The Emotional Dog Was a Glauconian Canine: The Reception of the Social Intuitionist Model, From the Neurocentric Paradigm to the Digital Paradigm

Abstract

In this article I analyze the academic reception of Jonathan Haidt’s seminal article The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. My thesis is that in the spheres of philosophy and psychology, this article was initially studied within the neurocentric paradigm, which dominated the field of scientific reflection in the fifteen years following its publication. This neurocentric reading established a specific interpretation of the text with several limitations. However, more recently a digital paradigm has emerged and come to prevail in academia, providing a new perspective from which to return to Haidt’s text. Indeed, this approach makes it possible to unravel elements of the famous article that in the neurocentric paradigm went unnoticed by researchers. Moreover, the digital paradigm manages to better integrate Haidt’s seminal article into his later work as a whole.