Rationality, Political Orientation, and the Individualizing and Binding Moral Foundations

Abstract

Is moral cognition rational or intuitive? This paper tests two competing theories of moral cognition: rational (i.e., Piaget and Kohlberg) vs. intuitive (i.e., Shweder and Haidt) through an investigation of the relationships of each to Haidt’s pluralistic moral theory. This theory claims that, in addition to an individualizing foundation (i.e., justice and harm avoidance), morality also includes a binding foundation (i.e., group and authority deference). Three-hundred and seventy-one undergraduates from two colleges in Maine (USA) completed a survey comprised of measures of rational and intuitive cognition, political orientation, disgust sensitivity, and the individualizing and binding moral foundations. The study found that rational thinking was the strongest predictor for both of the individualizing (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity) and two of the three binding moral foundations (ingroup/loyalty and authority/respect). Political orientation and disgust sensitivity, found in past studies to be related to these two moral foundation subscales were related, but more weakly, relative to rationality. While Haidt claims that moral cognition is intuitive, we found a more complex picture: low rational and high intuitive scores are characteristic of the binding moral foundations but the opposite is true of the individualizing moral foundations.

Intuitive Ethics and Political Orientations: Testing Moral Foundations as a Theory of Political Ideology

“…Our findings are more compatible with both developmental perspectives and an emerging literature seeking to refine the social intuitionist challenge to traditional moral reasoning theories of moral psychology (Garvey and Ford ; Paxton and Greene ; Suhler and Churchland ). This acknowledges that social intuitionism is broadly correct in its claim that emotion plays a role in moral judgment, but suggests it is overly dismissive of the role of conscious deliberation.…”

Edgcumbe. 2019 - The relationship between cognitive reflection and morality judgments are mediated by thinking dispositions.

“…Conversely, Garvey and Ford (2014) found a positive correlation between performance on measures of analytic thinking and individualizing moral judgments (kindness, fairness, avoiding harm and supporting the rights of others). The results of both studies suggest that cognitive style and thinking dispositions have an influence on moral judgments, however, the exact nature of this relationship is unclear.…”

“…It is argued that highly analytic (and therefore reflective) individuals will score highly on the moral foundations that are concerned with individualising values, namely care and fairness. These moral values positively correlate with analytic thinking (Garvey & Ford, 2014). As such the consideration of vignettes for these moral values require the capacity for reflective thinking.…”

Rationalization and Reflection Differentially Modulate Prior Attitudes Toward the Purity Domain

“…Alternately, variation in susceptibility to reflection and rationalization across social groups may be rooted in a third variable. We hypothesized that this variable could be cognitive style (Frederick, 2005), for three related reasons: (a) Religious individuals typically adopt a more intuitive style of thought than do the non-religious (Shenhav, Rand & Greene, 2012), and (b) the reliance on intuition is independently linked to stronger opposition to impure acts (Garvey & Ford, 2014;Landy, 2016;Pennycook et al, 2014;Royzman et al, 2014), plausibly as (c) intuitive thinkers gravitate toward non-consequentialist approaches to moral evaluation (Cushman, 2013;Hannikainen et al, 2017;Piazza & Sousa, 2014).…”