The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment

The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment

Haidt, Jonathan*
Psychological Review 108, no. 4 (2001): 814
https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.108.4.814

* Professor at New York University

“Psychologists...freed themselves from the worship of reason in the late 19th century, when they abandoned the armchair and went into the laboratory. Until the cognitive revolution of the 1960s, the major schools of psychology did not see reason as the master of anything, and their views on morality were compatible with Hume’s emphasis on emotions. Freud saw people’s judgments as driven by unconscious motives and feelings, which are then rationalized with publicly acceptable reasons. The behaviorists also saw moral reasoning as epiphenomenal in the production of moral behavior, explaining morality as the acts that a society happens to reward or punish.

But then came Lawrence Kohlberg....”

— Jonathan Haidt