Definition
Moral instincts, or otherwise social intuitions, are unconscious abilities that differentiate between right and wrong actions.
Introduction
Since the advent of psychology, Bargh (1989) stated that people access substantial types of knowledge without phenomenological cognizance. According to Reber (1993), awareness and phenomenological cognizance are comparatively new concepts in comparison to other functions of the brain considered to be unconscious. Lately, some scientific disciplines such as evolutionary psychology and cognitive sciences proposed intuitionist approaches to human functioning (Klein 2003).
Long ago, gut feelings were considered unreasonable. Now, however, things have changed significantly, and often reasoning is considered needless (Cummins 2003). Certain theories, like the moral intuitionist theories, emphasize people’s sudden instinct reactions that they exhibit toward others. As per this...
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References
Bargh, J. A. (1989). Conditional automaticity: Varieties of automatic influence in social perception and cognition. In J. S. Uleman & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), Unintended thought (pp. 3–51). New York: Guilford.
Cummins, D. (2003). The evolution of reasoning. In R. J. Sternberg & J. P. Leighton (Eds.), The nature of reasoning (pp. 338–374). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Gigerenzer, G. (2008). Moral intuition = fast and frugal heuristics? In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology, Vol. 2. The cognitive science of morality: Intuition and diversity (pp. 1–26). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108, 814–834.
Haidt, J., Koller, S., & Dias, M. (1993). Affect, culture, and morality, or is it wrong to eat your dog? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 613–628.
Klein, G. (2003). Intuition at work. New York: Doubleday.
Reber, A. S. (1993). Implicit learning and tacit knowledge: An essay on the cognitive unconscious. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Themistocleous, D., Anastassiou-Hadjicharalambous, X. (2018). Moral Instincts and Morality. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3620-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3620-1
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