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- What makes morality unique is that a lot of times,
people experience a moral judgment as a flash of intuition
or feeling good or bad.
But underneath that feeling
is complex moral psychological structure.
- We think that our morals are steadfast,
as if they were set in stone or inscribed in ink,
but it turns out our morals are far more fluid
than we'd like to believe.
- Studying moral psychology allows us access
to others' perspectives,
that others could have differing values.
And so just knowing that there is this complex space
of moral psychology could help us to understand
where other people are coming from.
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I'm Liane Young.
I'm a psychology professor at Boston College.
And in my lab, we study human moral decision-making.
A key question in our lab right now is what the role
of reasoning is for moral psychology.
So when do people and how do people
think about different principles
for making moral decisions?
- Morality might seem like a compass needle,
always guiding us north,
but as we start to add information and context
that trigger biases, the needle begins to spin.
- Moral cognition depends hugely on context.
So if I tell you about somebody who helped a stranger,
you would say they're much better than the person
who helped their brother,
but if I told you about a person who helped
the stranger instead of the brother,
you wouldn't think they're very good at all.
And it turned out, through the research that we did,
it was really people's intuitions about familial obligation
that structured people's moral intuitions
across all of these different cases.
- We may say adultery is wrong,
but if it's a friend who we know well
who had a troubled marriage, maybe we're more forgiving.
We say stealing is wrong,
but we might be more understanding
of our favorite politician
when they're caught lining their pockets.
We do this all the time.
- The point is that there are lots of different
contextual influences that contributes
to people's moral judgments.
- Morality has evolved with our species
because of humans' practical and psychological need
for social bonds, but even early human societies
began codifying a morality into laws and norms
that were meant to be applied universally.
- Back in evolutionary time,
people didn't interact with others across the world.
We interacted with the people in our family,
the people that we could see.
So because of that, moral psychology has developed
these sorts of biases that have to do with social distance.
So we think that the harm that is being done
up close and personal right in front of us matters more
than the harm that is being done
to somebody across an ocean.
- So it shouldn't surprise us that the biases
our minds exhibit are pragmatic.
The moral judgments we make about our close associates
are more forgiving and nuanced
than the judgments we make of strangers.
- The evolutionary origin of morality is coordination
or cooperation to help people get onto the same page
by pointing to common normative principles
that we can use to negotiate relationships,
to organize interactions
across many different social contexts.
- When we examine the moral judgments of others,
it's tempting to think that we live in different worlds,
but there's only one.
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The challenge today is that our social contexts
are far more global and complicated,
so can our sense of tribal morality evolve
to encompass people outside of our tribe?
- And so I think learning about the psychology
that drives that experience for individuals
thinking about what to do
and also individuals thinking about how to evaluate others
is going to be a really important process
for negotiating complex social interactions.
I think that clarifying the value
that you are consulting for a particular problem
is really critical.
- We're all connected in some way.
Between any two people in the world,
there's some common value or experience.
Finding that commonality could be the best path
towards a more morally consistent world.
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