An Evolutionary Science Perspective on Intuition, Rationality, Conflict, and Moral Judgments

Moral judgments can be the result of cognitive deliberations, which develop with age and socialization. Rationality began in humans with the development of the cerebral cortex. Alternatively, they can be the based-on survival mechanisms emanating in the sympathetic nervous based on innate, survival mechanisms (fight, flight, freeze) and the amygdala. Common examples are road rage (e.g., I was right while the other driver was wrong, cut me off, and could have killed me) and hold-your-ground state laws for self-defense (the victim was justified in killing the intruder, even though the intruder had no weapon when reaching into their coat pocket). Moral decision making can be based on an innate survival mechanism. Those who did this did not survive and were not our ancestors. This chapter reviews the research on signal detection theory, how aggression is favored over conciliation, as cognitive reasoning breaks down. Physiological studies involving the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system are reviewed in terms of the amygdala and emotional intelligence.

COVIDiots and Cogency

The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States spawns a perplexing polemic. Intransigent coronavirus skeptics who defy public health recommendations often get cast as ideological zealots or as perniciously ignorant. Both characterizations overlook a more fundamental epistemic opposition. The authors recast the conflict between COVID-19 skeptics and public health advocates as the rhetorical incompatibility between the deliberative, scientifically grounded public health experts and the intuitive, emotion-driven mental heuristics of the non-compliant. This study examines the discourse of COVID-19 misinformation purveyors on broadcast media and online. Their main contentions rely on heuristics and biases that collectively not only undermine trust in particular medical experts, but also undercut trust in the institutions and reasoning processes of science itself. The findings suggest ways that public health campaigns can become more effective by leveraging some of the intuitive drivers of attitudes and behaviors that scientists and argumentation theorists routinely dismiss as fallacious.

‘First Listen to My Voice'

This chapter offers to illuminate some of the complex relations between conscious, rational, higher order human functions and unconscious and intuitive processes, especially in the context of teaching and learning of higher order thinking. The chapter will consider dialogical models, especially those of Richard Paul and Mikhail Bakhtin, for teaching and learning of higher order thinking, which take into account these complex relations, and aims at optimizing higher order thinking skills and dispositions, without neglecting human's emotional side and their need for authentic self-expression.

Facts or Feelings?

The social intuitionist model has significant implications for the study of communication. Specifically, this chapter argues that the social intuitionist model reveals the limitations of rational argument and illustrates factors contributing to misinformation. This argument is developed through a series of four observations. First, communicators have attempted to combat misinformation through rational argument. Second, centuries of interdisciplinary insights revealing the intuitive nature of human decision-making cast doubt on strategies that appeal to audiences primarily through facts and reason. Third, application of the social intuitionist model to contemporary American politics can help explain several puzzling dynamics, including the appeal of Donald Trump and the persistence of misinformation. Fourth, communication scholarship can be improved through greater recognition of the influence of intuition upon decision-making. This chapter concludes by proposing ways that emotional narratives can be used to bridge gaps between public opinion and expert consensus.

Risky Jews

Focusing on many previously untranslated articles in popular national magazines and newspapers, as well as works by prominent racial theorists, this chapter traces how outrage was systematically fomented against Jews in Nazi-era Germany, creating perceived imperatives for drastic discriminatory measures. Rather than locate the core of Nazi antisemitism in historical or psychological factors, this study approaches antisemitism using the theoretical framework of risk communication. The heuristics of risk perception reveal an array of rhetorical tactics that fomented visceral aversion impervious to logical refutation. Portraying Jews as embodying maximal and uncontrollable risk, political, academic, and mass media discourse converged on the theme of Jews as posing unacceptable dangers that required progressively more drastic measures to control. The principles of risk communication, especially the means of inflaming outrage, could furnish useful interpretive frames for analyzing current antisemitism and other types of repressive discourse.

Trumping Reason

Why does support for Donald Trump remain resilient despite the preponderance of arguments and evidence that should refute so many of his claims? The answer lies in how Trump's rhetoric fully embraces intuitively based rationales for allegiance. This chapter analyzes Donald Trump's rhetoric throughout his campaign and presidency through the lens of moral foundations theory, which identifies clusters of value commitments that correlate with political allegiance. Trump activates connections with foundational values of his constituents through specific heuristic devices, especially loss aversion, availability, and representativeness. Synthesizing behavioral economics with the dramatistic rhetorical theories of Kenneth Burke reveals how Trump's claims resist counterargument and what rhetorical resources offer potential avenues for alternative positions to gain traction.

Listening Fast and Slow

Like other constructs studied by communication scientists, listening has been viewed as a predominantly deliberate process that requires considerable cognitive resources to perform well. Listening, contrasted with hearing as a more passive mode of information processing, requires a person to actively receive, process, and sensibly respond to aural information. The emphasis on deliberate processing might perhaps have been fueled by research in social psychology, from which much communication theory is drawn. That literature has emphasized rational, deliberate processing at the expense of a more intuitive mode that tends to be viewed as inferior in human decision making and grounded much more in emotions. Using a general dual-process framework, the authors argue that an intuitive, experiential system plays a much more important role in the listening process than previously recognized. They lay out their rationale and model for experiential listening and discuss ways in which people can improve their intuitive listening through mindfulness-based metacognitive practices.

Fake News?

Critical thinking is an essential skill in education and daily decision making. Research shows, however, that human brains are not designed to engage in complex cognitive processes such as critical thinking. Social intuition theorists propose that most people make fast and intuitive judgment for a given situation, then conduct post-hoc reasoning to support one's intuitive decision. Very few people engage in reasoned judgment and reflection, which are key elements of critical thinking. The chapter will examine what critical thinking is, its key features, a closely-related concept information literacy, and challenges of teaching critical thinking skills through the lens of social intuition theory. Advances in cognitive psychology are reviewed to help understand how the brain works, the challenges of engaging in critical thinking, and identify relevant strategies accordingly. The chapter will also include suggested strategies in education to improve critical thinking skills.

Individual Journalistic Bias Leads to Public Propaganda

The social intuitionist model (SIM) highlights the superiority of intuitive emotions over reasoning process in the link of moral judgment and reasoning, addressing the issues of private or individual intuitions of moral judgments on an interpersonal communication level. While the SIM can be applied to explain why journalists are biased and prone to producing intuitive news stories, the hierarchy of influences model (HIM) offers a theoretical framework that affects media content, which journalists and media organizations create in a social and cultural approach to propaganda. This chapter explores how the integration of SIM and HIM demonstrates the path to propagandistic news stories manufactured by intuitive journalists and their biased news outlets on the macro social structure level.

“Calling Bullshit”

This chapter reports an original experimental study that explores the idea that “calling bullshit” may shed light on how we reach a conclusion quickly, following Mercier and Sperber's social intuitionist theory of how we reason. According to the social intuitionist model, instead of going from deliberating and finding reasons prior to arriving at conclusions, as in the rationalist model, we typically go from conclusions backwards to reasons. Little if any empirical research has studied how we come to the determination “that's bullshit,” especially our ability to decide that something is bullshit so quickly. This study explores the relationship between the strength of belief in four ideologies and the speed of “calling bullshit.” The experiment tests the effect of strength of belief in the worldviews of Individualism, Communitarianism, Hierarchicalism, and Egalitarianism. It also examines reaction time for instances of confirming versus disconfirming the subject's worldview as well as age of the subject.