Blog #8

     Haidt, Jonathan. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108 (4), 814.

Haidt presents a great deal of information in his article The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail—all having to do with the social intuitionist model and how it relates to moral judgement. The author gives us four explanations on why we should question or doubt the relevance of reason: “The Dual Process Problem, The Motivated Reasoning Problem, The Post Hoc Problem, and The Action Problem. While all explanations make valid points, I felt that I related most to the motivated reasoning problem. After re-reading, I realize I may align with this one the most because I’ve grown up in a family of attorneys. Haidt also provides good examples of relatedness motives and coherence motives. 

I was most interested in Haidt’s ideas that he presented on how to test the social intuitionist model. Because of the complication of this model, he offers three ways to do so. The first had to do with the interference of reasoning. As we learned, reasoning is a process that takes time and a great deal of thought; however, intuition is something that comes to us quickly. Perhaps it is something we are born with, therefore making it a quick witted response with little thought. The author suggests that more research must be done to determine what these interferences could be and how they affect the moral situation and judgement. This is an interesting dilemma to consider and one that should require further research by field experts.

The other two questions have to do with Ecological Variation and Consilience. According to Haidt on consilience, “the degree to which facts and theories link up across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation” (2001, pg. 829). No matter what your opinion on this article, the one thing that holds true is the notion that this day in age, there are a plethora of new ways to think about moral judgement and the forces that drive moral reasoning.