Sacred Values as Heuristics

Can being faced with a decision involving morals be a good thing? Research has shown in the past that morally-laden decisions are perceived as difficult and unpleasant. Therefore, conventional wisdom suggests that people would react characteristically when faced with decision-making with moral considerations, such as avoiding being placed in a position to make moral decisions, or effortfully spending more time deliberating over difficult moral decisions.

However, perhaps there's more to it than meets the eye, and Hanselmann and Tanner from the University of Zurich think so. In a very concise study, Hanselmann and Tanner (2008) sought to show that the involvement of moral issues and values can, instead, actually facilitate our decision-making. By invoking what are known as sacred values (absolute and inviolable values), we may end up spending less time thinking about the dilemma simply because an option that has sacred value makes us think that it cannot be compromised.

Every dilemma or decision involves some extent of trade-off. The authors conceptualized three types of trade-offs for the study:

Taboo trade-off
a situation that pits a secular value (i.e. a value that does not hold moral worth) against a sacred value

Tragic trade-off
a situation that pits two sacred values against each other

Routine trade-off
a situation that pits two secular values against each other

One might thus think of a routine trade-off in the case of a typical job dilemma. Faced with employment in Company A vs Company B, one might consider trading off mundane items such as salary, distance or working environment. On the other hand, an extreme (though commonplace) example of a tragic trade-off would be to decide whether to save one's parent or an offspring instead in the event of a fire.

In the first experiment, 84 students from the University of Zurich were presented with three scenarios representing a taboo, tragic or routine trade-off. Each scenario provided a choice between two options. An example of a taboo trade-off scenario was as follows:

Imagine that you are the president of the local authority of a village that has been severely affected by a flood. The local authority is discussing whether to invest a considerable amount of the annual budget in improved flood protection measures. In this case, however, the village would have to forego a planned facelift for the village square. As president, you have to decide between the improvements in flood protection (option 1) and the facelift for the village square (option 2).

Participants were then asked to rate how they felt about the decision, such as how emotionally negative the decision was and how difficult it was to decide on an option. The following results were gathered:

As can be seen, the difficulty of decision-making was lowest when sacred values were pitted against secular values, showing that, although decision-making involving some degree of moral choice is still emotionally unpleasant, it can lead to easier decision-making. A second experiment, which was a more complex (with multiple traits to access decision difficulty and affectiveness) but fundamentally similar experiment, was conducted and the results were replicated.

Tetlock (2003) had assumed that the mere contemplation of trade-offs that involve sacred values elicits distress and disturbance. There could very well be an adaptive or functional purpose to our negative perception of moral choices which makes us acutely aware that compromising on sacred values can have adverse consequences. In a sense, we are psychologically 'punished' for even contemplating the trade-off of sacred values, so let alone act against our instinct to preserve sacred values. These findings thus suggest that reliance on sacred values may therefore work as a heuristic that we use to increase the efficiency of our decision-making.

Martin Hanselmann, & Carmen Tanner (2008). Taboos and conflicts in decision making: Sacred values, decision difficulty, and emotions Judgment and Decision Making, 3 (1)

Tetlock, P. (2003). Thinking the unthinkable: sacred values and taboo cognitions Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7 (7), 320-324 DOI: 10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00135-9

Detecting facial emotions: Women vs Men

Do women really recognize facial emotion better than men? Existing literature on the subject remains contradictory with some studies showing a female advantage (albeit with small effect sizes) and others failing to find any gender differences. Hoffman and colleagues (2010) suggest that expression intensity is an important factor mediating gender differences in recognizing emotions and that while women do recognize facial emotions better than men, this advantage only exists for subtle emotional facial expressions.

Using a facial expression morphing tool (FEMT), they manipulated the intensity of the emotional facial expression for their stimuli. Looking at the 40% intensity, I must say that it is in fact pretty hard for me to identify.

click to enlarge

Conforming to their hypothesis, they found that women indeed only recognize subtle emotional expression better than men but not when full-blown emotions are displayed. Decreased emotional intensity negatively affected the judgments of male participants more than that of female participants.  

But of course accurately detecting facial emotions is just the first part of the equation, whether you deal with it adequately is another thing altogether - especially when they are subtle. 

Hoffmann H, Kessler H, Eppel T, Rukavina S, & Traue HC (2010). Expression intensity, gender and facial emotion recognition: Women recognize only subtle facial emotions better than men. Acta psychologica, 135 (3), 278-83 PMID: 20728864

Becoming a Better Person: The Good, the Bad, and the Past

When we think of ourselves as being morally good or morally bad, what goes on in our brains? What moral memories does our mind gather to affirm that we are one or the other, and how are these memories influenced by cognitive biases?

In some ways, we are already aware of some cognitive biases in the way we remember events. For example, we know of an "emotional bias" where emotional memories are remembered more vividly, are typically easier to retrieve and seem more familiar, even when the actual memories are not typically accurate. There also appears to be a"positivity bias" in that positive memories tend to be more vivid then negative ones and are less easily forgotten.

Not much research has been done on moral memories and given that moral memories are often emotional ones (cheating on a partner for instance, or helping someone and receiving their gratitude in turn), similar cognitive biases might exist. In this study, the authors hypothesize that we would remember ourselves doing good deeds more recently, a sort of "temporal bias".

The authors collected 700 autobiographical moral memories and characterized them on 3 categories of good versus bad. They also measured how long ago these events took place and collected data on possible contributing factors like gender, IQ, personality, etc. They then compared the mean age of the morally good memories to the morally bad memories and found that the morally good memories were always more recent.

What could drive these findings? The authors list 3 distinct and fascinating possibilities.

1) People actively reconstruct their memories to render their most recent acts, the acts to which one is most accountable, in a more positive light and relegate bad deeds to the distant past where one can come up with a host of reasons like "I was young" or "I didn't know better". This would be a real "temporal bias".

2) Perhaps bad decisions are more emotionally arousing and hence are remembered better (refer to "emotional bias" above) and their memories, older.

3) There is some real difference in the way people act when they are younger and when they older, so they remember their older self as being more morally good while their younger self as being morally bad. This would be a non-psychological explanation for the phenomena examined above.

While I think the study does indeed have several flaws that makes it hard to disentangle the possibilities, the idea it raises is quite exceptional. The way I interpret it is that, for the most part, we always strive to be better people, but we can never forget the wrongs that we have done. The solution that the brain seems to have evolved, if the authors are correct, is to relegate the ugly deeds to the past, and push the good to the present.

Escobedo, J., & Adolphs, R. (2010). Becoming a better person: Temporal remoteness biases autobiographical memories for moral events. Emotion, 10 (4), 511-518 DOI: 10.1037/a0018723