Hi All, Interesting article by JONATHAN HAIDT, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, where he does research on morality and emotion and how they vary across cultures. He recently summarized a new synthesis in moral psychology with four principles. Here is the first principle that supports the MOQ: (My comments in parens)
"1) Intuitive primacy but not dictatorship. This is the idea, going back to Wilhelm Wundt and channeled through Robert Zajonc and John Bargh, that the mind is driven by constant flashes of affect in response to everything we see and hear. (Note he says "everything we see or hear," in other words, the front edge of experience. Also note his use of the word "flashes," indicating the immediacy of affective judgments prior to conceptions.) "Our brains, like other animal brains, are constantly trying to fine tune and speed up the central decision of all action: approach or avoid. You can't understand the river of fMRI studies on neuroeconomics and decision making without embracing this principle. We have affectively-valenced intuitive reactions to almost everything, particularly to morally relevant stimuli such as gossip or the evening news. Reasoning by its very nature is slow, playing out in seconds. (Again, evaluation prior to thought, keyed to survival.) "Studies of everyday reasoning show that we usually use reason to search for evidence to support our initial judgment, which was made in milliseconds. (Note again the immediacy again of moral judgment.) But I do agree with Josh Greene that sometimes we can use controlled processes such as reasoning to override our initial intuitions. I just think this happens rarely, maybe in one or two percent of the hundreds of judgments we make each week. And I do agree with Marc Hauser that these moral intuitions require a lot of computation, which he is unpacking. "Hauser and I mostly disagree on a definitional question: whether this means that "cognition" precedes "emotion." I try never to contrast those terms, because it's all cognition. I think the crucial contrast is between two kinds of cognition: intuitions which are fast and usually affectively laden and reasoning which is slow, cool, and less motivating." (I like his lumping of intuition with reason under the general term, "cognition." In other words, cognition used as a synonym for experience.) I think you'll find the rest of the article of considerable interest. he has some revealing things to say about it conservatives. It is at: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt07/haidt07_index.html Regards, Platt Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
