Why Good Policymakers Should Check Their Moral Judgements

Consider bans of the headscarf, which stem from a moral objection to the object and the value system it symbolizes. A policymaker who advocates for the ban might believe that it would be for the “good” of the women affected by it in opposing a patriarchal symbol. However, for the women who ultimately choose to wear the head scarf, good and evil probably mean different things than they do to the policymaker.

This illustrates the idea that judging others says as much about us as it does about them. We judge the moral character of others based not only on their actions, but also what we think motivates those actions. In a recent study, Critcher, Helzer, and Tannenbaum (2020) provide evidence of this phenomenon and posit that we do this by inferring mental states. They show that the way we make inferences about other people’s mental states guides our moral judgements of not only their past actions, but also their future actions.

According to Critcher, Helzer, and Tannenbaum, moral judgements are based on how we perceive mental occurrents: the thoughts, beliefs, feelings, or principles that activate in people’s minds when they make moral choices. Mental occurrents are important because judgements of moral character are ultimately judgements of moral-cognitive machinery, whether people can respond appropriately given their circumstances. We can only judge if someone’s moral-cognitive machinery is working properly if we can connect their mental occurrents to actions.

The researchers presented three different hypotheses explaining how mental occurrents influence moral judgements. First, we judge people positively if we have direct information on the mere presence of a mental occurrent that indicates moral concern. Second, we give matching praise to people whose actions align with mental occurrents we think they have. Finally, we engage in competing blame when we judge others for failing to act on a mental occurrent.

The researchers tested these hypotheses through eight experiments in which they asked study participants to judge the moral character of a hypothetical agent encountering one of four different moral dilemmas. Three dilemmas required that the agent act on either deontological principles or utilitarian outcomes. A fourth dilemma involved a choice between a risky or certain action.

In the first four experiments, the researchers tested whether participants relied on mental occurrents when forming moral judgments. First, they asked participants how likely the agent was experiencing a relevant mental occurrent as determined by a hypothetical scenario. Next, participants were randomly assigned to the different moral dilemmas described above and asked for their moral evaluations of the agent. After analyzing data from both steps, the researchers found evidence only for matching praise: The moral character of an agent was judged more positively if the course of action matched the inferred mental occurrent.

In the next four studies, the researchers manipulated three non-moral constraints on the agent: whether they were in a rush, suffered brain deficits in either cognitive or emotional processing, or were shown images of relevant subjects. These studies found further support for the claim that, when forming moral judgments, people spontaneously rely on inferred mental occurrents according to the decision context faced by the agent.

Combined, the findings suggest that people rely on contextual information in the environment when forming moral judgments. These judgments are also sensitive to how well an inferred mental occurrent aligns with a moral behavior. Most strikingly, these findings imply that instead of focusing on what features of an action make it good or bad, we should start thinking about how context can change an agent’s mental occurrents.

The real challenge is outside of the lab, where we cannot directly observe the moral-cognitive machinery of others. We are unaware of their inner workings and the context that informs their decisions. This has consequences not only for how see each other, but also how officials justify public policies. While policy decisions like headscarf bans are often concerned with judgements of right and wrong, they are inherently limited by the policymakers’ ability to infer the mental occurrents of citizens.

The findings of Critcher, Helzer, and Tannenbaum call into question the effectiveness of such top-down policymaking. Since we rely on inferred mental occurrents to judge moral character, policymakers should be aware that the accuracy of inferred occurrents could determine the success of a policy, as well as who gets condemned or praised in society.

For example, we might see fewer people wearing masks following recent CDC guidelines allowing fully vaccinated people to stop wearing face coverings. This advice doesn’t dictate what local governments will require nor what businesses will be comfortable with. So what happens when our local coffee shop relaxes mask requirements and angers customers who are still exercising caution? This would suggest that the CDC acted on an inferred mental occurrent of public trust being higher than reality.

While mental states don’t always produce an action, we can infer mental occurrents even before people act. Our moral judgements are limited not only by our ability to correctly infer each other’s mental occurrents, but also in how we pass on these judgments spontaneously – before we watch each other act. If so, our moral judgments say more about us than they do about the people we’re judging. Next time you have an impression of who’s good, think twice.

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Critcher, C. R., Helzer, E. G., & Tannenbaum, D. (2020). Moral character evaluation: Testing another’s moral-cognitive machinery. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 87, 103906. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2019.103906