bias (which is about teams), myside bias is about protecting your own personal beliefs, even if no group is involved.
- Individuals often hold their own side to low standards of evidence while demanding extreme proof from the opposition.
Confirmation Bias
The tendency to seek, interpret, and remember information that confirms your existing beliefs, while ignoring or downplaying contradictory evidence.
Methods and Experimental Evidence
True Experiments
A true experiment involves manipulating a variable through random assignment to establish causality.
While researchers cannot easily manipulate participants’ core political views, they can manipulate the information shown to them.
Experimental Example: Political Cues and Attraction
In one study, when participants were shown dating profiles without political views, they rated the attractiveness of others similarly. However, after political views were revealed, participants showed less attraction toward those with differing political views.
Conclusion: Political cues in dating profiles caused partisan participants to respond differently, rating profiles as more or less attractive based on political similarity or difference.
Cultural Cognition and Social Identity
Cultural Cognition
The way we perceive things and make judgments is heavily influenced by the culture or group to which we belong. This challenges the rationalist idea that people can make the “right” decision using only objective information.
Intelligence, Identity, and Reasoning
Research suggests that for objective, non-politicized problems, numeracy skills lead to the correct answer, indicating that people use their intelligence over group identity.
However, when dealing with politicized issues (e.g., gun violence), participants’ intelligence increased the likelihood of a correct answer only when the data supported their initial beliefs. When the data contradicted their beliefs, intelligence did not predict greater accuracy.
Note: Curiosity has been shown to help resolve this conflict, leading people toward the correct answer regardless of initial beliefs.
Mitigating Bias: Intellectual Humility
Definition of Intellectual Humility
Intellectual humility involves recognizing that a particular personal belief may be fallible, accompanied by an appropriate attentiveness to limitations in the evidentiary basis of that belief and to one’s own limitations in obtaining and evaluating relevant information.
- It means recognizing that one’s memory, understanding, and opinions may be wrong and open to change.
- Individuals who are more humble and possess greater intellectual humility suffer less from myside bias and partisan bias.
Schema and Belief-Consistent Processing
Belief-Consistent Information Processing
We start with a set of beliefs called a schema, which is a mental representation of what we think is true in the world.
When given conflicting information, people tend to engage in belief-consistent information processing. This means we are more likely to reject challenging information and deliberately seek information that confirms what we already believe.