Manipulating Moral Dumbfounding: Inhibiting the Identification of Reasons

Abstract

Moral dumbfounding occurs when people defend a moral judgement even though they cannot provide a reason in support of this judgement. It manifests as an admission of not having reasons, or the use of unsupported declarations (“it’s just wrong”) or tautological reasons (“because it’s incest”) as justifications for a judgment. We test a dual-processes explanation of moral dumbfounding, where moral dumbfounding is an example of conflict between a habitual response (making a judgement) and a response that results from deliberation (providing a reason for the judgement). The dumbfounding paradigm involves three possible responses: (a) providing reasons for a judgement (deliberative/controlled process); (b) accepting the counter-arguments and rating the behaviour as “not wrong” (habitual/automatic process); (c) a dumbfounded response (habitual/automatic process). Cognitive load manipulations have been shown to inhibit deliberative responding. We present 5 studies in which dumbfounded responding was investigated under cognitive load manipulations. We hypothesised that rates of providing reasons would be reduced under cognitive load. The identification of reasons was inhibited in Studies 1 and 3, but not in Studies 2, 4 or 5. The results provide weak evidence for a dual-process explanation of moral dumbfounding. We found some evidence that dumbfounded responding may be linked with Need for Cognition.