Index Errans

person in Black box

1963

Jonathan Haidt

Post-hoc rationalisationConfabulation

in Black box

Jonathan Haidt (b. 1963), American social psychologist. At the University of Virginia when "The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail" (Psychological Review, 2001) appeared, later at NYU's Stern School. He is widely known through The Righteous Mind, Moral Foundations Theory, and books on campus culture and adolescence.

Stake§

Scientific and reputational — an explicit challenge to the rationalist, Kohlberg-descended orthodoxy in moral psychology, and the launch of the research programme he is identified with.

Haidt's contribution to this topic is the social intuitionist model: moral judgments arrive quickly by intuition, and the reasoning people offer is generated afterward to justify a verdict already reached — post-hoc rationalisation. He builds the case partly on moral dumbfounding, where people hold to a judgment while admitting they can give no reason for it. It is the same structure as Nisbett and Wilson's confabulation and the human form of the unfaithful machine reasoning in Turpin.

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ConfabulationConfabulation Post-hoc rationalisationPost-hoc rationalisation

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excerpts

The author gives 4 reasons for considering the hypothesis that moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached.
— The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment (2001)

The social-intuitionist claim: the judgment arrives first, by intuition, and reasoning is recruited afterward to defend it. Moral argument is the [[concept:post-hoc-rationalisation|post-hoc rationalisation]] of a verdict already reached, not the process that reached it.

on Post-hoc rationalisation

It is easier to study verbal reasoning than it is to study emotions and intuitions, but reasoning may be the tail wagged by the dog. The dog itself may turn out to be moral intuitions and emotions…
— The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment (2001)

The title metaphor stated plainly. The visible, reportable part — verbal reasoning — is the tail; the thing that actually moves is the intuition, which the reasoning does not control and cannot fully see.

on Confabulation

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