Faculty Articles
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-2014
Publication Title
Judgment and Decision Making
Volume
9
Issue/Number
3
First Page
176
ISSN
1930-2975
Last Page
190
Abstract/Excerpt
Two studies examined the relationship between individual differences in cognitive reflection (CRT) and the tendency to accord genuinely moral (non-conventional) status to a range of counter-normative acts — that is, to treat such acts as wrong regardless of existing social opinion or norms. We contrasted social violations that are intrinsically harmful to others (e.g., fraud, thievery) with those that are not (e.g., wearing pajamas to work and engaging in consensual acts of sexual intimacy with an adult sibling). Our key hypothesis was that more reflective (higher CRT) individuals would tend to moralize selectively — treating only intrinsically harmful acts as genuinely morally wrong — whereas less reflective (lower CRT) individuals would moralize more indiscriminately. We found clear support for this hypothesis in a large and ideologically diverse sample of American adults. The predicted associations were not fully accounted for by the subjects’ political orientation, sensitivity to gut feelings, gender, age, educational attainment, or their placement on a sexual morals-specific measure of social conservatism. Our studies are the first to demonstrate that, in addition to modulating the intensity of moral condemnation, reflection may also play a key role in setting the boundaries of the moral domain as such.
DOI
10.1017/S1930297500005738
NSUWorks Citation
Royzman, E. B.,
Landy, J. F.,
Goodwin, G. P.
(2014). Are good reasoners more incest-friendly? Trait cognitive reflection predicts selective moralization in a sample of American adults. Judgment and Decision Making, 9(3), 176-190.
Available at: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cps_facarticles/2026
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Comments
We are grateful to Gordon Pennycook and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on an earlier version of this draft and to Jonathan Baron for his comments, editorial advice, and contributions to various aspects of this project.
Copyright: © 2014.