Moral psychology is concerned with the empirical and conceptual study of moral judgement, motivation, and development in psychology and philosophy. By understanding moral psychology, we can understand human behavior and moral judgments. Additionally, it also helps us understand why moral conflicts occur between groups, especially those that are divided by politics, religion, and various ideologies. Let us look at a few interesting perspectives and the psychology behind morality.
Morality is an important topic to understand given the rise of the post-modernist era. Although we encounter moral dilemmas in our daily lives, on a bigger scale moral judgement can get complicated when it includes different groups and influences one’s life. In 1999, Joshua Green, a graduate student in philosophy at Princeton University collaborated with a leading neuroscientist Jonathan Cohen to understand the ongoing processes in the brain of people when they are making a moral judgement. They studied a moral dilemma called the ‘trolley dilemma’ in which two ethical principles seem to be against each other. Here, the only way to stop a runaway trolley from killing five individuals is by pushing one person off the bridge. Although philosophers disagree on harming even a single individual, utilitarianism is a philosophical school that advocates bringing the greatest total good even if it entails hurting a few people along the way. Other philosophers believe that we have an inherent duty to respect the rights of individuals and we must not harm people in the pursuit of other goals, even moral goals such as saving lives. This type of perspective is known as deontology (originated from the Greek word ‘deon’ meaning duty). Deontology seems to be influenced by emotional gut feelings whereas utilitarian judgments were more influenced by rationality. This brings us to the question of whether to trust reasoning or gut feeling (intuition) to make a moral judgment.
Johnathan Hadith’s social intuitionist model suggests that intuition comes first before reasoning which explains why moral and political arguments can be frustrating. Seen also in his book The Righteous Mind- Why good people are divided by politics and religion, he goes on to suggest an interesting analogy to explain human behavior and moral judgment, suggesting that we have two cognitions: the rider (controlled processes, including “reasoning-why”) and the elephant (automatic processes, including emotion, and intuition). But in this case, the rider is the slave of the elephant which means intuition comes first and ‘strategic reasoning’ comes second. Thus, if a person’s ‘elephant’ (emotion, feelings) is leaning toward a particular ideology, religion, or political party, their ‘rider’ (reasoning, rationality) would come up with innumerable reasons to justify their feeling. This explains why most debates can go on forever. Thus, the social intuitionist model, which starts with Hume’s model, explains why one needs to talk to a person’s ‘elephant’ first — develop trust/ commonality — and then present their opinion. If you ask a person to believe something that contradicts their intuitions, they will devote their efforts to finding a way to refute your argument or conclusion which they will most likely succeed in doing. An analogy of this concept was given by the american author, Mark Manson in his book The Book about Hope where he suggests that we have two brains (to better explain this concept to the mainstream public) i.e., the ‘thinking brain’ (rider) and the ‘feeling Brain’ (elephant). He used this analogy to pragmatically understand oneself and help others to build healthy habits. He states that we fail to develop good habits because self control is an illusion to the ‘thinking brain’(rider). Furthermore, he offers a counter-intuitive solution where he suggests that we need to develop more self acceptance (accepting one’s feelings i.e. the elephant) rather than self-control to develop healthy habits and reduce self-sabotaging behavior.
Morality is more than just conversations about harm and fairness. People are self-interested (selfish as per Darwin’s theory) but also care about how people are treated and how they participate in groups. Furthermore, morality seems to be partly self-promotional even though people sincerely want peace, equality, and cooperation to prevail within their communities. The birth of morality is more so because of a cultural evolution rather than genetic which means that it can change significantly with time. This is apparent in the modern era, with the advancement in technology, we are more conscious of the fate and lives of people in faraway lands, develop empathy for them, and desire peace, and cooperation to prevail in not only our own subgroups but also the collective human group.
By understanding moral psychology, we know why certain people are attached to one ideology and reject the other. Why are people so divided over certain debates such as the left vs the right, conservatism vs liberalism, individualism vs collectivism, rich vs poor, religion etc. By becoming more aware of the mechanism behind morality, we tend to also become less biased toward the ideologies and groups that we are familiar with because we understand that there are different interpretations of truth, making us more open-minded. This often enables us to empathize with opposing perspectives, broadening our horizons and thus having constructive discussions that are open to different world views.
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