Psyc: It focuses on descriptives- facts and emprical evidence that indicate psychological processes that influences moral judgment and behaviour.

Phil: It is normative and prescriptive standards. Whst is the norm? What should people be doing?

If harm or injustice is committed against someone= SMR

If violation of authority, less serious, no harm, local in scope and less severe punishment= SCR

Not all harm violation evoke the SMR.

Non harm violations can still evoke SMR.

Example: American thought it was morally wrong to clean toilet bowl with American flag- No harm done but still gave a SMR. (Haidt et. al., 1993)

Authority dependent as well. If Pentagon says it was okay to abuse trainees, participants say it was okay to abuse trainees during training. (Kelley et. al., 2007)

Local Scope/Context of situation- Participants say it was okay to whip sailor 300 years ago but not accepted in Modern navies. (Kelley et. al., 20070

5 Domains that if violated cause people to make moral judgments?

Autonomy

Harm cause to people? - care violated?

Fairness/Reciprocity- Is act unfair to people?

Community

Authority/respect- Violation of obligation to respect and obey leader?

Ingroup loyalty- Is it an act that is disloyal to in group?

Divinity

Purity/Sanctity- Violation against God and body? Violation of body, spirit and soul? Not living the noble life?

WEIRD- Western Educated Industralised Rich Democratic

WEIRD cultures are less likely to moralise Community and Purity domain. They tend to see only harm/care; fairness and reciprocity as moral issues.

Non-Weird cultures- See all 5 domains as moral issues.

Left wing aligned people tend to see harm/fairness as moral issues.

Right winged people tend to focus on all 5 domains especially for  obedience to authority and purity.

Moral reasoning- Conscious mental process of transforming given information in order to make a moral judgment.

Moral Intuition- Unconscious and sudden moral judgment with negative or positive affective valence.

(gut feeling)

Moral reasoning is an intentional, effortful and controllable process.

VS

Moral Intuition is not intentional- no conscious awareness of searching, weighing evidence or inference (no conscious reasoning) before coming to a moral judgment

Moral dumbfounding- Even if break down all rational justifications, one still insists that acts is wrong. This is arguably because basing their judgment on intuition (gut feeling of digust) rather than rational reasong (moral reasoning)

This relates to Social Intuitionist Model which argues that moral judgement are made using intuitions (gut feelings) and only when ask to justify one's judgment, does reasoning/rationalising occur.

(Post hoc rationalisation)

CAD Triad Hypothesis (Rozin et al., 1999)

Community violations (group disloyalty and disobedience of authority)- contempt

Autonomy violation(causing harm)- Anger

Divinty (Purity and sanctity)- Disgust.

Digust amplifies condemnation.

Example the Fart spray/disgusting stimulus study- higher condemnation when exposed to the fart spray.

Congressman Arnold Paxton who take bribes while condemning corruption- Word 'take' cause to feel disgust and display higher levels of condemnation of Paxton's actions.

Deontological responses based on moral rules governed by gut reactions/emotions and intuition. (Eg.Do not kill innocent people)

Utilitarian responses based on greatest good for greatest number. It is governed by conscious and effortful reasoning.

The tug of war between deonotological and utilitarian responses results in the final moral judgment.

Track switch and footbridge

Key is direct contact.

If direct contact, had to push innocent person off footbridge onto tracks to save 5 other people- Because of direct contact- participants had a more deonotological response- more emotional and personal because directly causing man's death.

If no direct contact (i.e. using switch)- less emotional and impersonal- so can reason- had utilitarian response

See also Saturday night live(SN)- positive stimulus) and Doco.- Neutral stimulus experiment. People who were induced into a positive mood by the SNL had a utilitarian response when given footbridge dilemma. This is arguably because SNL reduce emotional negativity of the dilemma so participants could use conscious reasoning process- Utilitarian response

People with a higher need for cognition and higher working memory capacity tend to have more utilitarian responses.
(because tend to consciously reason more?)

Decision framing- For footbridge dilemma, if use the words 'save the other five innocent people'- changes the emotional affect of the decision made- more likely to have utilitarian response of pushing the man to save 5 other people.

Dual process model

Is it a personal or impersonal decision?

Personal- tend to have deontological

Impersonal- Utilitarian tendency

Individual differences- huge need for cognition and working memory capacity- Utilitarian tendency

Tug of war between Deontological and Utilitarian response results in final moral judgment and decision.

Deontological- emotional/gut feeling/intuition driven

Utilitarian-reasoning driven

Egoist

1. Helping make us feel better

Cialdini, 1973 tried to induce guilt in participants and then offer chance to help, those that felt guilty helped.

2. Negative state relief model- helping others to reduce our own aversive state of seeing other people suffer.

Empathy-Altruism

Personal distress- help to reduce personal distress of seeing somebody suffer

Empathetic concern- Help regardless of whether it reduce one's own personal distress/aversive state.

People motivated by empathetic concerns- will step in to replace Elaine during the electrocution punishment- regardless of whether easy or difficult to escape from the unpleasant electrocution.

( Batson et. al., 1981- Elaine the learner study)