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LIT-511: The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment

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Properties4
StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-403), from the author's final manuscript; worth reading as the standard statement of the social intuitionist model, the proximate account of moral judgment that morality-as-cooperation lacks, and as the source of the "harmless wrongs" (consensual incest, sex with a dead chicken) on which the purity and sex objections to cooperative theories rest. Most of its evidence comes from outside the moral domain, which the author says himself: the model is offered as "a plausible alternative", not an established fact.
Tagsmoral-psychology, cognition, emotion-and-affect, social-science
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-403 — Haidt 2001, the social intuitionist model
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-558 — Moral judgment is usually caused by quick affective intuitions, and moral reasoning is usually a post-hoc search for supporting reasons that changes judgments mainly by triggering intuitions in other people, THEORY-632 — Purity is moralized in self-report: in morality-as-cooperation's own questionnaire studies, purity items are rated about as morally relevant as loyalty and authority items, and harmless purity violations are condemned, so that theory's prediction that non-cooperative behaviour is morally neutral fails unless purity is itself cooperative

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Jonathan Haidt (2001), Psychological Review 108(4), 814–834 — DOI-10.1037/0033-295X.108.4.814

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-02 in the morality-as-cooperation batch (ADR-018). It is the oldest of the rivals and the prequel to Moral Foundations Theory, whose founding essay, LIT-502, cites it for the claim that moral judgment is intuitive. No anthology topic holds it, and it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice.

Its bearing on morality-as-cooperation is in two places, both set out in NOTE-403.

  • It is not a rival on function. The paper locates morality “in a group’s efforts to solve cooperation and commitment problems” (p. 18), and maps three of Fiske’s relational models onto kin care, rank and Trivers’ reciprocity. Bloom’s commentary on LIT-047 (read in NOTE-034) says morality-as-cooperation says nothing about proximate mechanisms; this paper is a proximate account and is compatible with a cooperative ultimate one.
  • It supplies the evidence against cooperation’s exclusivity. The harmless-but-condemned cases it reports (incest with contraception, sex with a dead chicken, eating the family dog) are the cases Bloom and the Reply argue over. Baumard, André and Sperber (LIT-508) answer the chicken case with a fairness account of sexual morality; Rai and Fiske (LIT-507) answer the incest case relationally; Schein and Gray (LIT-494) deny that such wrongs are intuitively harmless.

Its gut-feeling mechanism leans on Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis, which the record holds and has read (LIT-384). The Wheatley and Haidt hypnotic-disgust study it reports is one of the findings whose generality the meta-analysis cited in NOTE-132 disputes.

NOTE-403 is the close reading of 2026-10-02, and it placed the work: Active. It is the reference for intuitionism in moral psychology. Its own evidence is mostly borrowed from social cognition, and it says so.

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