Dual-process Theory Of Moral Judgment Research Articles

Effect of subclinical depression on moral judgment dilemmas: a process dissociation approach

Dual-process theory of moral judgment indicates that moral decision-making is guided by emotional or cognitive processing, competing with each other. While emotional processing overwhelms cognitive processing, individuals preferentially make deontological judgments. Further, while cognitive processing dominates emotional processing, individuals preferentially make utilitarian judgments. This theory predicts that individuals with subclinical depression associated with emotion regulation deficits may deliver more utilitarian judgments. Experiment 1 indicated that higher depressive symptoms predicted utilitarian judgment. However, previous studies have not determined why individuals with subclinical depression make a utilitarian judgment. Thus, Experiment 2 employed the process-dissociation approach, which can separately measure the relative strength of individual deontological and utilitarian inclinations. Deontological inclination (parameter D) was associated with emotional processing, whereas utilitarian inclination (parameter U) was related to cognitive processing. In Experiment 2, the two groups (higher depressive symptoms/minimal depressive symptoms) completed the moral task of the process-dissociation approach to investigate the underlying mechanism. There was a significant interaction effect between the group and parameter of process dissociation. Parameter D in the higher depressive symptoms group was weaker than in the minimal depressive symptoms group. Individuals with subclinical depression bias their utilitarian judgments by making fewer deontological moral judgments.

Brains, trains, and ethical claims: Reassessing the normative implications of moral dilemma research

ABSTRACT Joshua Greene has argued that the empirical findings of cognitive science have implications for ethics. In particular, he has argued (1) that people’s deontological judgments in response to trolley problems are strongly influenced by at least one morally irrelevant factor, personal force, and are therefore at least somewhat unreliable, and (2) that we ought to trust our consequentialist judgments more than our deontological judgments when making decisions about unfamiliar moral problems. While many cognitive scientists have rejected Greene’s dual-process theory of moral judgment on empirical grounds, philosophers have mostly taken issue with his normative assertions. For the most part, these two discussions have occurred separately. The current analysis aims to remedy this situation by philosophically analyzing the implications of moral dilemma research using the CNI model of moral decision-making – a formalized, mathematical model that decomposes three distinct aspects of moral-dilemma judgments. In particular, we show how research guided by the CNI model reveals significant conceptual, empirical, and theoretical problems with Greene’s dual-process theory, thereby questioning the foundations of his normative conclusions.

The application of multinomial models in moral judgment research

Morality has been a hot topic in the psychological literature, and moral judgment, appraising process that enables individuals to differentiate good from evil and right from wrong according to moral principles, is a critical component of human morality. This review aims to introduce the application of multinomial models in moral judgment research. Several theories have been proposed to explain how moral judgment is made. Dual-process theory of moral judgment proposed that moral judgment is shaped by two moral principles (i.e., utilitarianism and deontology). The principle of utilitarianism emphasizes that the morality of an action is determined by its consequence whereas the principle of deontology states that the morality of an action depends on its consistency with moral norms. To measure people’s moral inclinations in moral judgment, researchers developed moral dilemma paradigm that pit the utilitarian principle against the deontological principle. Based on this moral dilemma paradigm, moral psychologists have revealed gender difference (i.e., men are more utilitarian) and individual differences (e.g., psychopathy individuals are more utilitarian) in moral judgment. However, the traditional moral dilemma paradigms, which did not distinguish the consequences and moral norms in moral dilemmas, can’t precisely measure an individual’s inclinations to utilitarian and deontological nor preclude potential confounders (e.g., people’s preference to act or not in moral dilemmas). To overcome these shortcomings of the traditional moral dilemma paradigms, researchers have recently developed a multinomial model (i.e., the CNI model) that allows researchers to quantify sensitivity to consequences ( C ), sensitivity to moral norms ( N ), and a general preference for inaction versus action irrespective of consequences and norms ( I ) in responses to moral dilemmas. This review aims to discuss the disadvantages of traditional moral dilemma paradigm and the advantages of the CNI model, and to summarize how CNI model-based findings contribute to our understanding of moral judgment. Specifically, recent work based on the CNI model of moral judgment has elaborated on how cognitive load and incidental happiness affect specific psychological processes of moral judgment, which challenges the dual-process theory of moral judgment. Moreover, the cognitive mechanisms underlying the individual differences (i.e., gender and psychopathy) in moral judgment have been clarified. We also point out future directions for moral judgment research. First, due to a small number of observation data in the model (i.e., data from only 24 moral dilemmas), the CNI model may not fit the data well at an individual-level and thus not be suitable for correlational designs. Future studies need to develop a larger set of moral dilemmas to increase the observations for the model and allow model fitting at an individual level. Second, it has been recognized that Chinese people showed stronger deontological inclination than British people, thus it would be interesting to uncover the underlying neurocognitive mechanism of culture differences in moral judgment. Third, several neuromodulators, such as oxytocin and serotonin, have been shown to affect moral judgment, future research is thus needed to clarify the influence of neuromodulators on specific cognitive processes underlying moral preferences. In conclusion, this review highlights the advantages of multinomial modeling and summarizes how the CNI model-based findings deepen our understanding of moral judgment, and the individual differences (i.e., gender and psychopathy) in moral judgment, which yields insights into human morality.

Is morality hardwired into the brain? The recent advances and prospects of cognitive neural mechanism researches of morality

“Is morality hardwired into the brain” is a major problem that have long puzzled philosophers. Since Piaget and Kohlberg, morality gradually comes into the view of psychological research. In the 21st century, morality has become a new growing point of cognitive neuroscience research and moral cognitive neuroscience has emerged. Current moral cognitive neuroscience studies give a preliminary answer to the above puzzle. These studies focus on three aspects: the brain mechanism of moral judgment, the brain mechanism of moral emotion and the integrative brain mechanism models of morality. Moral judgement is a process of individuals’ moral evaluation of their own or others’ behavior according moral principles which is the interaction of cognition and emotion. Therefore, the brain regions of moral judgment not only consist of some brain areas related to cognitive process which include DLPFC, ATL and TPJ, but also involve some brain areas related to emotional process which include VMPFC, OFC, ACC and amygdala. Moral emotions are some complex emotions which arise from moral evaluation of one’s own of others’ behavior and affect the occurrence and change of moral behavior, such as empathy, guilt and admiration, etc. Many studies show that the main brain areas of cognitive empathy are VMPFC and TPJ, and the core brain areas of emotional empathy include ACC, AI and mirror-neuron system. On the one hand, positive empathy has some same brain mechanism with negative empathy, for instance, both of them can activate left AI. On the other hand, there are certain cognitive neuroscience difference between positive empathy and negative empathy. Positive empathy activates the brain reward system, but negative empathy activate the right AI. The brain areas of guilt are mainly in VMPFC, precuneus, TP, ACC and insula. Admiration for virtue can activate posterior PMC, ACC, anterior insula, hypothalamus and folia cerebelli. The main integrative brain mechanism models of morality are dual-process theory of moral judgment, Event-Feature-Emotion Complexes, Triune Brain Theory, and brain mechanism models of cooperation and altruistic punishment. In the point view of dual-process theory of moral judgment, moral judgement which is related to explicit cognitive reasoning process and implicit emotional motivation process needs comprehensive function of VMPFC, PCC, precuneus, amygdala, ACC, inferior parietal cortex and DLPFC. The main components of Event-Feature-Emotion Complexes are structured event knowledge, social perception and functional features, and central motive states. According to Triune Brain Theory, the neural bases of safety ethic, engagement ethic and imagination ethic are reptilian brain, paleomammalian brain and eomammalian brain respectively. Cooperative decision-making is based on the interaction of reward system, cognitive control system and social cognition system. The brain mechanism model of altruistic punishment includes three system: reward, cognition and emotional regulation. Future researches should integrate the existing research results, improve ecological validity gradually, use many methods synthetically, and rich and expand research perspectives.

Emotions associated with counterfactual comparisons drive decision-making in Footbridge-type moral dilemmas

Based on the dual-process theory of moral judgment, it has been suggested that in Footbridge-type dilemmas the anticipation of the emotional consequences of causing intentional harm might contribute to the decision of rejecting utilitarian resolutions. However, no empirical data have been reported on the emotions felt by participants after their decisions, and the role played by emotions in Trolley-type dilemmas remains to be determined. The present study investigated the specific emotions engaged both after decision choices and after the generation of the counterfactual scenario in Trolley- and Footbridge-type dilemmas. The results support the idea that in Footbridge-type dilemmas decision-making is driven by the attempt to minimize the aversive emotional state evoked by the decision outcome. A greater increase in emotional intensity was found overall for Footbridge-type than Trolley-type dilemmas after the counterfactual generation following typical (non-utilitarian) choices, with guilt, regret, and shame being the emotions that increased most. Critically, in Footbridge-type dilemmas only, typical choices were predicted by the increase in regret intensity experienced after counterfactual generation.

Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality: Why Cognitive (Neuro)Science Matters for Ethics

Abstract In this article I explain why cognitive science (including some neuroscience) matters for normative ethics. First, I describe the dual-process theory of moral judgment and briefly summarize the evidence supporting it. Next I describe related experimental research examining influences on intuitive moral judgment. I then describe two ways in which research along these lines can have implications for ethics. I argue that a deeper understanding of moral psychology favors certain forms of consequentialism over other classes of normative moral theory. I close with some brief remarks concerning the bright future of ethics as an interdisciplinary enterprise.

United we stand, divided we fall: Cognition, emotion, and the moral link between them.

Contrary to Greene's dual-process theory of moral judgment (Greene 2013), this commentary suggests that the network view of the brain proposed by Pessoa, in which emotion and cognition may be used as labels in the context of certain behaviors, but will not map clearly into compartmentalized pieces of the brain, could represent a better explanation of the rationale behind people's moral behavior.

Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality: Why Cognitive (Neuro)Science Matters for Ethics

In this article I explain why cognitive science (including some neuroscience) matters for normative ethics. First, I describe the dual-process theory of moral judgment and briefly summarize the evidence supporting it. Next I describe related experimental research examining influences on intuitive moral judgment. I then describe two ways in which research along these lines can have implications for ethics. I argue that a deeper understanding of moral psychology favors certain forms of consequentialism over other classes of normative moral theory. I close with some brief remarks concerning the bright future of ethics as an interdisciplinary enterprise.

The Role of Mental States and Causality in Moral Judgment: Examination on Dual-process Theory of Moral Judgment

Moral judgment has been explored for many years.Cognitive development theorists have argued that moral judgment in adults mainly relied on intention,but attribution theorists have argued that causality played a key role in moral judgment.However,recent researchers put forward a dual-process theory of moral judgment,which distinguishes two processes of moral judgment:one which begins with harmful consequences and seeks a causally responsible agent,and the other which begins with an action and analyzes the mental states responsible for that action.The present study attempted to examine the rationality of this theory and to investigate the role of mental states and causality for younger children,older children and adults,and to explore children's developmental process of moral judgment.In this study,120 undergraduates,120 children aged 10-11 and 120 adolescent aged 13-15 were tested for a moral sense of judgment.A 2(desire:negative desire vs.neutral desire) ×2(belief:negative belief vs.neutral belief) × 3(causality:harm caused by the agents' action,vs.no harm vs.harm caused by accidents) experimental design was conducted to test the roles of desire,belief and causality in moral judgment.Participants were presented with a series of stories,and then would answer two types of questions about the extent of the agents' behavior badness and moral responsibility on a 7-point scale.Our findings were consistent with that of Cushman(2008),which showed that the roles of desire,belief,and causality were different under the two types of moral judgment questions.The results revealed that for 10-11 and 13～15 year-old children,there were significant main effects of desire and belief on the judgment of badness,which indicated that the judgment of badness was mainly based on the mental states of the agents.There were significant main effects of desire,belief,and causality on the judgment of moral responsibility for 10-11 year-olds,but no significant interaction effects were found.There were significant main effects of desire and causality,and significant interaction effects between desire and causality for 13-15 year-olds.The results showed that younger children paid more attention to the consequences and the mental states of the agents,but they cannot jointly use causal connection between behavior and consequence in the judgment of moral responsibility.In addition,younger and older participants did not use abstract mental states(e.g.belief) of the agents in the judgment of moral responsibility.The present study provided support for the dual-process theory of moral judgment.The results demonstrated that moral judgment of badness in adults mainly relied on mental states(e.g.desire,belief,and intention) and judgment of moral responsibility mainly jointly relied on the mental states of agents and causal analysis.There is a developmental process in jointly using information of mental states and causality for younger and older children in the judgments of moral responsibility.This study supported the dual-process theory of moral judgments,and provided additional data about development of moral judgment in children and adolescents.

Morally irrelevant factors: What's left of the dual process-model of moral cognition?

Current developments in empirical moral psychology have spawned a new perspective on the traditional metaethical question of whether moral judgment is based on reason or emotion. Psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists such as Joshua Greene argue that there is empirical evidence that emotion is essential for one particularly important subclass of moral judgments: so-called “deontological judgments.” In this paper, I scrutinize this claim and argue that neither the empirical evidence for Greene's dual process-theory of moral judgment nor the normative conclusions it is supposed to yield can be maintained. More specifically, I argue that the evidence from neuroimaging relies on a problematic reverse inference, that the behavioral data are flawed, and that the findings from focal brain damage do not support the model. From a normative point of view, Greene fails to show that we ought to discount the intuitions that give rise to deontological judgments because they respond to morally irrelevant factors: firstly, I show that they do not pick up on the factors Greene deems to be morally irrelevant in the first place, and secondly, I argue that there generally is reason to trust our deontological intuitions.

You See, the Ends Don’t Justify the Means

We conducted three experiments indicating that characteristically deontological judgments—here, disapproving of sacrificing one person for the greater good of others—are preferentially supported by visual imagery. Experiment 1 used two matched working memory tasks—one visual, one verbal—to identify individuals with relatively visual cognitive styles and individuals with relatively verbal cognitive styles. Individuals with more visual cognitive styles made more deontological judgments. Experiment 2 showed that visual interference, relative to verbal interference and no interference, decreases deontological judgment. Experiment 3 indicated that these effects are due to people’s tendency to visualize the harmful means (sacrificing one person) more than the beneficial end (saving others). These results suggest a specific role for visual imagery in moral judgment: When people consider sacrificing someone as a means to an end, visual imagery preferentially supports the judgment that the ends do not justify the means. These results suggest an integration of the dual-process theory of moral judgment with construal-level theory.

Harming Kin to Save Strangers: Further Evidence for Abnormally Utilitarian Moral Judgments after Ventromedial Prefrontal Damage

The ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) has been implicated as a critical neural substrate mediating the influence of emotion on moral reasoning. It has been shown that the vmPFC is especially important for making moral judgments about "high-conflict" moral dilemmas involving direct personal actions, that is, scenarios that pit compelling utilitarian considerations of aggregate welfare against the highly emotionally aversive act of directly causing harm to others [Koenigs, M., Young, L., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., Cushman, F., Hauser, M., et al. Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgments. Nature, 446, 908-911, 2007]. The current study was designed to elucidate further the role of the vmPFC in high-conflict moral judgments, including those that involve indirect personal actions, such as indirectly causing harm to one's kin to save a group of strangers. We found that patients with vmPFC lesions were more likely than brain-damaged and healthy comparison participants to endorse utilitarian outcomes on high-conflict dilemmas regardless of whether the dilemmas (1) entailed direct versus indirect personal harms and (2) were presented from the Self versus Other perspective. In addition, all groups were more likely to endorse utilitarian outcomes in the Other perspective as compared with the Self perspective. These results provide important extensions of previous work, and the findings align with the proposal that the vmPFC is critical for reasoning about moral dilemmas in which anticipating the social-emotional consequences of an action (e.g., guilt or remorse) is crucial for normal moral judgments [Greene, J. D. Why are VMPFC patients more utilitarian?: A dual-process theory of moral judgment explains. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 322-323, 2007; Koenigs, M., Young, L., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., Cushman, F., Hauser, M., et al. Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgments. Nature, 446, 908-911, 2007].

Dual-process morality and the personal/impersonal distinction: A reply to McGuire, Langdon, Coltheart, and Mackenzie

A substantial body of research supports a dual-process theory of moral judgment, according to which characteristically deontological judgments are driven by automatic emotional responses, while characteristically utilitarian judgments are driven by controlled cognitive processes. This theory was initially supported by neuroimaging and reaction time (RT) data. McGuire et al. have reanalyzed these initial RT data and claim that, in light of their findings, the dual-process theory of moral judgment and the personal/impersonal distinction now lack support. While McGuire and colleagues have convincingly overturned Greene et al.’s interpretation of their original RT data, their claim that the dual-process theory now lacks support overstates the implications of their findings. McGuire and colleagues ignore the results of several more recent behavioral studies, including the study that bears most directly on their critique. They dismiss without adequate justification the results of a more recent neuroimaging study, three more recent patient studies, and an emotion–induction study. Their broader critique is based largely on their conflation of the dual-process theory with the personal/impersonal distinction, which are independent.