TWO The Intuitive Dog and Its Rational TailRead more at location 588
Note: Tesi: l'emozione precede la ragione ma quest' ultima può farci tornare sui ns giudizi... Ragione/Sentimento: chi è il padrone e chi lo schiavo. 3 modelli: Platone, Hume, Jefferson… L' innatismo di Darwin: x' è stato avversato dai progressisti Polit. corr. come messa progressista. La battaglia di Harvard: Wilson vs Rawls Damasio e i cervelli danneggiati nell' area affettiva: sanno scegliere tra bene e male, ma nn quando la decisione li riguarda… Test al modello duale jeffersoniano: giudicare con carichi cognitivi. Bocciato. Il caso dell' incesto protetto: ragione schiava delle passioni. In fatto di morale noi razionalizziamo. Il giudizio e la giustificazione sono processi separati. L' emozione precede sempre la ragione. Definizione di emozione: anche l' emozione ha una sua razionalità. Parliamo di razionalità evolutiva o naturale No al contrasto ragione vs sentimento sì al connubio intuizione & ragione Schema: noi intuiamo e giudichiamo. Dopo ragioniamo e, specie attraverso la discussione con altri che ci fanno rilevare intuizioni incompatibili, torniamo sui ns giudizi Come convincere il prossimo: rivolgersi all' elefante con sorrisi e ascolto. Empatia vs rigore Edit
One of the greatest truths in psychology is that the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict.1 To be human is to feel pulled in different directions,Read more at location 589
There’s a direct line running from Plato through Immanuel Kant to Lawrence Kohlberg. I’ll refer to this worshipful attitude throughout this book as the rationalist delusion. I call it a delusion because when a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it.Read more at location 615
Thomas Jefferson offered a more balanced model of the relationship between reason and emotion.Read more at location 620
So now we have three models of the mind. Plato said that reason ought to be the master, even if philosophers are the only ones who can reach a high level of mastery.9 Hume said that reason is and ought to be the servant of the passions. And Jefferson gives us a third option, in which reason and sentiment are (and ought to be) independent co-rulers,Read more at location 642
Darwin offered several explanations for how morality could have evolved, and many of them pointed to emotions such as sympathy,Read more at location 650
Darwin was a nativist about morality: he thought that natural selection gave us minds that were preloaded with moral emotions.Read more at location 653
But as the social sciences advanced in the twentieth century, their course was altered by two waves of moralism that turned nativism into a moral offense. The first was the horror among anthropologists and others at “social Darwinism”—theRead more at location 654
The claim that some races were innately superior to others was later championed by Hitler, and so if Hitler was a nativist,Read more at location 658
The second wave of moralism was the radical politics that washed over universities in America, Europe, and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. Radical reformers usually want to believe that human nature is a blank slateRead more at location 660
The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker was a graduate student at Harvard in the 1970s. In his 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Pinker describes the ways scientists betrayed the values of science to maintain loyalty to the progressive movement.Read more at location 664
Nowhere was the betrayal of science more evident than in the attacks on Edward O. Wilson,Read more at location 669
In 1975 Wilson published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. The book explored how natural selection, which indisputably shaped animal bodies, also shaped animal behavior.Read more at location 669
He was a professor at Harvard, along with Lawrence Kohlberg and the philosopher John Rawls, so he was well acquainted with their brand of rationalist theorizing about rightsRead more at location 674
Wilson sided with Hume. He charged that what moral philosophers were really doing was fabricating justifications after “consulting the emotive centers” of their own brains.Read more at location 679
I read Frans de Waal’s Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals.21 De Waal did not claim that chimpanzees had morality; he argued only that chimps (and other apes) have most of the psychological building blocks that humans use to construct moral systems and communities.Read more at location 694
I also read Descartes’ Error, by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio.22 Damasio had noticed an unusual pattern of symptoms in patients who had suffered brain damage to a specific part of the brain—theRead more at location 698
Their emotionality dropped nearly to zero. They could look at the most joyous or gruesome photographs and feel nothing. They retained full knowledge of what was right and wrong, and they showed no deficits in IQ. They even scored well on Kohlberg’s tests of moral reasoning. Yet when it came to making decisions in their personal lives and at work, they made foolish decisions or no decisions at all.Read more at location 700
It was the shocking revelation that reasoning requires the passions. Jefferson’s model fits better: when one co-emperor is knocked out and the other tries to rule the empire by himself, he’s not up to the task.Read more at location 716
Yet the collapse of decision making, even in purely analytic and organizational tasks, was pervasive. The head can’t even do head stuff without the heart. So Hume’s model fit these cases best:Read more at location 719
These synthesizers were assisted by the rebirth of sociobiology in 1992 under a new name—evolutionary psychology.Read more at location 726
But I had already arrived at a Jeffersonian view in which moral emotions and moral reasoning were separate processes.25 Each process could make moral judgments on its own, and they sometimes fought it out for the right to do soRead more at location 729
For example, social psychologists often ask people to perform tasks while carrying a heavy cognitive load, such as holding the number 7250475 in mind, or while carrying a light cognitive load, such as remembering just the number 7. If performance suffers while people are carrying the heavy load, then we can conclude that “controlled” thinking (such as conscious reasoning) is necessaryRead more at location 733
My question was simple: Can people make moral judgments just as well when carrying a heavy cognitive load as when carrying a light one? The answer turned out to be yes. I found no differenceRead more at location 741
I used a computer program to force some people to answer quickly, before they had time to think, and I forced other people to wait ten seconds before offering their judgment.Read more at location 743
The main point of the study was to examine responses to two harmless taboo violations. We wanted to know if the moral judgment of disturbing but harmless events would look more like judgments in the Heinz task (closely linked to reasoning), or like those in the roach juice and soul-selling tasks (where people readily confessed that they were following gutRead more at location 776
Julie and Mark, who are sister and brother, 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 the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie is 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?Read more at location 779
Jennifer works in a hospital pathology lab. She’s a vegetarian for moral reasons—she thinks it’s wrong to kill animals. But one night she has to incinerate a fresh human cadaver, and she thinks it’s a waste to throw away perfectly edible flesh.Read more at location 784
Only 20 percent of subjects said it was OK for Julie and Mark to have sex, and only 13 percent said it was OK for Jennifer to eat part of a cadaver. But when Scott asked people to explain their judgments and then challenged those explanations, he found exactly the Humean pattern that we had predicted.Read more at location 788
They seemed to be flailing around, throwing out reason after reason, and rarely changing their minds when Scott proved that their latest reason was not relevant.Read more at location 791
EXPERIMENTER: So what do you think about this, was it wrong for Julie and Mark to have sex? SUBJECT: Yeah, I think it’s totally wrong to have sex. You know, because I’m pretty religious and I just think incest is wrong anyway. But, I don’t know. EXPERIMENTER: What’s wrong with incest, would you say? SUBJECT: Um, the whole idea of, well, I’ve heard—I don’t even know if this is true, but in the case, if the girl did get pregnant, the kids become deformed, most of the time, in cases like that. EXPERIMENTER: But they used a condom and birth control pills— SUBJECT: Oh, OK. Yeah, you did say that. EXPERIMENTER: —so there’s no way they’re going to have a kid. SUBJECT: Well, I guess the safest sex is abstinence, but, um, uh … um, I don’t know, I just think that’s wrong. I don’t know, what did you ask me? EXPERIMENTER: Was it wrong for them to have sex? SUBJECT: Yeah, I think it’s wrong. EXPERIMENTER: And I’m trying to find out why, what you think is wrong with it. SUBJECT: OK, um … well … let’s see, let me think about this. Um—how old were they? EXPERIMENTER: They were college age, around 20 or so. SUBJECT: Oh, oh [looks disappointed]. I don’t know, I just … it’s just not something you’re brought up to do. It’s just not—well, I mean I wasn’t. I assume most people aren’t [laughs]. I just think that you shouldn’t—I don’t—I guess my reason is, um … just that, um … you’re not brought up to it. You don’t see it. It’s not, um—I don’t think it’s accepted. That’s pretty much it. EXPERIMENTER: You wouldn’t say anything you’re not brought up to see is wrong, would you? For example, if you’re not brought up to see women working outside the home, would you say that makes it wrong for women to work? SUBJECT: Um … well … oh, gosh. This is hard. I really—um, I mean, there’s just no way I could change my mind but I just don’t know how to—how to show what I’m feeling, what I feel about it. It’s crazy!Read more at location 793
These results supported Hume, not Jefferson or Plato. People made moral judgments quickly and emotionally. Moral reasoning was mostly just a post hoc search for reasons to justify the judgments people had already made.Read more at location 820
Margolis was trying to understand why people’s beliefs about political issues are often so poorly connected to objective facts,Read more at location 826
FIGURE 2.3. The Wason 4-card task. Which card(s) must you turn over to verify the rule that if a card shows a vowel on one face, then it has an even number on the other?Read more at location 839
But amazingly, they are just as able to offer an explanation, and just as confident in their reasoning, whether they are told the right answer (E and 7) or the popular but wrong answer (E and 4).Read more at location 845
Margolis shared Wason’s view, summarizing the state of affairs like this: Given the judgments (themselves produced by the nonconscious cognitive machinery in the brain, sometimes correctly, sometimes not so), human beings produce rationales they believe account for their judgments. But the rationales (on this argument) are only ex post rationalizations.Read more at location 848
The intuition launched the reasoning, but the intuition did not depend on the success or failure of the reasoning.Read more at location 869
my thinking was entrenched in a prevalent but useless dichotomy between cognition and emotion.Read more at location 882
Emotions are a kind of information processing.39 Contrasting emotion with cognition is therefore as pointless as contrasting rain with weather,Read more at location 893
In The Happiness Hypothesis, I called these two kinds of cognition the rider (controlled processes, including “reasoning-why”) and the elephant (automatic processes, including emotion, intuition, and all forms of “seeing-that”).Read more at location 903
The rider can do several useful things. It can see further into the future (because we can examine alternative scenarios in our heads) and therefore it can help the elephant make better decisions in the present.Read more at location 910
independently reasoned judgment is possible in theory but rare in practice.Read more at location 919
For most of us, it’s not every day or even every month that we change our mind about a moral issue without any prompting from anyone else.Read more at location 936
Because of these two changes I called my theory the “social intuitionist model of moral judgment,” and I published it in 2001 in an article titled “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail.”Read more at location 942
The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog.Read more at location 948
If you want to change people’s minds, you’ve got to talk to their elephants. You’ve got to use links 3 and 4Read more at location 954
“begin in a friendly way,” to “smile,” to “be a good listener,” and to “never say ‘you’re wrong.’ Read more at location 957
The performance may impress our friends and show allies that we are committed members of the team, but no matter how good our logic, it’s not going to change the minds of our opponents if they are in combat mode too.Read more at location 966
Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.Read more at location 970
Hume believed that reason was (and was only fit to be) the servant of the passions. In this chapter I tried to show that Hume was right: The mind is divided into parts, like a rider (controlled processes) on an elephant (automatic processes). The rider evolved to serve the elephant. You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn’t change his judgment. The social intuitionist model starts with Hume’s model and makes it more social. Moral reasoning is part of our lifelong struggle to win friends and influence people. That’s why I say that “intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.”Read more at location 973
