HEURISTICS, BIASES, AND PHILOSOPHY... The basic version of the problem asks people to imagine that they see five passengers on a runaway trolley, headed for certain destruction.

The basic version of the problem asks people to imagine that they see five passengers on a runaway trolley, headed for certain destruction. They can save these five by throwing a switch that would divert the trolley to a safe course, saving the five passengers, but the diversion will end up killing one bystander who happens to be standing on the safe route. The problem thus asks people if they will act in a way that kills one but saves five. Most people struggle, but agree that they would divert the trolley. But if the hypothetical is altered so that the only way to stop the trolley is by pushing a portly individual off of a footbridge onto the tracks so as to stop the trolley, fewer agree to sacrifice the one to save the five. The hypothetical is designed to illustrate the greater moral dilemma associated with direct, forceful action. Moral Heuristicsis not such a piece. It brings some psychological research to bear on legal issues, but the piece is more ambitious than that. It provides a new way for both psychologists and legal scholars to think about the concept of heuristics. It then uses this new approach to challenge the basic epistemological assumptions of contemporary moral philosophy. The basic thesis of Moral Heuristics is that people rely on simple habits of the mind when thinking about moral issues. As in many areas of life, they do not adhere to principles of deductive logic. They resist relying on broad-based optimization strategies (such as cost-benefit analysis) as a means of addressing hard moral questions in favor of simple rules of thumb. For example, Sunstein argues that people avoid making decisions that they know will result in the death of another person. This is a good principle to follow, of course, but blind application of it can lead to paradox because some fatalities are more invisible than others. The principle can produce condemnation of those who account for less visible, indirect fatalities, as happens in cost-benefit analysis. Cost- benefit analysis makes indirect fatalities transparent, thereby making those who rely on it seem callous, even if they are trying to minimize the total fatality rate. Intuitions about moral issues, he contends, are no more apt to be coherent than intuitions about probability theory. Therefore, founding a normative theory of moral philosophy upon intuition is just as misguided as founding mathematics on intuition. And yet, that is exactly what contemporary moral philosophers undertake. The primary methodological approach at the time was to study the ways that memory and perception might go astray. For example, psychologists studying memory found that when they presented people with lists of words to memorize, people more easily remember them. From this pattern, psychologists inferred that memory includes a short-term storage buffer with limited capacity. At the beginning of the list, the short-term buffer is not yet fully engaged, and hence, it can be used for active rehearsal of the words. At the end of the list, the buffer is not clouded with subsequent words and can be used to facilitate the transfer of the words into long-term storage. The errors in memory, in effect, guide the cognitive theory ofhow memory works. Cognitive psychologists assumed that human memory does not work the same way as a tape recorder, but they also reasoned that the departures from the concept of human memory as a tape recorder could provide insights into the underlying cognitive systems supporting memory. Likewise, cognitive psychologists studying human judgment and choice rejected the idea that human judgment and choice perfectly followed deductive logic and rationality, but they also reasoned that departures from this vision of human judgment would give clues as to how these systems actually worked. And thus, the methodology that produced insights into
the understanding of memory and perception should produce insights into understanding ofjudgment and choice as well. The heuristics and biases approach to assessing human judgment has extraordinary strengths. It provides a simple, inexpensive methodology for studying human judgment and decision making. It also capitalizes on the enormous success of the cognitive psychology of memory and perception in documenting how the brain functions. But, it also inspires criticisms. It arguably fails to account for variations in human ability in judgment, fails to account for motivated reasoning processes, and simply makes people seem too inept. People with different cultural worldviews may well experience betrayal in different settings. The idea that people react negatively to betrayal itself allows for such variations, making it easier to see how this heuristic is compatible with the research on cultural cognition than the representativeness heuristic. Handgun owners might not feel the betrayal of a gun accident (or they might feel more betrayed because they see the gun as a precaution not as a weapon), whereas handgun opponents might deem a handgun accident an ironic betrayal (or might feel that the owner got what was expected). Research on the representativeness heuristic suggests that to the extent to which activities resemble dangerous undertakings, people treat them as if they are dangerous, regardless of the underlying risk. But such treatment fails to account for variations in how individuals assess risk. Betrayal aversion, by contrast, has variation built in. Furthermore, the idea of betrayal aversion is one that proponents of ecological rationality can support much more easily than the representativeness heuristic. Evolutionary psychologists, in particular, argue that humans have an ancestral need to be highly vigilant against betrayal. Cooperation was essential to the survival of hunter- gatherer bands of human ancestors, but cooperative undertakings are vulnerable to exploitation by a defector. Human ancestors who were known to react strongly and punish betrayal aggressively likely deterred defection, therebyfacilitating productive cooperation within their group. Ancestors known to tolerate defection would attract defectors who would destroy group cohesiveness. Such accounts might be little more than "just so" stories, but the idea of a universally strong reaction to betrayal at least seems to have some advantages in social settings. Thus, it is easier to square with an ecological rationality than some of the more general heuristics. Koehler and Gershoff, Like betrayal aversion, the prohibition against deliberately causing another's death fits well with ecological rationality. Only in a vastly more interconnected modem world do humans face the moral consequences of indirectly causing each other harm through action (voting for a political candidate who starts a war that produces collateral injury to civilians) and inaction (failing to donate to charity that cannot save lives as a consequence of lack of funding). The human brain evolved to process a much smaller social universe than we face today. But in ordinary social settings, the prohibition against directly causing death functions as a sensible way of deciding how to act. It has been a great puzzle for psychologists studying judgment and choice, in fact, that intuition about probability and deductive logic deviates so markedly from logical principles. The discrepancy between the answers people's intuition produces and the teachings ofdeductive logic underlies some ofthe backlash against the early literature on heuristics and biases. It has led many to embrace ecological rationality, as discussed above. But most have simply accepted that intuition and deductive logic are not the same, and conclude that it is extremely difficult to develop a unified theory of human judgment and choice that is both descriptively accurate and normatively logical. If that is correct, then relying on intuition to construct a system of logic, probability, or mathematics would be deeply misguided.

scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

Taken on: May 25, 2024

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