Morality Based in Emotional and Affective Appraisals

Some scholar believe that emotions are the basis of moral judgments. Emotions may arise from cognitive appraisals, but they may also influence cognitive appraisals. The majority of research to date has dealt with the latter influence of emotions. Emotions should be distinguished from Affect. Affect is general positivity and negativity. Some research has looked at the influence of positive versus neutral emotions on moral judgments. 


For example, Valdesolo and DeSteno (2006), examined the moderating roles of positive affect on participant responses to the footbridge dilemma. In the footbridge dilemma, the experimenter presents the participant with a fictional scenario. The brakes and steering on a train have failed. The train is hurtling towards track workers, who will all be killed if the train is not redirected onto an empty track. A bystander on a bridge above the track notice a large switch that would redirect the train. Unfortunately, the switch can only be moved by a great force. The bystander looks around and sees a heavyset man who, if pushed onto the switch, would move the switch and divert the train. The bystander herself is not heavy enough to move the switch. She must decide whether to push the heavyset man onto the switch, killing him in the process, or let the train hit the track workers.

Many participants respond to this situation by refusing to push the heavyset man to his death, dooming the workers in the process. However, Valdesolo and DeSteno (2006) were able to get more participants to agree to push the man. They did this by having participants watch "a comedy video immediately before completing a questionnaire on which they judged the appropriateness of pushing a man to his (useful) death" (Haidt & Kesebir, 2009). The positive affect, the researchers believe, counteracted any negative affect aroused by the footbridge dilemma.

Positive affect (including positive emotions) can also increase helpful action. Experiments have examined the roles of "[g]ood weather (Cunningham, 1979), hearing uplifting or soothing music (Fried &  Berkowitz, 1979; North, Tarrant &  Hargreaves, 2004), remembering happy memories (Rosenhan, Underwood &  Moore, 1974), eating cookies (Isen &  Levin, 1972), and smelling a pleasant aroma such as roasted coffee (R. A. Baron, 1997)" (Haidt & Kesebir, 2009) on helping behaviors. 

Other experiments have examined specific emotions more directly. One particularly influential emotion is disgust. Wheatley and Haidt (2005) "used post-hypnotic suggestion to implant an extra flash of disgust whenever participants read a particular word (“take” for half of the participants; “often” for the other half). Participants later made harsher judgments of characters in vignettes that contained the hypnotically enhanced word, compared to vignettes with the nonenhanced word. Some participants even found themselves condemning a character in a story who had done no wrong--a student council representative who “tries to take” or “often picks” discussion topics that would have wide appeal" (Haidt & Kesebir, 2009). Schnall, Haidt, Clore, and Jordan (2008) "extended these findings with three additional disgust manipulations: seating participants at a dirty desk (vs. a clean one), showing a disgusting video clip (vs. a sad or neutral one), and asking participants to make moral judgments in the presence of a bad smelling “fart spray” (or no spray)" (Haidt & Kesebir, 2009). 

The influence of disgust was moderated by participant awareness of disgust, as measured by the "private body consciousness" scale (Miller, Murphy, & Buss, 1981). This scale measures "the degree to which people attend to their own bodily sensations. This finding raises the importance of individual differences in the study of morality: Even if the ten literatures reviewed here converge on a general picture of intuitive primacy, there is variation in the degree to which people have gut feelings, follow them, or override them (see Bartels, 2008; Epstein, Pacini, Denes-Raj, & Heier, 1996). For example, individual differences on a measure of disgust sensitivity (Haidt, McCauley, & Rozin, 1994) has been found to predict participants’ condemnation of abortion and gay marriage, but not their stances on non-disgust-related issues such as gun control and affirmative action (Inbar, Pizarro, & Bloom, in press). Disgust sensitivity also predicts the degree to which people condemn homosexuals, even among a liberal college sample, and even when bypassing self-report by measuring anti-gay bias using two different implicit measures (Inbar, Pizarro, Knobe, & Bloom, in press)"(Haidt & Kesebir, 2009).

It should be noted that the exact appraisal underlying the relationship between disgust and negative moral judgments is not necessarily well-understood. For example, in Inbar, Pizarro, Knobe, & Bloom  (2009) disgust sensitivity predicted both attributions of intentionality to a situation that resulted in more gay men kissing in public and implicit negative attitudes towards gay men as measured by an IAT. However, it is not clear whether disgust is moderating sensitivity to moral purity and pollution or, more generally, sensitivity to the violation of social conventions. 

Tapias, Glaser, Keltner, Vasquez, & Wicken (2007) further explore the relationship between disgust and attitudes towards gay people. In this study, the researchers primed participants with words related to homosexuality. They then tested participant reaction on an onstensibly unrelated experiment. Participants reacted to this experiment as if they had been primed directly with disgust, or so the authors argue. Participants who reported being more likely to experience disgust in their daily lives also reported higher levels of prejudice towards gay people. 

Disgust is not the only emotion studied in the moral psychology literature. Anger, for example, has a powerful influence on moral judgments. Tapias et al. (2007) used the same methodology to demonstrate a relationship between anger and prejudice towards African Americans. 

Morality as Cognition

Marc Hauser's Moral Minds argues that an evolved moral faculty generates moral judgments. Moral judgments are defined as judgments of right and wrong, permitted and forbidden. This faculty applies innate principles that are biologically determined. However, these principles allow for variation.  Just as some principles of language are immutable and some are varying, so moral judgments can vary across cultures.  Culture, in Hauser's terminology, sets the parameters.  Nature gives us the principles.

Departing from other researchers in the field, Hauser argues that cognitive appraisals that may precede or be driven by emotion are distinct from the appraisals made by the moral faculty.  However, for Hauser, emotions may directly result from or accompany these appraisals and remain, in his account, an important area of inquiry.

Methodology: Supporting evidence comes from social-psychology-based laboratory experiments and surveys, behavioral economics, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology.  Hauser argues that while little evidence contradicts his thesis, more research is needed to ensure that it is the most parsimonious explanation.

Morality vs. Convention

Shweder et al. (1987) contrast social conventions and moral rules cross-culturally. They conclude that the category of social convention emerges from the moral concept of individual rights and is not found in cultures that lack this concept.

Shweder et al. would give a more complete analysis if they discussed informal social rules. These rules are unmarked by culture and are learned through mimicry.  People may feel uncomfortable upon witnessing another person violating these informal rules. However, they are unlikely to know why.

Shweder et al. support their conclusions using data collected via structured interviews in Hyde Park, IL and India.