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ABSTRACT Contractualist moral theories view morality as a matter of mutually beneficial agreements among rational agents. Compared to its rivals in moral philosophy–consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics–contractualism has only recently started to attract attention in empirical work on the cognitive science of morality. Is it fruitful to adopt a contractualist lens to better understand how moral cognition works? After introducing the main contractualist theories in contemporary moral philosophy, I present five reasons to take inspiration from this family of normative theories to develop descriptive accounts of morality. Then, I review how the contractualist framework has been used to contribute to our understanding of moral cognition at three interrelated levels of analysis: Morality's evolutionary logic, its cognitive organization, and the specific cognitive processes and forms of reasoning involved in moral judgment and decision making. First, several evolutionary accounts of morality argue that its evolutionary logic must be understood in contractualist terms. Second, resource‐rational contractualism proposes that the subcomponents of moral cognition–including well‐studied rule‐ and outcome‐based mechanisms, and much less studied agreement‐based processes–are organized to efficiently approximate the outcome of explicit negotiation under resource constraints. Third, recent empirical developments suggest that three characteristically contractualist forms of reasoning–virtual bargaining, we‐reasoning, and universalization–can be involved in producing moral judgments and decisions in a variety of contexts. Beyond the traditional distinction between rules and consequences, these various research programs open a third way for the cognitive science of morality, one based on agreement. This article is categorized under:Psychology > Reasoning and Decision MakingEconomics > Interactive Decision‐MakingPhilosophy > Value
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Biased sequential sampling underlies the effects of time pressure and delay in social decision making
Abstract Social decision making involves balancing conflicts between selfishness and pro-sociality. The cognitive processes underlying such decisions are not well understood, with some arguing for a single comparison process, while others argue for dual processes (one intuitive and one deliberative). Here, we propose a way to reconcile these two opposing frameworks. We argue that behavior attributed to intuition can instead be seen as a starting point bias of a sequential sampling model (SSM) process, analogous to a prior in a Bayesian framework. Using mini-dictator games in which subjects make binary decisions about how to allocate money between themselves and another participant, we find that pro-social subjects become more pro-social under time pressure and less pro-social under time delay, while selfish subjects do the opposite. Our findings help reconcile the conflicting results concerning the cognitive processes of social decision making and highlight the importance of modeling the dynamics of the choice process.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1554837
- PAR ID:
- 10153703
- Publisher / Repository:
- Nature Publishing Group
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Nature Communications
- Volume:
- 9
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2041-1723
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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