Today I want to discuss moral psychology and how it can help us be “better” more virtuous people. The field of moral psychology purely preoccupies itself with understanding what science can tell us about the cognitive processes that drive our moral decision-making. This post is not about WHAT is actually good or bad like last month’s post on philosophies of morality, but rather it’s a discussion on what drives our decisions. It’s my hope that this more technical approach will help you better understand why you might behave the way you do and identify opportunities for self-improvement.

Psychoanalysis: Our first stop on this journey will be to understand where does our sense of moral behavior come from. As you might already suspect, the tenants of our morality are birthed starting from early childhood. In 1959 psychologist Erik Erikson published a study in which he outlined 8 key stages to human development throughout our life cycle. His research suggested that people build their moral philosophy and sense of right and wrong during key formative years. Concepts of trust and mistrust; shame and doubt; initiative and guilt; were observed to be a critical component of children’s developing psyche between the ages of 18months to 5 years old.

Developmental Psychology: By the 1970s Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg began refining this idea theorizing that moral development, like cognitive development, follows a series of stages throughout our lifetime, not just childhood. He outlined 3 stages of moral development with the final step ending in adolescence. It has since become generally accepted that by the time we reach our mid 20s a great deal of our moral character is very much internalized subconsciously. Observational studies showed that humans typically do not engage in the same level of explorative moral judgment of right and wrong as we once did when we were growing up.

Neuroscience (Part 1): In 1980 psychologist Joseph LeDoux added to our understanding of human decision making when he discovered that the brain actually takes 12 milliseconds for the thalamus to process sensory input and send a signal to the amygdala for emotional processing. In contrast, high order conditioning and complex thought takes 30 to 40 milliseconds to process the same information. He coined the terms ‘high road’ and ‘low road’, effectively proving that the brain processes events on an emotional level several milliseconds fast than we do on a cognitive and conscience level. Our thoughts are in fact primed by our emotions.

Neuroscience (Part 2): By the 1990s neuro-imaging techniques like the CT-scan and fMRI had evolved to such a point that we could now observe the brain with unprecedented precision and accuracy. This increase in spatial and visual resolution led to hundreds of thousands of new studies and discoveries. Among them, researchers found that the brain is particularly interested in making judgments based on social interactions that involve a kind of ‘comparative rarity’. When we make judgments about others and update our impressions of people’s behaviors, activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the superior temporal sulcus correlate with perceptions of how frequently those behaviors occur in daily life. In simpler terms, it seems the brain is tracking low level statistical properties of behavior in order to make complex decisions regarding other people’s character. It follows that our brain attempts to make judgments based on events that are least likely to happen.

Understanding these fundamental mechanisms on how the brain computes social information and guides our decisions gives insight into how our perceptual misgivings can skew what deem good and bad. Seeing as it is only through self-awareness and rationalization that we can break free from this primer, the premise follows that as much as we might know about the theories of morality, we cannot trust our first impressions. It is this writer’s opinion that moral judgments should be based on critical thinking and constant re-evaluation of ones biases. Emotion clouds judgement; analysis requires calm. These are the tenants and qualities of what makes a good person, and your path to becoming a better one! Check in next month for the exciting conclusion of our series on morality & me.