This is the manuscript that was published, with only minor copy-editing alterations, as: Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review. 108, 814-834 Copyright 2001, American Psychological Association To obtain a reprint of the final type-set article, please go through your library’s journal services, or contact the author directly Research on moral judgment has been dominated by rationalist models, in which moral judgment is thought to be caused by moral reasoning. Four reasons are given for considering the hypothesis that moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post-hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached. The social intuitionist model is presented as an alternative to rationalist models. The model is a social model in that it de-emphasizes the private reasoning done by individuals, emphasizing instead the importance of social and cultural influences. The model is an intuitionist model in that it states that moral judgment is generally the result of quick, automatic evaluations (intuitions). The model is more consistent than rationalist models with recent findings in social, cultural, evolutionary, and biological psychology, as well as anthropology and primatology. Author notes

When an observer detects a target in a rapid stream of visual stimuli, there is a brief period of time during which the detection of subsequent targets is impaired. In this study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from normal adult observers to determine whether this "attentional blink " reflects a suppression of perceptual processes or an impairment in postperceptual processes. No suppression was observed during the attentional blink interval for ERP components corresponding to sensory processing (the P1 and N1 components) or semantic analysis (the N400 component). However, complete suppression was observed for an ERP component that has been hypothesized to reflect the updating of working memory (the P3 component). Results indicate that the attentional blink reflects an impairment in a postperceptual stage of processing. Over the past several decades, the vast majority of studies of visual attention have examined the operation of attention across space. In the visual search task, for example, a target item must be detected within an array of distractor items that are presented at different locations from the target. In recent

In 4 experiments, subjects classified visually presented target words as pleasant-unpleasant words or male-female first names. Prime words were similar (congruent) or dissimilar (incongruent) in meaning to targets. Brief duration of prime words (17, 33, or 50 ms), along with pre- and postmasking, prevented most subjects from perceiving their physical and semantic properties. By constraining response latencies to fall within a response window-a narrow time band that occurred earlier than subjects would ordinarily respond-these experiments consistently produced subliminal priming effects, indicated by greater error rates for incongruent than congruent priming trials. This conclusion was confirmed by analyzing magnitude of priming as a regression function of prime perceptibility using the method of A. G. Greenwald, M. R. Klinger, and E. S. Schuh (1995). The data of each experiment passed their significant-intercept criterion for demonstrating unconscious cognition. In the past decade, cognitive psychologists have been increasingly willing to discuss theories of unconscious cognition. This receptiveness is associated with a series of methodological advances that have led to an increasing variety of demonstrations of unconscious cognition (e.g.,

The O.J. Simpson “trial of the century ” in the mid-1990s captured the attention of the American populace more than any other public spectacle since the kidnaping of the Lindberg baby in the 1920s. A prominent football player and popular sportscaster was charged with a gruesome double homicide. The attorneys for the prosecution and defense were of various races and genders. The evidence presented on each side was at times amazingly simple, visual, and emotional, and at times was verbal, abstract, and probably incomprehensible to jurors. The witnesses included individuals of diverse styles, demeanors, and credibility. The jurors, the recipients of the messages from these various sources, were themselves a mixed group of people of diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and personal experiences who had to sift through the trial material and arrive at a decision as to whether the defendant had been proven guilty or not. The context in which all of this took place was at times tense and sad, and at times filled with humor and positive feelings. Not surprisingly, no experiment has ever captured the extraordinary complexity inherent in this situation, yet almost all of the variables present in this trial (and many not present) have been examined in the social psychological literature on attitude formation and change. This chapter provides an overview of research on these diverse variables and addresses the processes by which these variables are thought to result in influence. Although it has become a cliché to say that the attitude construct is the most indispensable concept in

Recent research has established several empirical results that are widely agreed to merit description in terms of unconscious cognition. These findings come from experiments that use indirect tests for immediate or long-term residues of barely perceptible, perceptible-but-unattended, or attended-but-forgotten events. Importantly, these wellestablished phenomena-insofar as they occur without initially involving focal attention-are limited to relatively minor cognitive feats. Unconscious cognition is now solidly established in empirical research, but it appears to be intellectually much simpler than the sophisticated agency portrayed in psychoanalytic theory. The strengthened position of unconscious cognitive phenomena can be related to their jit with the developing neural network (connectionist) theoretical framework in psychology. A familiar theme in academic psychology has been that psychoanalytic conceptions of unconscious cognition lack empirical confirmation. ' This skeptical view-which partly explains the omission of the topic of unconscious cognition from many textbooks, and even the omission of the word unconscious from the vocabularies of many psychologists-was prevalent in the 1950s, when concerted empirical research (the New Look, starting with Bruner & Postman, 1947) ultimately subsided with much achieved, but without any convincing evidence for psychoanalytic-inspired conceptions of unconscious influences on per~eption.~ Erdelyi (1974) initiated a second New Look, making a strong case for theoretical connections between cognitive psychology and psychoanalytic conceptions of unconscious cognition. Although New Look 2's rapprochement of psychoanalytic and cognitive theory remains an active

The role of unconscious and conscious thought in decision making was investigated in 5 experiments. Because of the low processing capacity of consciousness, conscious thought was hypothesized to be maladaptive when making complex decisions. Conversely, unconscious thought was expected to be highly effective. In Experiments 1–3, participants were presented with a complex decision problem in which they had to choose between various alternatives, each with multiple attributes. Some participants had to make a decision immediately after being presented with the options. In the conscious thought condition, participants could think about the decision for a few minutes. In the unconscious thought condition, participants were distracted for a few minutes and then indicated their decision. Throughout the experiments, unconscious thinkers made the best decisions. Additional evidence obtained in Experiments 4 and 5 suggests that unconscious thought leads to clearer, more polarized, and more integrated representations in memory. When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters however... the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves.

According to a two-step account of the mere-exposure effect, repeated exposure leads to the subjective feeling of perceptual fluency, which in turn influences liking. If so, perceptual fluency manipulated by means other than repetition should influence liking. In three experiments, effects of perceptual fluency on affective judgments were examined. In Experiment 1, higher perceptual fluency was achieved by presenting a matching rather than nonmatching prime before showing a target picture. Participants judged targets as prettier if preceded by a matching rather than nonmatching prime. In Experiment 2, perceptual fluency was manipulated by figure-ground contrast. Stimuli were judged as more pretty, and less ugly, the higher the contrast. In Experiment 3, perceptual fluency was manipulated by presentation duration. Stimuli shown for a longer duration were liked more, and disliked less. We conclude (a) that perceptual fluency increases liking and (b) that the experience of fluency is affectively positive, and hence attributed to positive but not to negative features, as reflected in a differential impact on positive and negative judgments.

Ever since William James, psychologists of emotion have tended to view affective states as intrinsically conscious. We argue that nonconscious affect also exists, and focus specifically on the possibility of unconscious ``liking''. We present evidence that positive and negative affective reactions can be elicited subliminally, while a person is completely unaware of any affective reaction at all �in addition to being unaware of the causal stimulus). Despite the absence of any detectable subjective experience of emotion, subliminally induced unconscious ``liking' ' can influence later consumption behaviour. We suggest that unconscious ``liking' ' is mediated by specific subcortical brain systems, such as the nucleus accumbens and its connections. Ordinarily, conscious liking �feelings of pleasure) results from the interaction of separate brain systems of conscious awareness with those core processes of unconscious affect. But under some conditions, activity in brain systems mediating unconscious core ``liking' ' may become decoupled from conscious awareness. The result is a genuinely unconscious emotion. We begin with apologies to William James for having stolen the title of our paper from his classic article, ``What is an emotion' ' �James, 1884). Worse still, by inserting ``unconscious' ' as a modifier, our title distorts his concept of emotion in a way that renders it almost nonsensical. This is because an unconscious emotion was a contradiction in terms, according to James ' �1884) definition. For James, emotion was a conscious experience or subjective feeling

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Implicit learning is generally characterized as learning that proceeds both unintentionally and unconsciously. Here are some examples: 1 Reber (1967), who coined the term ‘implicit learning’, asked participants to study a series of letter strings such as VXVS for a few seconds each. Then he told them that these strings were all constructed according to a particular set of rules (that is, a grammar; see Figure 8.1) and that in the test phase they would see some new strings and would have to decide which ones conformed to the same rules and which ones did not. Participants could make these decisions with better-than-chance accuracy but had little ability to describe the rules. For example, participants could not recall correctly which letters began and ended the strings. Reber described his results as a ‘peculiar combination of highly efficient behavior with complex stimuli and almost complete lack of verbalizable knowledge about them ’ (p. 859). 2 In the 1950s, a number of studies asked people to generate words ad libitum and established that the probability with which they would produce, say, plural nouns was increased if each such word was reinforced by the experimenter saying ‘umhmm ’ (e.g. Greenspoon, 1955). This result occurred in subjects apparently unable to report the reinforcement contingency. 3 Svartdal (1991) presented participants with brief trains of between 4 and 17 auditory clicks. Participants immediately had to press a response button exactly the same number of times and were instructed that feedback would be presented when the number of presses matched the number of clicks. In fact, though, feedback was contingent on speed of responding: for some