Joshua Rottman

Cultural influences on the teleological stance: evidence from China

ABSTRACT Recent research has suggested that humans have a robust tendency to default to teleological (i.e., purpose-based) explanations of natural phenomena. However, because samples have previously been heavily drawn from Western cultures, it is unclear whether this is a universal cognitive bias or whether prior findings are a product of Western philosophical and theological traditions. We evaluated these possibilities by administering a speeded judgment task to adults in China – a country that underwent nearly 40 years of institutionally enforced atheism in the Maoist era and which has markedly different cultural beliefs than those found in Western societies. Results indicated that Chinese adults, like Western adults, have a propensity to favor scientifically unwarranted teleological explanations under processing constraints. However, results also yielded suggestive evidence that Chinese culture may attenuate baseline tendencies to be teleological. Overall, this study provides the strongest evidence to date of the cross-cultural robustness of a teleological explanatory bias.

The Big ‘Whoops!’ in the Study of Intentional Behavior: An Appeal for a New Framework in Understanding Human Actions

AbstractDistinguishing intentional behavior from accidental behavior is a crucial component of social cognition and a major developmental achievement. It has often been assumed that developmental changes in intentional reasoning result from a gradual sophistication in the ability to discern intentions in action. We take issue with this notion, demonstrating that data from cognitive, developmental, and social psychology are more consistent with the hypothesis that it is instead a gradual sophistication in the ability to understand accidents that drives developmental change.

Evolution, development, and the emergence of disgust.

Evolutionary developmental psychology typically utilizes an evolutionary lens to explain various phenomena that occur throughout development. In this paper, I argue that the converse is also important: Developmental evidence can inform evolutionary theory. In particular, knowledge about the developmental origins of a psychological trait can be used to evaluate theoretical claims about its evolved function. I use the emotion of disgust as a case study to illustrate this approach. Disgust is commonly thought to be a behavioral adaptation for avoiding the ingestion of pathogens. Given this claim, disgust should be expected to develop at a time when humans are especially vulnerable to the dangers of ingesting pathogens, during the immediate post-weaning period from about 3 to 5 years of age. Despite a strong selective pressure at this point in development, research has suggested that the emotion of disgust and the recognition of the “disgust face” do not reliably emerge until later in ontogeny, at 5 years of age or after. Given the late developmental appearance of disgust, I re-evaluate claims about its adaptive role.

Comment: Scholarly Disgust and Related Mysteries

Strohminger (2014) is revolted by McGinn’s (2011) book, The Meaning of Disgust. We argue that her reaction of repugnance highlights one of the greatest mysteries in the psychology of disgust: this emotion is at times elicited by abstract ideological concerns rather than physical threats of infection or contamination. Here we describe the theoretical challenge of accounting for nonpathogenic disgust elicitors, which include spiritual defilement, violations of the “natural order,” and, apparently, McGinn’s latest publication.

The impact of testimony on children’s moralization of novel actions.

What leads children to moralize actions that cause no apparent harm? We hypothesized that adults’ verbal instruction (“testimony”), as well as emotions such as disgust, would influence children’s moralization of apparently harmless actions. To test this hypothesis, 7-year-old children were asked to render moral judgments of novel, seemingly victimless, body-directed or nature-directed actions after being exposed to adults’ testimony or to an emotional induction. Study 1 demonstrated that children became more likely to judge actions as “wrong” upon being verbally presented with testimony about disgust or anger—but not upon being directly induced to feel disgusted. Study 2 established that principle-based testimony is an even more powerful source of moralization, and additionally found long-term retention of newly formed moral beliefs. These studies also indicated that children frequently lack introspective insight into the sources of their newly acquired moral reactions; they often invoked welfare-based concerns in their explanations regardless of experimental condition. In sum, this research demonstrates that children rapidly and enduringly moralize entirely unfamiliar, apparently innocuous actions upon exposure to a diverse array of morally relevant testimony.

Purity matters more than harm in moral judgments of suicide: Response to Gray (2014)

Many people judge suicide to be immoral. We have found evidence that these moral judgments are primarily predicted by peoples belief that suicide taints the soul and by independent concerns about purity. This finding is inconsistent with accounts that define morality as fundamentally based upon harm considerations. In this commentary, we respond to a critique of our finding, and we provide further support for our original conclusions. Even when applying new exclusion criteria to our data, an examination of effect sizes demonstrates that concerns about purity robustly and meaningfully explain variance in moral judgments of suicide. While harm concerns sometimes predict moral judgments of suicide alongside purity concerns, they reliably explain a much smaller proportion of the variance than do purity concerns. Therefore, data from six studies continue to suggest that the relevance of harm concerns for moral judgments of suicide is substantially overshadowed by the contribution of purity concerns.

Which Appraisals Are Foundational to Moral Judgment? Harm, Injustice, and Beyond

Harm-centric accounts of judgments of moral wrongdoing argue that moral judgments are fundamentally based on appraisals of harm. However, past research has failed to operationally discriminate harm appraisals from appraisals related to injustice. Four studies carefully discriminated harm qua pain/suffering from injustice, alongside appraisals related to impurity, authority, and disloyalty. Appraisals of injustice outperformed appraisals of harm as independent predictors of the judged wrongness of recalled offenses (Study 1). Studies 2a, 2b, and 3 extended these findings using a diverse range of wrongful acts and two different cultural samples—the United States and Greece. In addition to the strong relevance of injustice appraisals, these latter studies uncovered substantial contributions of impurity and authority appraisals. The results inform debates on moral pluralism and the foundations of moral cognition.