Moral Dumbfounding: When intuition finds no reason

In the past couple posts, I've  mentioned Jonathan Haidt's Social Intuitionist Model quite a bit.  Intuitions dominate our initial moral impressions and rather than correcting these intuitions, our faculty of reason makes these impressions stronger.  As Haidt puts it, "Reason is the press-secretary of the intuitions, and can pretend to no other office than that of ex-post facto spin doctor."  Perhaps the most intriguing support for this model is what Haidt calls "moral dumbfounding," which will be the subject of this post.

To test his model, Haidt had 30 college students answer questions about a series of dilemmas.  One was a dilemma well known in the history of moral psychology, the "Heinz dilemma."  Here's the dilemma in full.

In Europe, a woman was near death from a very bad disease, a special kind of cancer.  There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium for which a druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying, and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said, "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So, Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife. Was there anything wrong with what he did?

Given that this dilemma involves explicit tradeoffs between competing interests, Haidt predicted that people would easily engage in dispassionate moral reasoning.

As a comparison for the Heinz dilemma, participants were presented with two other dilemmas that didn't exhibit any obvious harm to any character.  The more famous of these stories is now known simply as "the Mark and Julie dilemma."

Julie and Mark, who are brother and sister are traveling together in France. They are both on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach.  They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy it, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret between them, which makes them feel even closer to each other. So what do you think about this? Was it wrong for them to have sex?

Participants were also presented with a dilemma in which a medical student, Jennifer, eats a bit of a cadaver's flesh.  This cadaver was going to be incinerated the next day, so no one would miss it.  It was expected that participants would quickly and intuitively recognize the wrongness of Mark and Julie's actions as well as Jennifer's actions.  However, they would be at pains to verbally explain exactly why these characters had done something wrong.

Finally, participants were presented with two tasks that were expected to elicit strong intuitions, though they were non-moral in nature.  In one task, participants were asked to drink a glass of juice both before and after a sterilized cockroach had been dipped in it.  The other task involved the participants signing their name on a piece of paper.  On this paper, were the words "I, (participant's name), hereby sell my soul, after my death, to [the experimenter], for the sum of two dollars."  At the bottom of the page was a note that read: "This is NOT a legal or binding contract, in any way."  Despite the apparent harmlessness of each of these actions, participants were unsurprisingly uncomfortable with these tasks.

After the participant read each dilemma and gave their judgment, an experimenter would "argue" with the participants.  The experimenter would non-aggressively undermine whatever reason the participant put forth in support of their judgment.  For example, if a participant said that Mark and Julie did something wrong because they might have a deformed child, the experimenter would remind the participant that Julie was taking birth control pills and Mark used a condom.  If the participant said that what Heinz did was ok because his wife needed it to survive, the experimenter would ask if it would be ok to steal if a stranger needed it or if a beloved pet dog needed it.  The same procedure was followed for the two behavioral tasks the participants were asked to perform.  If a participant chose not to drink the cockroach-dipped-juice, the experimenter would remind them that the roach was sterile.  If a participant refused to sign the piece of paper, the experimenter would remind them that it wasn't a real contract.

While participants were going through the rigmarole of this experiment, Haidt was recording their verbal and nonverbal responses.  Afterwards, Haidt had participants fill out a self-report survey asking them how confident they were in their judgments, how confused they were, how irritated they were, how much they had changed their mind from their initial judgment, how much their judgment was based on gut feelings, and how much their judgment was based on reason.

Haidt found striking differences between the Heinz dilemma and the other dilemmas.  When responding to the Heinz dilemma, participants tended to provide reasons before announcing their judgment.  They reported that their judgments were based more on reason than on gut feelings.  Their judgments were relatively stable and held with high confidence.  And they rarely said that they couldn't explain their judgments.  The other dilemmas left participants in a much different mental state.  Participants reported being more confused and less confident in their judgments.  They relied more on their gut than on their reasoning; after gentle probing from the experimenter, participants dropped most of the arguments they put forward, and they frequently admitted that they couldn't find any reasons for their judgments.  This observation, in particular, is what Haidt calls "moral dumbfounding."  Participants maintained their judgments despite the inability to articulate their reasons.  They were, in a sense, struck speechless, or dumbfounded.  Furthermore, participants often verbally expressed their dumbfoundedness.  These verbal expressions were made 38 times in response to the incest story but only twice in response to the Heinz dilemma.  Participants' responses to the behavioral tasks provided a mixed bag of results but were similar to the Mark and Julie dilemma in several respects.   Participants were unconfident in their decision not to sign the piece of paper, and they didn't believe their decision was the result of rational deliberation.  And they often said they couldn't think of any reason, but they maintained their decision nonetheless.

Prior to this study, moral psychologists had almost exclusively presented participants with just the Heinz dilemma.  Consequently, psychologists inferred that moral judgment was largely the result of conscious effortful reasoning.  In hindsight, this conclusion seems obviously invalid.  This is like showing people pictures of cute cats, asking them how they feel, and inferring that humans only feel happiness.  It's odd that this was the dominant paradigm for decades.  Perhaps I'm missing something, but Haidt's insight seems like an obvious idea whose time had come.  It's now quite evident that, at least under certain circumstances, people may eschew reason in favor of their gut instincts.  Haidt's study doesn't warrant the conclusion that the majority of moral judgment is intuitively driven, but it does provide another brick in the wall of evidence for the Social Intuitionist Model.

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Haidt, J., Bjorklund, F., & Murphy, S. (2000). Moral dumbfounding: When intuition finds no reason. Unpublished manuscript, University of Virginia.