Haidt’s “Emotional Dog” has three legs, a broken tail, and fleas
The Three-Legged Dog
In 2001, Jonathan Haidt published a paper called The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment. It has gone on to be his most cited paper and underpins much of his subsequent, highly influential work. Unfortunately, it is fatally flawed. In the next few articles, I will discuss how one of the four reasons given for doubting the influence of reasoning on morality is self-defeating; I will demonstrate that the attack on reasoning is, at best, broken; and, finally, I will note a number of smaller issues, including those that have the effect of damaging Haidt’s own defence against other critiques of his paper.
which contains the brilliant single Better Get a Lawyer
(none of which has anything to do with this article, but there’s a
surprising lack of three-legged dog pictures on Unsplash, Pexels, etc.)
Jonathan Haidt
Jonathan Haidt is probably best known, outside of academic psychology, for his book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. The popularity of this book led to the usual array of talks, including a TED Talk (or several). However, Haidt’s first TED Talk was in 2008, four years before The Righteous Mind was published. In the years just prior to that talk, and for several years after, Haidt and others who have become his regular co-authors published a number of papers building Moral Foundations Theory.
Moral Foundations Theory is what The Righteous Mind is about. It is also what Haidt’s 2008 TED Talk is about. Haidt is an engaging speaker, and I encourage you to check out his talk (YouTube). It is unfortunate, however, that Haidt misrepresented his own findings in that talk (and others like it). Just prior to the halfway mark, he points to a graph (Figure 1, below) and states that liberals reject three of the five moral foundations — namely authority, in-group and purity — whereas conservatives use all five. This is a big claim, probably intended to shock, given that Haidt had already established that the audience in the auditorium was heavily skewed towards the politically liberal.
(image from Wikipedia, apparently screen-grabbed from that TED talk)
As we can see in the graph, liberals don’t disregard authority, in-group and purity. On a scale of zero to five, they score them at around two, slightly more than half of the ratings for harm and fairness. Conservatives score all five at between three and three-and-a-half. (Whilst not the topic of this article, there is a fruitful discussion to be had about the implications of holding authority or in-group to be as important or more important than harm/fairness.)
As well as being an engaging speaker, Jonathan Haidt is an engaging writer. The paper I am critiquing here is a much more enjoyable read than many articles on the topic (including the one you are currently reading). I encourage you to download his paper, even if only so you can check my critique against the original. The paper develops the Social Intuitionist Model which underpins Moral Foundations Theory; because those foundations are applied intuitively. As such, humans need to be intuitionists in order to use moral foundations in the ways that Haidt suggests.
As this paper precedes and underpins Moral Foundations Theory — a theory that has become very influential in moral psychology — I think it is important to raise these issues. Issues, I might add, that were true at the time, as I will show by primarily citing work that was published prior to 2001. What follows is based on my Master’s research, but I will also cite various academics that have critiqued the paper in question, such as Pizarro and Bloom (2003), Saltzstein and Kasachkoff (2004), and Cordelia Fine (2006). Haidt responds to the first two of those critiques directly, so his responses will be taken into account here. I have focussed on critiques published between 2001 and 2007 — i.e. prior to the TED Talk and well prior to the publishing of The Righteous Mind.
Haidt’s “Emotional Dog” has three legs
Of great anatomical importance to a dog, and of similar significance to Haidt’s paper, is its legs. Haidt proposes the following four legs for his Emotional Dog:
[Recent relevant] findings offer four reasons for doubting the causality of reasoning in moral judgment: [1] There are two cognitive processes at work — reasoning and intuition — and the reasoning process has been overemphasized; [2] reasoning is often motivated; [3] the reasoning process constructs post hoc justifications, yet we experience the illusion of objective reasoning; and [4] moral action covaries with moral emotion more than with moral reasoning. (p. 815)
I have problems with all four legs, but the fourth leg is actually broken. In describing it, Haidt, referencing Blasi (1980), states that intelligence and moral reasoning are correlated and that moral reasoning ability is predictive of those that refrain from immoral behaviour, but is not predictive of those that engage in pro-social moral behaviour. It is curious that Haidt omits ability from his description of the fourth leg. That might prove to be important.
Citing Cialdini (1991), Haidt notes that people engage in pro-social moral behaviour due to empathy, sadness, guilt and shame. Guilt and shame both imply that the moral agent believes they have engaged in some kind of immoral action for which reparation is due. The same may sometimes be the case for sadness. In other cases, though, this sadness (and other emotions) may be empathic: becoming aware of someone’s misfortune and in some sense feeling how they feel leads one to engage in pro-social moral behaviour. While emotion might be the motivator of pro-social moral behaviour, it is probably quite common to actually think about how you are going to make amends. Both guilt and shame tell you that you have done something wrong, not necessarily how to make it right. As such, even if it is true that intelligence and moral reasoning ability are not predictive of pro-social moral behaviour that does not mean that (possibly deficient) moral reasoning does not underpin the specific pro-social moral behaviour in question, indeed, it seems unlikely that it could be any other way.
Haidt does say, “Blasi was careful to state that the connection between moral reasoning ability and moral behavior is only a correlation” (p. 823, emphasis mine). As such, Haidt proposes a variable — the strength of the cool system — that might sit in between and explain the relationship. In talking about this, Haidt references a paper by Kochanska, Murray, Jacques, Koenig and Vandegeest (1996). I am unable to access that particular paper, unfortunately, however, the cool (or cold) system is generally considered to be one that is independent of emotional involvement (American Psychological Association [APA]: cold cognition), as distinct from the hot system (APA: hot cognition).
Haidt attempts to rescue the point by saying:
The development of the cool system does not represent the triumph of reasoning over emotion; rather, Metcalfe and Mischel (1999, p. 16) see the successful development and integration of the cool system as an essential feature of emotional intelligence. (p. 824)
I think this is a paradigm case of what Daniel Dennett calls rathering (using the word “rather” to obscure a false dichotomy or an uncertain conclusion).
The term emotional intelligence was coined by Peter Salovey and John Mayer (1990):
…a set of skills hypothesized to contribute to the accurate appraisal and expression of emotion in oneself and in others, the effective regulation of emotion in self and others, and the use of feelings to motivate, plan, and achieve in one’s life.
The fact that the definition of emotional intelligence contains “appraisal”, “effective regulation” and “plan”, suggests at least some conscious processes. Conscious processes that are part of the cool system. A cool system that is an “essential feature” of emotional intelligence.
This involvement of the cool system in the appraisal of emotional queues through emotional intelligence, for the regulation and planning of one’s own behaviour, brings it under Haidt’s definition of reasoning and does nothing to help Haidt’s claim about the status of intuition as it relates to moral judgment. Indeed, the “integration of the cool system” that Haidt mentions seems exactly like reasoning taking on a causal role in moral judgment (more on this in part two). If one’s reasoning abilities are poor and one can’t resolve conflicting emotional cues, it seems probable that the result is frustration, or maybe even anger, leading to behaviour that will require pro-social moral behaviour later.
If human morality is all it’s cracked up to be, the cool system’s overriding of immoral impulses from the hot system should be the main way it is expressed. Whether the means of making amends is reasoned to (as suggested above) or grasped intuitively, the cool system’s overriding of the hot system before immoral action takes place should relegate the pro-social aspect of moral behaviour to a distant second in terms of the frequency of moral cognitions. A society made up of people constantly making amends for immoral actions would be significantly less functional than a society made up of individuals overriding immoral impulses in the first place.
To remind you, the Emotional Dog’s fourth leg, reads:
moral action covaries with moral emotion more than with moral reasoning [ability]
This needs to be restated as being, at the very least, broken in two (the original text of Haidt’s claim is in regular type, my additions are in bold-italic):
- The moral action of over-riding immoral impulses covaries with the degree to which moral emotion is integrated m̵o̵r̵e̵ ̵t̵h̵a̵n̵ with moral reasoning [ability]
- Pro-social moral action covaries with moral emotion, such as empathy, sadness, guilt and shame, more than with moral reasoning
Version 1 is the exact opposite of Haidt’s thesis, and version 2 is a nothing burger; it describes a small part of the totality of moral behaviour with nowhere near the importance of the original claim.
This leg is not just broken, but shattered, it will not heal cleanly; it is in the interest of the Emotional Dog’s health that we amputate it.
In the next article, I will address The Emotional Dog’s Rational tail.
