BW: Is this what is referred to as the “dual-process” theory of moral judgment?
JG: Yes. The dual-process theory of moral judgment says that moral judgments are influenced by automatic emotional intuitions, on the one hand, and more detached, rule-based reasoning on the other.
If you’re like most people, when you hear about the footbridge dilemma you have both reactions competing in your head. You have detached, cost-benefit thinking telling you it makes sense to push, and you have an automatic emotional response telling you that this is wrong. You can see this in the brain imaging studies, but you can also see it in more low-tech experiments. If you put people under time pressure, for example, they are more likely to say it’s wrong to push the guy off the footbridge.
The dual-process theory says that people have mixed responses. But which response is right? That’s an even more complicated — and controversial — issue. In general, I think it’s good we are reluctant to push people off footbridges. It’s good to have a strong immediate negative emotional response to committing an act of violence. It’s certainly not something we would want to get rid of.
But, any emotional response has its limitations. These moral dilemmas create a situation in which a generally good gut reaction favors a worse outcome. It may be that, here, our gut reaction is wrong, but it’s wrong in a generally good way.
My preferred analogy for the dual-process theory is a digital SLR camera. You’ve got your automatic settings (“landscape,” “portrait”) and your manual mode. Which way of taking photos is better? Neither is absolutely better. The manual and automatic settings are good for different things. If you’re doing something standard, with pretty typical goals in mind, point-and-shoot settings are probably better. But if you’re trying to do something fancy, something the manufacturer of the camera didn’t envision, then you want to put the camera in manual mode.
Automatic settings are like our gut reactions, while manual mode is deliberate reasoning. I would say that for everyday moral problems, you want to trust your moral intuitions, which tell you things like, “don’t lie and don’t steal, and don’t do all of those generally bad things.” But when you’re facing peculiarly modern moral problems — for example, bioethical dilemmas like abortion and physician-assisted suicide — you should be skeptical of your gut reactions and rely more on reasoning.
BW: What you just said rings true of personal relationships as well.
JG: Yes, I think there’s something to that. Counseling psychologists say to express your disagreements with “I” statements. Instead of “you did this,” or “you shouldn’t have done that,” describe where your behavior and feelings are coming from. You lay your facts on the table and resist the temptation to draw conclusions for as long as possible.
I think this approach may also be effective when it comes to disagreements between groups. When we talk about “rights,” it is, I think, really just a way of insisting our gut reactions are correct. If we can take a step back and simply describe where we’re coming from, and what our concerns and values are, that might be more effective than making high-minded declarations about who has what rights.
BW: Have you ever found that men or women tend to do one more than the other?
JG: The tendencies that I’ve seen are general human tendencies, more apparent in some cultures than others, but not tied in any strong way to gender.
There are interesting differences between nations like the U.S. that are individualist and more collectivist ones like India. Research by Joe Henrich and colleagues indicates that many cultural differences stem from how people earn a living. In “Moral Tribes,” I discuss how in smaller societies where people hunt on their own, they don’t expect much from other people, and they don’t give much themselves. In small-scale societies where people need elaborate cooperation to survive — doing things like whale hunting, for example — people tend to be much more generous.
BW: What about moral decision-making and money?
JG: We’ve run many studies with financial stakes. In one set of experiments conducted with David Rand and Martin Nowak, we had people play the “public goods game.” Each participant gets $10. They can decide whether to keep their money, put all their money, or just a portion into a common pool. The money put in gets doubled and is equally divided among the four people. If you’re selfish, you simply keep your money and get a share of whatever the other people put in. That’s how you maximize your own payoff. But, if you care about the group as a whole, you put all your money into the pool.
In one of these experiments, we put people under time pressure. If your gut reaction is to be cooperative, then time pressure should make you give more, and having time to think, “Well, maybe I shouldn’t. I’ll lose my money,” will make you give less. By contrast, if your first instinct is to be selfish, you may initially think, “I want to keep my money,” but then after deliberating you might say, “Well, maybe I should put the money in the pool for the greater good.” A third possibility is that there are no competing impulses. People will just do what they wholeheartedly want to do. We don’t see this in all populations, but at least in some people, the more automatic reaction is to be cooperative, and further thinking makes people less likely to contribute.
BW: Would you say that those who make intuitively unappealing choices tend to have longer reaction times than those who make emotionally pleasant decisions?
JG: I think that, in general, people have prosocial emotions. This is the core of morality.
We have negative and positive social emotions. We can apply them to our own behavior and we can apply them to the behavior of other people. If I care about the person I’m interacting with — someone I love, a friend, or just a stranger towards whom I have good will, my gut tells me to be cooperative, and doing that is rewarding. Likewise, I’ll feel guilty if I’m not cooperative.
We apply this thinking to others as well. If [in the public goods game] you put your money in, you’ll have the gratitude of the others who benefit. If you don’t, then you’ll have their contempt and their scorn. These social emotions motivate us to be cooperative — to think about other people’s well-being instead of just our own. Fortunately, we live in a society in which being exceptionally selfish is also shortsighted. Here, anti-social people tend not to do as well in the long run. But there are places where if you’re cooperative and trusting, you’ll loose.
This article was first published in Brain World Magazine’s Fall 2014 issue.
