Abstract
Bazerman, Gino, Shu, and Tsay (2011) presented findings about separate versus joint evaluation, which are useful and provocative toward understanding the complexity of moral judgment. The focus of this commentary is the authors’ explanation based on a dichotomy between emotion and cognition. According to the authors, the underlying difference between two response patterns is whether judgment is based on cognition or emotion. This explanation is useful for representing and revealing common misconceptions in moral psychology today. These misconceptions reflect a widespread static and dualistic paradigm, which must be overcome in order for the field to make significant progress and provide more satisfactory accounts of the real-life complexity of moral judgment.
Bazerman et al.’s (2011) explanation presumes that emotion is inherently separate from cognition, as if human experience is divided between an emotional self and a cognitive self. Therefore, it is based on a false dichotomy. For this explanation to be accurate, people must be experiencing very little (if any) reasoning as a causal contributor to moral judgment in single evaluation. Similarly, people must be experiencing emotion inherently isolated from cognition and weak enough to be suppressed by cognition under joint evaluation. These possibilities are unlikely because cognition and emotion are inherently interconnected (Lewis, 2005). The human mind is continuously emotional (Izard, 2011), and emotion has a formative role in cognition (Tucker, 2007). Therefore, there is no such thing as a pure emotion independent of cognition. Nor is there pure cognition isolated from emotional experience. Not only are specific cognitions, such as appraisals, formative in the experience of specific emotions, but also emotions enable and sustain cognitions. For the same set of findings, a more adequate explanation can be found that is not dualistic.
Contrary to the authors’ explanation, I suggest that joint evaluation is at least as emotionally informed as separate evaluation. Likewise, motivation to decide according to one’s best interests is not limited to joint evaluation; it is strongly operative, influencing separate evaluation as well. Participants under separate evaluation judge based on their best interests given their limited information. The absence of alternative possibilities for their consideration does not mean the absence of motivation for their best interest. Nor does it indicate noncognitive or irrational decision making.
The experience of human consciousness is not split into emotion and cognition. Mental activity is unitary, as emotion and cognition are inherently interconnected. In this unified experience, a different type of differentiation is more likely: within a single judgment context, individuals are likely to have multiple motivations in different degrees. Each motivation is cognitive and emotional at the same time. Conflict is not between emotion and cognition, but rather between multiple motivations, each with its own cognitions and emotions. The emerging moral judgment is a synthesis of multiple motivations, reflecting multiple cognitive-emotional evaluations, pulling the individual toward different directions as multiple attractors in a dynamic system. This motivational multiplicity reflects a dynamic intrapsychic organization, consistent with the “cardinal principle of evaluative bivalence” (Berntson, Norman, & Cacioppo, 2011, p. 345).
In each judgment context, varieties of emotions are likely to emerge within person in different degrees, interconnected with specific cognitions. Rather than treating cognition and emotion to be inherently separate, moral psychology would benefit more from examining their dynamic interconnectedness, and turning attention to intrapersonal variability within this unity in terms of multiple motivations. Evidence from affective neuroscience confirms this synergistic functioning (de Oliviera-Souza, Moll, & Grafman, 2011), in which cognitive activity is emotional and inherently motivated (Tucker, 2007). It follows that moral judgment cannot be based on either cognition apart from emotion, or emotion apart from cognition. Rather, it is motivated based on their dynamic interactions. This formulation resonates with Izard’s (2011) emotion schemas as dynamic cognition–emotion interactions, “motivating the decision making and actions of everyday life” (p. 371).
Variation in moral judgment cannot be understood with a dichotomy. The difference between single evaluation and joint evaluation is not reliance on emotion versus cognition, but rather, different configurations of multiple motivations.