The curious tale of Julie and Mark: Unraveling the moral dumfounding effect
Clicks: 267
ID: 103284
2015
The paper critically
reexamines the well-known ``Julie and Mark'' vignette, a stylized account of
two college-age siblings opting to engage in protected sex while vacationing
abroad (e.g., Haidt, 2001). Since its inception, the story has been viewed as
a rhetorically powerful validation of Hume's ``sentimentalist'' dictum that
moral judgments are not rationally deduced but arise directly from feelings of
pleasure or displeasure (e.g., disgust). People's typical reactions to the
vignette are alleged to support this view by demonstrating that individuals are
prone to become morally dumbfounded (Haidt, 2001; Haidt, Bjorklund, and Murphy,
2000), i.e., they tend to ``stubbornly'' maintain their disapproval of the act
without supporting reasons. In what follows, we critically reassess the
traditional account, predicated on the notion that, among other things, most
subjects simply fail to be convinced that the siblings' actions are truly
harm-free, thus having excellent reasons to disapprove of these acts. In line
with this critique, 3 studies found that 1) tended not to believe that the
siblings' actions were in fact harmless; 2) notwithstanding that, and in spite
of holding a number of ``counterargument-immune'' reasons, subjects could be
effectively maneuvered into exhibiting all the trademark signs of a morally
dumbfounded state (which they subsequently recanted), and 3) with subjects'
beliefs about harm and standards of normative evaluation properly factored in,
a more rigorous assessment procedure yielded a dumbfounding estimate of about
0. Based on these and related results, we contend that subjects' reactions are
wholly in line with the rationalist model of moral judgment and that their use
in support of claims of moral arationalism should be reevaluated.
| Reference Key |
royzman2015thejudgment
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|---|---|
| Authors | Royzman, Edward B.;Kwanwoo Kim, ;F. Leeman, Robert; |
| Journal | judgment and decision making |
| Year | 2015 |
| DOI | DOI not found |
| URL | |
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