A brother and sister, both adults, are traveling together and decide one night to have sex. They use contraception. They enjoy it, but agree not to do it again. They keep it to themselves. No one is harmed. Neither is hurt or troubled by it afterward.
Is it wrong?
Most people say yes, immediately. Then the interviewer starts in on the reasons. What about genetic harm? Ruled out, since they used contraception. Social confusion for children? There are no children, and they agreed to keep it private. Might one of them have felt coerced? The scenario stipulates mutual consent. What if it damages their relationship? It didn’t — they’re closer.
And one by one, the reasons fall. The person being interviewed grants each concession, sometimes reluctantly but honestly. Yes, if you stipulate no genetic harm, I accept that. Yes, if you stipulate secrecy and mutual agreement, I accept that. And at the end of this process, with the reasons exhausted and every stated objection acknowledged and ruled out, the verdict doesn’t move.
“I still think it’s wrong. I just know it is.”
The person saying this is not stupid, and they’re not being obtuse. They’re describing something true about themselves with unusual accuracy. The conviction didn’t begin with the reasons; the reasons were consulted after the conviction arrived. And when the reasons failed, the conviction remained standing on its own, with no reason they could put into words left holding it up.
The psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues called this moral dumbfounding: the persistence of a moral judgment after every supporting reason has been stripped away. Understanding it requires a closer look at how moral judgment is made.
The emotional dog and its rational tail
The dominant Western tradition in moral psychology runs from Piaget through Kohlberg: moral development is the progressive acquisition of reasoning capacity, a movement from primitive rule-following toward principled reflection on justice and rights. In this picture, moral judgment, if it’s working properly, is the output of moral reasoning. You think it through and reach a conclusion, and if you’re at a sufficiently advanced developmental stage, you can even explain why.
Jonathan Haidt argued in 2001 that this picture is substantially backward.
Haidt’s social intuitionist model holds that moral judgment is the product of fast, automatic, affective processing, something that fires quickly, produces a verdict, and feels like a conclusion even though it was never reasoned to. What follows the verdict is rationalization: the process of generating reasons that could support it, conducted by a system whose task is to defend the verdict rather than to evaluate whether it is correct. The metaphor Haidt reaches for is a dog and its tail. The emotional system is the dog, and it acts; reason is the tail, which moves in response to what the dog does. Watch only the tail and you’d conclude the dog was reasoning. But the tail isn’t driving anything.
This feels counterintuitive from the inside, and deliberately so. When you reason about a moral question, it feels like reasoning: you’re considering, weighing, sometimes revising. Haidt’s response is to distinguish between what the conscious mind can observe about itself and what’s generating the outputs. You can observe the reasoning process. You can’t observe the affective verdict that arrived before the reasoning started.
The affective primacy claim goes back to Robert Zajonc, who found that affective responses to stimuli can precede cognitive evaluation and operate independently of it: people form preferences before forming beliefs. Haidt applies this directly to moral judgment. The “wrongness” of the incest scenario arrives like a physical sensation before the justification machinery has started.
Haidt marshaled four reasons to doubt that reasoning drives moral judgment. The dual-process problem: moral judgments are fast and automatic; the reaction precedes deliberation and feels like perception rather than inference. The motivated-reasoning problem: people reason about morality less like a judge weighing evidence than like a lawyer defending a client, pushed by the wish to fit in with their group and to keep their worldview intact. The post hoc problem: reasoning readily manufactures justifications for verdicts already reached, creating the illusion that the reasons came first. And the action problem: what people do tracks their moral emotions more closely than their moral reasoning. In Haidt’s model, reasoning does change minds, but mostly other people’s, through persuasion and social influence, rather than the reasoner’s own.
From the inside, reasoning feels like it’s working because it’s all you can observe. The machinery that delivered the verdict runs beneath the level of observation, and the reasoning process spends its effort building the case for that verdict instead of evaluating it.
The dual-process debate
Haidt’s social intuitionist model does not go uncontested. Joshua Greene’s dual-process model, developed in tandem with neuroimaging research, holds that moral judgment involves two distinguishable systems: a fast, emotion-driven process and a slower, more deliberate one, and that the deliberate system can and sometimes does override the emotional one. Greene and a colleague later pushed back on what they saw as the overly deflationary reading of reason’s role, arguing that deliberate reasoning does sometimes produce genuine moral revision, not just post-hoc rationalization.
Haidt’s response is not that reason never produces genuine revision but that it does so far less often, and under far narrower conditions, than the rationalist tradition assumed. The evidence since has been mixed. When Greene's team tested this, a strong argument defending Julie and Mark won more acceptance than a weak one, but only when people were made to reflect for two extra minutes before answering. Two larger preregistered replications in 2022 could not reproduce that pattern, so even that narrow opening is uncertain. On Haidt’s reading, the core claim survives: moral judgment is predominantly affective, reason operates mostly downstream, and the rationalist picture of moral development substantially misfires. What remains contested is how much, and under what conditions. If he is right, your moral verdicts usually arrive before your reasons, and the reasons’ primary job is to defend them.Moral dumbfounding — what the mechanism looks like under pressure
The “Julie and Mark” vignette is Haidt’s own example, designed to demonstrate what the social intuitionist model predicts: a scenario constructed to strip away every standard harm-based justification for condemning incest, such that if the judgment depended on those reasons, removing them should destabilize it. Haidt’s original interviews, with 31 University of Virginia undergraduates, found that it doesn’t, and later studies have reproduced the effect, though usually in a minority of participants.
The term “moral dumbfounding”, coined by Haidt with Fredrik Björklund and Scott Murphy in a 2000 manuscript, refers specifically to this: the stubborn maintenance of a moral judgment in the absence of supporting reasons, accompanied by the subject’s puzzled awareness that the supporting reasons have run out. What makes it dumbfounding is the persistence of the judgment after the justificatory props have been knocked away, combined with visible bewilderment at the position one is left in.
McHugh and colleagues, working with explicit protocols to identify measurable indicators of moral dumbfounding, found that in their interview study 22 of 31 participants were dumbfounded at least once across four scenarios. Counted response by response, about 17% of answers were explicit admissions of having no reasons while keeping the judgment, and another 9% were “unsupported declarations”: assertions of wrongness with no accompanying justification. These numbers are conservative, because they count only responses that verbalized the structure of dumbfounding. A significant proportion of participants who had initially offered harm-based justifications ended up, after conceding those justifications, still maintaining the judgment.
What happens when the reasons run out is specific: participants don’t reach for new arguments. They express bewilderment. “I just feel it.” “It’s just wrong, I can’t explain it.” These read like evasions if you approach them as failures of reasoning. They read as accurate self-reports if you take the social intuitionist model seriously: the conviction didn’t depend on the reasons because it didn’t arise from them.
On that reading, the reasons offered were post-hoc rationalizations. That isn’t deliberate dishonesty. It is the reasoning process searching for justifications for a position it didn’t create, using machinery whose job is advocacy rather than evaluation.
The Royzman challenge
The dumbfounding research has a serious methodological challenger. In 2015 Royzman and colleagues argued that many participants who appeared dumbfounded in Haidt’s paradigm were not failing to provide reasons at all; they were implicitly rejecting the harmlessness stipulation. They doubted the scenario’s harmlessness and kept finding harms the stipulation hadn’t explicitly ruled out: psychological effects, long-term relational damage, harms too remote to see from outside. On this reading, the apparent dumbfounding was participants holding onto a harm-based reason they weren’t willing to fully release, rather than maintaining a reasonless verdict.
This is a substantive critique. If most apparent dumbfounding dissolves on closer inspection into implicit harm reasoning, the phenomenon would be far less diagnostic of affective primacy than Haidt claimed.
McHugh and colleagues answered empirically in a 2020 follow-up. Endorsing a reason when it is offered on a checklist, they argued, is not the same as being guided by it. So they excluded only participants who both put a harm- or norm-based reason into their own words and endorsed it, and in a second study, who applied it consistently across situations. Very few people met that standard, and among everyone else the effect doesn’t vanish. It narrows, as any experimental effect narrows under more stringent controls, but it remains. The phenomenon is narrower than Haidt originally suggested and less universal than his earlier writing implied, but it exists, and its existence is informative about the structure of moral conviction.The same math, different verdict
The trolley problem is overused, but it still shows something odd: two cases with identical casualty counts get opposite verdicts.
In the switch scenario, a runaway trolley heads toward five people. You can pull a lever to divert it onto a side track, killing one instead of five. Most people say pull it. In Western samples approval runs at around 85–90%; in a survey spanning 42 countries, it came out averaging about 81% across countries.
In the footbridge scenario, the math is identical: five people in the trolley’s path, one death prevents five. But here the mechanism is different. You’re on a bridge. The only way to stop the trolley is to push a large stranger onto the tracks, using his body as an obstacle. In the same 42-country survey, approval dropped to around 51%. In earlier Western-sample studies, the majority said it was not permissible.
The math and the outcome are the same. What changes is the causal structure: one case involves a mechanism, the other requires your hands on another person’s body, and the verdict flips.
Greene and colleagues used brain imaging to find a neural correlate for exactly this asymmetry. When subjects contemplated the footbridge scenario, with its personal harm, direct causation and physical contact, brain regions associated with emotional processing showed preferential activation. When they contemplated the switch scenario, where the harm is impersonal, indirect and mediated by a mechanism, deliberative reasoning regions showed greater relative activity.
The interpretation Greene draws is provocative: the moral intuition against pushing the stranger may not be tracking anything morally different about the two cases. On his account it tracks something evolutionarily ancient, an aversion to direct, personal harm calibrated for a world where the only people you could hurt were close enough to touch. Philippa Foot introduced the trolley in 1967 as a dilemma faced by its driver; Judith Jarvis Thomson later added the bystander at the switch and the man on the footbridge. Both noticed how sharply intuitions diverge between such cases and proposed principles to explain it: doing versus allowing harm, redirecting a threat versus using a person as a means. Philosophers still argue over whether those principles mark a real moral difference. Greene’s neuroscience offers an uncomfortable alternative: the different verdicts may be an artifact of how moral psychology was built, not a response to a morally relevant difference.
The vivid, physical, direct instinct against pushing the stranger may be the same instinct that makes distant harms feel less morally urgent. Supply chain labor conditions, air pollution policy and financial decisions that impoverish millions involve real, quantifiable harms that in many cases exceed the harms generating immediate moral reaction. But they arrive through mechanisms, at distance, involving statistical people rather than visible individuals. An aversion tuned to direct physical contact would not be triggered by them, and so the moral urgency wouldn’t be felt.
The ecological validity question
Trolley problems are obviously artificial. They strip away uncertainty, require no action, involve no interpersonal consequences, and bear almost no resemblance to actual moral decisions people face. A critic has good grounds to ask whether findings from trolley scenarios generalize anywhere.
The reply is that a related asymmetry shows up in real behavior too: a strong moral pull toward the identifiable, and a weak one toward the statistical. In charitable giving studies, donors gave more to a single identified sick child than to a group of eight, even when all eight were identified. The donation experiment described below found the same asymmetry in actual giving. So a pull of the kind the trolley problem hints at turns up in contexts that aren’t artificial: in these studies an identifiable victim pulled harder on sympathy and wallets than a statistical one, in real donation decisions as in thought experiments. The effect is less solid than it once looked. Recent preregistered replications of both studies, using hypothetical donations, found no reliable identifiable-victim advantage, so how strong and how general the pull is remains in dispute.The arithmetic of compassion
In 1991, William Desvousges and colleagues asked people how much they would pay to prevent migratory birds from drowning in oil ponds. One group was told the program would save 2,000 birds, a second 20,000, and a third 200,000.
The willingness-to-pay figures came back at $80, $78 and $88. The difference between 2,000 and 200,000, a factor of one hundred, produced a difference in moral concern so small it disappeared in statistical noise.
The likeliest explanation is that people were pricing the image of a bird struggling in an oil pond. A single mental image set the price, and the image looked the same whether it stood for 2,000 birds or 200,000.
Call this scope insensitivity. The Desvousges participants presumably knew that 200,000 was larger than 2,000, so the error isn’t in the arithmetic. Knowing a number and feeling it are different cognitive operations, served by different systems, and it was feeling, not knowing, that set those prices.
Thomas Schelling identified the “identified lives” problem in 1968: statistical lives and identified lives are not treated as morally equivalent, even when we know they should be. A named child with a photograph can generate donations at a scale that an anonymous statistic, even one representing millions of deaths, rarely approaches. The gap comes from the affective system, which responds to an individual, identifiable human being in a way it doesn’t respond to a number.
Slovic and his colleagues pressed further and found that presenting statistical information alongside an identified victim reduced donations compared to presenting the identified victim alone. Adding the numbers appears to have crowded out the emotional engagement rather than supplementing it. The appeal said, in effect, here is one girl, Rokia, and here are millions more facing hunger across Africa. That information should have added moral weight; instead giving fell. The authors’ explanation is that the statistics pushed people from feeling toward calculation, though donors may also have felt that any gift was a drop in the bucket.
The finding means the obvious antidote, more information and more quantification, can make things worse. If analytical thinking and emotional engagement compete for activation, and emotional engagement is what drives moral action, the tools most available to correct scope insensitivity may work against the motivation they’re meant to serve.
Jessica McClure was eighteen months old when she fell into a backyard well in Midland, Texas in 1987. She was trapped for fifty-eight hours while the world watched on live television, and sympathetic strangers sent enough money to build a trust fund of up to $800,000. What moved them was one named child, followed hour by hour on live television. Anonymous statistical populations, however large, rarely produce that response. It reflects a moral psychology failure before it reflects a media or political failure. Media and politics amplify a prior architecture: they respond to what generates emotional engagement because that’s what the audience’s moral psychology runs on.
Collapse of compassion
Slovic has examined how moral response fails to scale with the magnitude of suffering. In a study Slovic reported with Daniel Västfjäll and Ellen Peters, people could donate to help a hungry Malian girl, Rokia, or a hungry boy, Moussa. They gave less, and felt less, when asked to help both children together than when asked to help either one alone. Slovic’s model: compassion peaks at a single victim, starts fading at two, and collapses as the number grows into a statistic.
Slovic applied this explicitly to how societies respond to mass atrocity. The world generally knows, roughly, what’s happening; part of what lets the world stand by during genocide, he argued, is that moral response does not grow with the numbers. A single death registers as a tragedy, while a million become, in the brain’s processing, something closer to an abstraction. What results is a ceiling on emotional engagement, calibrated to individuals rather than quantities.The universalism problem
The most accessible escape from everything established so far is this: individual moral intuitions may be distorted by proximity, identity, and affect, but there is a universal moral sense, common across cultures and grounded in something like human nature, that, properly understood, tracks moral truth.
Haidt and Joseph proposed what became Moral Foundations Theory in 2004: a small set of innate but culturally calibrated dimensions of moral concern. They started with four; within three years the list had grown to the five that made the theory famous — Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion and Sanctity/Purity. Liberty/Oppression was later proposed as a sixth candidate, and in 2023 the theory’s researchers split Fairness into Equality and Proportionality, giving six core foundations. The claim wasn’t that all cultures moralize identically but that they draw on a shared set of foundations, weighting them differently in response to local history, ecology, and social structure.
Within the United States, one finding has proved robust: liberals moralize predominantly around Care and Fairness; conservatives weight all five foundations more evenly, including Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity at levels liberals don’t match. The practical consequence, which Haidt had already pointed to, is that each side frequently doesn’t recognize the other’s moral concerns as moral at all.
Outside the United States, one team tested whether the structure itself, rather than the weightings, carries over to a broader range of societies including non-WEIRD samples. They found that the five-foundation structure holds in WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures alike, even though individual questionnaire items behave somewhat differently from one culture to the next.
Treating this as a universalism rescue runs into a problem. The claim that moral intuitions track objective moral facts is available to every culture simultaneously, which is exactly what disqualifies it as validation for any particular culture’s intuitive weightings. Every culture has the intuitions its history, ecology, and social structure produced. The evolutionary origins of those intuitions explain why they exist; they don’t confer epistemic privilege. Nor do the cross-cultural divergence data vindicate any of them: people in different societies weight Care and Loyalty and Authority at different levels, each with equal confidence.
Distinguish this from moral relativism, which would be a different mistake. The cross-cultural data doesn’t show that all moral views are equally valid. It removes the option of treating any culture’s moral certainties as trustworthy merely because they are widely shared or intensely felt. Breadth and intensity are properties of the certainty, and on their own they cannot vouch for its content.
And moral progress is real, which means the picture is tractable but not simple. On slavery, the status of women, the treatment of children and the scope of who counts as a full moral patient, the direction of movement is not random. The mechanisms are multi-causal: changed economic conditions, religious shifts, new sympathies built through literature and contact, political organizing, philosophical argument over long timescales. What these cases share is that the morally correct endpoint required overriding strongly held majority intuitions that showed no tendency to self-correct. Widespread, confident moral feeling was wrong and had to be worked against.
The WEIRD problem
Henrich and colleagues have shown that the overwhelming majority of psychological research had been conducted on WEIRD samples (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) that are not representative of human populations even on basic cognitive measures. Haidt’s early moral foundations research, which drew heavily on American samples, was no exception.
This is a real methodological concern. If the foundations were identified primarily in Western, educated populations, their claim to universality is at risk. Cross-cultural work since has partly answered it: across 30 diverse societies, the five-factor structure holds in WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures alike, even though individual questionnaire items behave differently from one culture to the next. The WEIRD critique weakens early claims about the specific biological universality of particular foundations and their exact content. It does not rescue the universalism argument, because foundations that exist across cultures are still weighted very differently from one culture to the next.What corrected moral reasoning requires
Moral judgment arrives predominantly as a feeling, produced by affective machinery calibrated for proximity, visibility, and individual identity. The machinery responds poorly to scale and to distance, and it responds differently to identified individuals than to statistical populations. And there is no universal moral sense that transcends these distortions, because the moral senses humans have are the ones evolutionary and cultural history produced, not the ones that track what matters at the scale of modern collective decisions.
The answer is not to feel less, or to become someone who evaluates suffering analytically rather than emotionally. Because the bias is built into how the affective response system processes information, resolving to feel differently won’t reach it; the correction has to be built into how decisions are made. A person who resolves to care more about distant suffering will do so right up until the identified victim appears, at which point much of their moral attention is likely to redirect.
Explicit quantification of scope at the decision-making stage does work that spontaneous moral response cannot. Forcing the comparison of 2,000 against 200,000 on the same scale, evaluated by the same criteria, produces judgments the affective system won’t deliver unaided. The methodology of effective altruism, whatever its other problems, is built around putting outcomes on a common scale. Its philosophical scaffolding is Singer’s 1972 argument that geographic distance and anonymity are not morally relevant: a drowning child has the same claim on you whether she’s in front of you or on another continent. GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness analysis is the methodology applied: how many lives per dollar, requiring choices between causes to be made on grounds other than which one arrived with a face.
That puts the burden on institutions more than on individual resolve. Foreign aid triage made in response to television coverage rather than systematic analysis of where a dollar does the most good is mainly a structural failure. Designing institutions to require explicit comparative analysis before resources are committed is hard, because the same moral psychology that distorts individual giving drives the political constituencies that fund aid organizations.
Treating distance and mechanism as morally irrelevant in policy means putting the supply chain worker and the pollution victim on the same ledger as the person standing in front of you. Regulatory cost-benefit analysis has the right structure for this correction and often fails to deliver it.
One normative dependency to name plainly: these corrections presuppose that scale is morally relevant and distance alone is not, so that 200,000 deaths count more than 2,000, wherever they happen. That is a substantive normative position, broadly consequentialist, that the empirical evidence creates strong pressure toward but doesn’t establish. What the evidence does show is that any framework that ignores scale and lets distance discount a claim will reproduce the specific failures documented above. What belongs on the other side is a normative choice.
Effective altruism has its own failure modes: speculative longtermism, methodological insularity, and the FTX collapse, in which Sam Bankman-Fried, the movement’s most prominent donor and public advocate, was convicted on seven fraud and conspiracy counts and sentenced to twenty-five years in federal prison. None of that refutes the core methodology. It does illustrate that structural corrections are vulnerable to the same motivated reasoning they’re designed to counter, now applied to the framework itself.
The institutions that should embody structural correction at scale, such as democratic governments, international aid bodies and public health agencies, are all responsive to the intuitions this article has been dismantling: to individual stories, to photographs, to visible, proximate crises. The distance between where these institutions are and where they’d need to be is a moral psychology gap, and closing it requires sustained effort against the grain of how moral motivation works.
The moral mind in its native element
The participant from the opening, reasons exhausted and conviction intact, is not reasoning badly.
Their moral cognition is working exactly as it was built to work. The incest scenario triggers an evolved aversion, a disgust response in Haidt’s framing, that served a function where incest carried real costs: genetic, social, structural. The conviction is irrational only in the sense that machinery built for one purpose is operating where that purpose doesn’t apply: the scenario has been stipulated to lack the harms that make incest aversion adaptive, and the aversion fires anyway.
The same is true of the bystander who couldn’t push the stranger off the footbridge and of the politician who scrambled resources toward the televised disaster and ignored the quieter one killing more people at a slower rate. Both are applying moral instincts faithfully, and each instinct is functional in its native range and mute in the one that determines who gets help and who doesn’t.
Still, moral convictions that survive rational pressure can encode real social information: accumulated warnings from experience, norms whose function isn’t transparent, implicit knowledge about where community trust runs. Sometimes the resistance to revision tracks something that hasn’t been made articulable yet. Moral intuitions evolved because they sometimes tracked something. Dismissing them entirely in favor of explicit calculation is a different error.
But hold this concession to its precise scope. It does not extend to allocating resources between 200,000 people the decision-maker will never see, whose suffering produces little emotional signal because they have no faces. It does not extend to the judgment that a drowning child nearby has a stronger claim than one dying of malaria on another continent, when the only difference is proximity. In those contexts, the very ones where collective moral decisions operate, the intuition is running on a mismatch.
The participant at the opening knew something: their conviction was functioning moral knowledge within its range. That range does not reach the 200,000 people a decision-maker will never see, and most of the decisions that matter are about people like them.
Gen AI Disclaimer
Some contents of this page were generated and/or edited with the help of a Generative AI.
Media
Key Sources and References
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814–834. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.108.4.814
Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, 293(5537), 2105–2108. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1062872
Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences. American Psychologist, 35(2), 151–175. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.35.2.151
Kohlberg, L. (1971). From is to ought: How to commit the naturalistic fallacy and get away with it in the study of moral development. In T. Mischel (Ed.), Cognitive development and epistemology (pp. 151–235). New York: Academic Press.
Paxton, J. M., & Greene, J. D. (2010). Moral reasoning: Hints and allegations. Topics in Cognitive Science, 2(3), 511–527. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1756-8765.2010.01096.x
Paxton, J. M., Ungar, L., & Greene, J. D. (2012). Reflection and reasoning in moral judgment. Cognitive Science, 36(1), 163–177. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01210.x
Herec, J., Sykora, J., Brahmi, K., Vondracek, D., Dobesova, O., Smelik, M., Vaculik, M., & Prochazka, J. (2022). Reflection and reasoning in moral judgment: Two preregistered replications of Paxton, Ungar, and Greene (2012). Cognitive Science, 46(7), e13168. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13168
McHugh, C., McGann, M., Igou, E. R., & Kinsella, E. L. (2017). Searching for moral dumbfounding: Identifying measurable indicators of moral dumbfounding. Collabra: Psychology, 3(1), 23. https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.79
McHugh, C., McGann, M., Igou, E. R., & Kinsella, E. L. (2020). Reasons or rationalizations: The role of principles in the moral dumbfounding paradigm. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 33(3), 376–392. https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.2167
Haidt, J., Björklund, F., & Murphy, S. (2000). Moral dumbfounding: When intuition finds no reason. Unpublished manuscript, University of Virginia.
Royzman, E. B., Kim, K., & Leeman, R. F. (2015). The curious tale of Julie and Mark: Unraveling the moral dumbfounding effect. Judgment and Decision Making, 10(4), 296–313. https://doi.org/10.1017/S193029750000512X
Foot, P. (1967). The problem of abortion and the doctrine of the double effect. Oxford Review, 5, 5–15.
Thomson, J. J. (1976). Killing, letting die, and the trolley problem. The Monist, 59(2), 204–217. https://doi.org/10.5840/monist197659224
Thomson, J. J. (1985). The trolley problem. Yale Law Journal, 94(6), 1395–1415. https://doi.org/10.2307/796133
Awad, E., Dsouza, S., Shariff, A., Rahwan, I., & Bonnefon, J.-F. (2020). Universals and variations in moral decisions made in 42 countries by 70,000 participants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(5), 2332–2337. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1911517117
Kogut, T., & Ritov, I. (2005). The “identified victim” effect: An identified group, or just a single individual? Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 18(3), 157–167. https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.492
Desvousges, W. H., Johnson, F. R., Dunford, R. W., Boyle, K. J., Hudson, S. P., & Wilson, K. N. (1992). Measuring nonuse damages using contingent valuation: An experimental evaluation of accuracy (RTI Monograph 92-1). Research Triangle Park, NC: Research Triangle Institute.
Schelling, T. C. (1968). The life you save may be your own. In S. B. Chase, Jr. (Ed.), Problems in public expenditure analysis (pp. 127–176). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Small, D. A., Loewenstein, G., & Slovic, P. (2007). Sympathy and callousness: The impact of deliberative thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 102(2), 143–153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2006.01.005
Maier, M., Wong, Y. C., & Feldman, G. (2024). Revisiting and rethinking the identifiable victim effect: Replication and extension of Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic (2007). Collabra: Psychology, 9(1), 90203. https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.90203
Majumder, R., Tai, Y. L., Ziano, I., & Feldman, G. (2024). Revisiting the impact of singularity on the identified victim effect: Replication and extension of Kogut and Ritov (2005a) Study 2. Judgment and Decision Making, 19, e26. https://doi.org/10.1017/jdm.2024.31
Slovic, P. (2007). If I look at the mass I will never act: Psychic numbing and genocide. Judgment and Decision Making, 2(2), 79–95. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1930297500000061
Associated Press. (2011, March 25). Baby Jessica turns 25, gains access to trust fund. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna42283074
Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 1029–1046. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015141
Haidt, J., & Joseph, C. (2004). Intuitive ethics: How innately prepared intuitions generate culturally variable virtues. Daedalus, 133(4), 55–66. https://doi.org/10.1162/0011526042365555
Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20(1), 98–116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-007-0034-z
Atari, M., Haidt, J., Graham, J., Koleva, S., Stevens, S. T., & Dehghani, M. (2023). Morality beyond the WEIRD: How the nomological network of morality varies across cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 125(5), 1157–1188. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000470
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2–3), 61–83. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X
Doğruyol, B., Alper, S., & Yilmaz, O. (2019). The five-factor model of the moral foundations theory is stable across WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures. Personality and Individual Differences, 151, 109547. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.109547
Singer, P. (1972). Famine, affluence, and morality. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1(3), 229–243.
GiveWell. (2017, June 1). How GiveWell uses cost-effectiveness analyses. GiveWell Blog. https://blog.givewell.org/2017/06/01/how-givewell-uses-cost-effectiveness-analyses/
United States Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York. (2024, March 28). Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison for orchestrating massive fraud. U.S. Department of Justice. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/sam-bankman-fried-sentenced-25-years-prison
