Reconciling cognition and affect in moral judgment
I began studying moral judgment late in graduate school and have continued to follow research. In a world of cyberbullying, animosity toward LGBTQ+ persons and immigrants, and increasing gun violence, moral judgment seems worthy of attention. Gray et al. (2022) published “The Affective Harm Account (AHA) of Moral Judgment: Reconciling cognition and affect, dyadic morality and disgust, harm and purity” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They begin by observing that, “Moral psychology has long debated whether moral judgment is rooted in harm versus affect.” They propose the affective harm account (AHA) of moral judgment which, “understands harm as an intuitive perception (i.e., perceived harm), and divides ‘affect’ into two: embodied visceral arousal (i.e., gut feelings) and stimulus-directed affective appraisals (e.g., ratings of disgustingness).” What is clever about their study is its use of the β-blocker propranolol. Their experiment was a randomized, double-blind study in which young adults were asked to judge, “the immorality, harmfulness, and disgustingness of everyday moral scenarios (e.g., lying) and unusual purity scenarios (e.g., sex with a corpse) after receiving either a placebo or the β-blocker propranolol (a drug that dampens visceral arousal).”
Their data supported their three key hypotheses; here’s more from the abstract:
perceived harm and affective appraisals are neither competing nor independent but intertwined.
although both perceived harm and affective appraisals predict moral judgment, perceived harm is consistently relevant across all scenarios (in line with the theory of dyadic morality), whereas affective appraisals are especially relevant in unusual purity scenarios (in line with affect-as-information theory).
the “gut feelings” of visceral arousal are not as important to morality as often believed. Dampening visceral arousal (via propranolol) did not directly impact moral judgment, but instead changed the relative contribution of affective appraisals to moral judgment—and only in unusual purity scenarios. (Gray et al. 2022)
Like me, Gray et al. prefer a constructionist view of the mind to such traditional dichotomies as affect and cognition. They see the Affective Harm Account of moral judgment as reconciling “historic harm-centric and current affect-centric theories.” I like the both/and approach and the finding that gut feelings are less important than many people think. It also makes sense to me that gut feelings matter more in the unusual purity situations. Aznar, Tenenbaum, & Russell (2022) examine mothers and their 4-, 6-, or 8-year old children as they evaluate facial expressions, finding that children perceive disgusted faces as well as they perceive angry or sad faces, but later than happy faces. Mother-child dyads associated moral transgressions with anger and pathogen transgressions with disgust. These findings are consistent with Gray et al. in supporting a constructionist social learning view.