Factors Guiding Moral Judgment Reason Decision and Action

Different researches have been carried out to show how people make moral judgment and how the process of moral judgment is intertwined with other cognitive processes. Powell and Horne’s empirical paper “moral severity is presented as a domain general magnitude”. They carry out investigation to show how severity of moral transgression is psychologically represented by measuring participant’s response times. These response times obtained two signatures of domain general magnitude comparisons suggesting that moral severity is presented in a similar fashion as other continuous magnitudes, therefore not represented in a unique domain specific way. Cold and hot cognition The previous experiments on the coherence effect have one limitation, which is, their measures pertained only to what has been called the ‘cold cognition’ namely, interpretations of facts, probabilistic judgments, evaluations of attributes, analogies and many more.

People feel anger toward a person who is appraised to have caused an adverse event and sympathy towards someone who is deemed to be a victim. Different theoretical frameworks for connecting cold and hot cognition have been advanced in the form of simulation models grounded in constraint satisfaction processing. Paul proposed a model named HOTCO in which each decision alternative is coupled with a node representing the likability or desirability of the corresponding decision thus forming an overall state of emotional coherence. The goal of the current studies is to extend the coherence effect to include the hot cognition so as to test whether the process of reaching judgment and making decisions result in a global state of coherence where those judgment and decisions fit together harmoniously with the myriad of both hot and cold cognition involved in the task.