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      Priming intuition decreases endorsement of instrumental harm but not impartial beneficence

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          Abstract

          Understanding the cognitive underpinnings of moral judgment is one of most pressing problems in psychological science. Classic studies suggest that intuition decreases utilitarian (expected welfare maximizing) judgments in sacrificial moral dilemmas, in which one has to decide whether to instrumentally harm (IH) one person to save a greater number of people. However, recent work suggests that such dilemmas are not fit for purpose as they fail to capture the defining core of utilitarianism, that is, commitment to impartial beneficence (IB). Accordingly, a new, two-dimensional model of utilitarian judgment has been proposed that distinguishes IH and IB. The role of intuition on this new model has not been studied. Does intuition disfavor utilitarian choices only along the dimension of instrumental harm or does it also do so along the dimension of impartial beneficence? To answer this question, we conducted three studies (total N = 970, two preregistered) using conceptual priming of intuition versus deliberation on moral judgments. Our evidence converges on an interaction effect, with intuition decreasing utilitarian judgments in IH - as suggested by previous work - but failing to do so in IB. These findings provide additional support to the recently proposed two-dimensional model of utilitarian moral judgment among ordinary people, and open up new avenues for future research.

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          Most cited references28

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          Integration of the cognitive and the psychodynamic unconscious.

          M Epstein (1994)
          Cognitive-experiential self-theory integrates the cognitive and the psychodynamic unconscious by assuming the existence of two parallel, interacting modes of information processing: a rational system and an emotionally driven experiential system. Support for the theory is provided by the convergence of a wide variety of theoretical positions on two similar processing modes; by real-life phenomena--such as conflicts between the heart and the head; the appeal of concrete, imagistic, and narrative representations; superstitious thinking; and the ubiquity of religion throughout recorded history--and by laboratory research, including the prediction of new phenomena in heuristic reasoning.
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            Spontaneous giving and calculated greed.

            Cooperation is central to human social behaviour. However, choosing to cooperate requires individuals to incur a personal cost to benefit others. Here we explore the cognitive basis of cooperative decision-making in humans using a dual-process framework. We ask whether people are predisposed towards selfishness, behaving cooperatively only through active self-control; or whether they are intuitively cooperative, with reflection and prospective reasoning favouring 'rational' self-interest. To investigate this issue, we perform ten studies using economic games. We find that across a range of experimental designs, subjects who reach their decisions more quickly are more cooperative. Furthermore, forcing subjects to decide quickly increases contributions, whereas instructing them to reflect and forcing them to decide slowly decreases contributions. Finally, an induction that primes subjects to trust their intuitions increases contributions compared with an induction that promotes greater reflection. To explain these results, we propose that cooperation is intuitive because cooperative heuristics are developed in daily life where cooperation is typically advantageous. We then validate predictions generated by this proposed mechanism. Our results provide convergent evidence that intuition supports cooperation in social dilemmas, and that reflection can undermine these cooperative impulses.
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              Cognitive load selectively interferes with utilitarian moral judgment.

              Traditional theories of moral development emphasize the role of controlled cognition in mature moral judgment, while a more recent trend emphasizes intuitive and emotional processes. Here we test a dual-process theory synthesizing these perspectives. More specifically, our theory associates utilitarian moral judgment (approving of harmful actions that maximize good consequences) with controlled cognitive processes and associates non-utilitarian moral judgment with automatic emotional responses. Consistent with this theory, we find that a cognitive load manipulation selectively interferes with utilitarian judgment. This interference effect provides direct evidence for the influence of controlled cognitive processes in moral judgment, and utilitarian moral judgment more specifically.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                14 January 2019
                Article
                1901.04282
                6a273088-fc28-437a-a53f-6b0ea9db9f87

                http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

                History
                Custom metadata
                physics.soc-ph

                General physics
                General physics

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