Marc Parry
profiles Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist whose main interest is in moral choices:
In 2001, Haidt chambered a bullet at rationalism in a classic paper that tied together moral dumbfounding, philosophy, and recent psychology findings on human judgment, while also bringing in anthropology and primatology. His conclusion: "Most of the action in moral psychology" is in our automatic intuitions. "People do indeed reason, but that reasoning is done primarily to prepare for social interaction, not to search for truth."
This was no small claim: We're deluded about how we derive right from wrong. Largely thanks to Haidt, a neglected field "all of a sudden exploded," says David A. Pizarro, associate professor of psychology at Cornell. He wrote a critique with Bloom, who admires Haidt but has continued to disagree with him on this point in the decade since. The problem, Bloom tells me, is that social psychologists overlook the tons of moral reasoning that people do in daily life. Morality fascinates, and not in some unconscious way. They read advice columns. Visit priests. Argue.
