Moral Dumbfounding

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Moral Dumbfounding

On this course we want to understand humans’ ethical abilities and the kinds of process which underpin them, and what this implies for political change as well as what it implies for ethics.

In this lecture we will look at two phenomena which help us with understanding ethical abilities. The first is moral dumbfounding.

What is moral dumbfounding?

Moral dumbfounding is ‘the stubborn and puzzled maintenance of a judgment without supporting reasons’ (Haidt, Bjorklund, & Murphy, 2000, p. 1).

To understand this phenomenon, we need to review the experiment that gave rise to the term.

To understand moral dumbfounding, we need to review the experiment that gave rise to the term.

Haidt et al (2000; unpublished!)’s tasks

NB: I’m deliberately not mentioning the Heinz dilemma at this stage, for drama.

morally provocative but ‘harmless’: Incest; Cannibal

‘(Incest) depicts consensual incest between two adult siblings, and [...] (Cannibal) depicts a woman cooking and eating a piece of flesh from a human cadaver donated for research to the medical school pathology lab at which she works. These stories were chosen because they were expected to cause the participant to quickly and intuitively "see-that" the act described was morally wrong. Yet since the stories were carefully written to be harmless, the participant would be prevented from finding the usual “reasoning-why” about harm that participants in Western cultures commonly use to justify moral condemnation‘ (Haidt et al., 2000).

‘In addition we used two "non-moral intuition" tasks: Roach and Soul. [...] In [Roach] the participant is asked to drink from a glass of juice both before and after a sterilized cockroach has been dipped into it. In the Soul task the participant is offered two dollars to sign a piece of paper and then rip it up; on the paper are the words "I, (participant's name), hereby sell my soul, after my death, to Scott Murphy [the experimenter], for the sum of two dollars." At the bottom of the page a note was printed that said: "this is not a legal or binding contract"’ (Haidt et al., 2000, p. 6)

Method: ask whether wrong; counter argue; questionnaire

Method: (1) ask whether the act was wrong (or whether the participant would perform the action). (2) record the answer, and any argument given. (3) experimenter argue against the participant’s position. (4) questionnaire after each task (‘The questionnaire asked the participant to respond on a Likert scale as to her level of confusion, irritation, and confidence in her judgment, and to what extent her judgment was based on reasoning or on a "gut feeling."’).

This condition is often forgotten but it is important for two reasons.

First, a natural assumption is that we should be able to test hypotheses about relative levels of dumbfounding rather than about absolute levels. Second, ... we’ll see late in covering Dwyer‘s argument

On the importance of the control (Heinz) task: ‘Planned contrasts were performed between the Heinz task and each of the other four tasks, because we predicted that the Heinz task would be unique in encouraging analytical reasoning’ (Haidt et al., 2000, p. 8)

Results

NB: unpublished data

‘it often happened that participants made “unsupported declarations”, e.g., “It’s just wrong to do that!” or “That’s terrible!”

Note the comparison with the control!

They made the fewest such declarations in Heinz, and they made significantly more such declarations in the Incest story.’

Results ctd

NB: unpublished data

Informal observation: ‘participants often directly stated that they were dumbfounded, i.e., they made a statement to the effect that they thought an action was wrong but they could not find the words to explain themselves’ (p. 9)

‘Participants made the fewest such statements in Heinz (only 2 such statements, from 2 participants), while they made significantly more such statements in the Incest (38 statements from 23 different participants), Cannibalism (24 from 11), and Soul stories (22 from 13).’

Importance of the method: this is a control

Study 2 (not reported!):

Cognitive load increased the level of moral dumbfounding without changing subjects’ judgments.

‘In Study 2 [which is not reported in the draft] we repeated the basic design while exposing half of the subjects to a cognitive load—an attention task that took up some of their conscious mental work space—and found that this load increased the level of moral dumbfounding without changing subjects’ judgments or their level of persuadability.’ (Haidt & Bjorklund, 2008, p. 198).

This will be important later when we are thinking about dual process theories of moral abilities.

replication / extension / review?

Royzman et al, 2015 : more recent study doubts that dumbfounding occurs (Royzman, Kim, & Leeman, 2015). This study involves three experiments. They partially replicated Haidt et al, 2000, then go on to test whether subjects really believe that the incest is harmless.

Note that, unlike Haidt et al, 2000, these researchers did not use the comparison with Heinz!

‘a definitionally pristine bout of MD is likely to be a extraordinarily rare find, one featuring a person who doggedly and decisively condemns the very same act that she has no prior normative reasons to dislike’

(Royzman et al., 2015, p. 311)

Royzman et al, 2015 p. 311

‘3 of [...] 14 individuals [without supporting reasons] disapproved of the siblings having sex and only 1 of 3 (1.9%) maintained his disapproval in the “stubborn and puzzled” manner.’

(Royzman et al., 2015, p. 309)

Royzman et al, 2015 p. 309

Warning: Note the absent comparison with the Heinz dilemma.

another replication

McHugh, McGann, Igou, & Kinsella (2017, p. figure 1, part)

NB: the other three studies do not show a robust distinction between dilemmas (although there is some evidence for one); but they were online studies so I am not persuaded that they actually worked.

further replications

see notes on handout

replication / extension / review?

diy approach (!)

Do try this at home!

But is Isabel dumbfounded? Maybe briefly. But is that significant? Hard to measure ...

replication / extension / review?

place	most dumbfounding scenario
	Trolley	Cannibal	Incest
India	x
Middle East and North Africa	x
China		x
WEIRD			x

‘for both the Indian sample and the [Middle East and North Africa] sample, Trolley appeared to evoke the highest rates of dumbfounding,
while for the Chinese sample, Cannibal evoked the highest rates of dumbfounding.
In contrast for WEIRD samples, Incest tends to be the scenario that most reliably evokes dumbfounding

(McHugh, Zhang, Karnatak, Lamba, & Khokhlova, 2023, p. 1056)

WEIRD = Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic

MENA = Middle East and North Africa

replication / extension / review?

summary: moral dumbfounding

we know the definition;

some evidence — not rock solid, but probably occurs.

‘Moral dumbfounding occurs when you make an ethical judgement but either cannot provide reasons or provide reasons that are ‘only weakly associated’ with your judgement’ (Dwyer, 2009).

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Moral Dumbfounding

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