Congitive Processes in Moral Judgement

Abstract

Psychological theories of morality tend to agree that automatic processes in the mind influence moral judgments, but they disagree about the role of effortful cognition. These theories also focus primarily on how people judge moral violations, such as causing harm to another person, and neglect how people judge the good moral actions of others. In this thesis, the results of 10 experiments examining these two key issues are presented. The first series of experiments showed that exhausting cognitive resources with a cognitively demanding task affects subsequent moral judgments. For example, after writing an essay without using words that contain the letters "a" or "n", participants judged causing harm to one person in order to save a larger group of people to be less morally permissible than participants who had written essays with no constraints. These experiments also showed for the first time that effortful cognitive processes are implicated in regulating emotions following moral judgments, as fatigued participants felt worse about their moral judgments, even in cases where they made judgments similar to non-fatigued participants. The first series of experiments suggest a nuanced role for effortful cognitive processes in moral judgment, not currently accounted for in contemporary theories of morality. The second series of experiments showed that good actions are esteemed more when they succeed when they fail. They also showed that imagining how the outcome could have turned out differently affects whether people judge that the action should have been taken: when participants imagined how the outcome would have been worse if the action were not taken, they agree that it should have been taken more strongly compared to when they imagine how the outcome could have been the same even if the action were not taken. The hindsight effect for good moral actions was extended to how inspiring participants judged those actions and was further extended to moral behaviour: participants were more likely to engage in spontaneously helping behaviour when they had thought about good actions turning out well compared to good actions that did not turn out well. The results from the second series of experiments are argued to support the idea that causal links between actions and outcomes are important for reasoning about good actions in the same way that they are important for reasoning about moral violations. The results from the ten experiments have important implications for understanding how people make moral judgments.