New Year's Resolution: Go With Our Gut
January 2012
Pete Ditto, Department Chair and Professor of Psychology and Social Behavior, shares his recommended New Year's resolution in Yahoo News Canada.
The emerging view in psychology is that morality is something we feel more than think. Rather than reasoning our way to decide what is right and what is wrong, there is now overwhelming evidence to suggest that moral evaluations are "gut" reactions that we justify after the fact with what seem like principled arguments. This simple truth is the source of both humankind's most ennobling acts of kindness and some of its most-callous and malicious misdeeds. Ditto's suggestion to friends is to turn the emotional table by submitting judgments to the "shoe on the other foot test." When faced with a difficult moral choice, ask yourself how you would feel and what you would do if a victim of misfortune was your loved one, or the perpetrator of some morally questionable act was you.