visual versus verbal Thinking and Dual‐Process Moral cognition

Moral judgments are not produced by a unified “moral faculty.” Instead, they are influenced by a combination of automatic emotional responses and controlled cognitive processes with distinctive cognitive profiles (Cushman, Young, & Hauser, 2006; Greene, Morelli, Lowenberg, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2008; Moore, Clark, & Kane, 2008; Paxton, Ungar, & Greene, 2011) and neural substrates (Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001; Greene, Nystrom, Engell, Darley, & Cohen, 2004; Mendez, Anderson, & Shapira, 2005; Koenigs et al., 2007; Ciaramelli, Muccioli, Ladavas, & Di Pellegrino, 2007). This dualprocess framework (Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977; Sloman, 1996; Loewenstein, 1996; Chaiken & Trope, 1999; Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999; Lieberman, Gaunt, Gilbert, & Trope, 2002; Stanovich & West, 2000; Kahneman, 2003, 2011) answers some questions while raising many others, including the following: What triggers the automatic emotional responses that influence our moral judgments? What accounts for the variability in these “gut reactions,” both from person to person and situation to situation? Parallel questions arise concerning the influence of controlled cognition on moral judgment. In this chapter, we address these questions, focusing on the role of domaingeneral cognitive processes. More specifically, we consider the respective influences of visual and verbal thinking on moral judgment. First, we briefly review the most relevant literature on automatic versus controlled processes in moral judgment and decision making. Next, we discuss the distinctive features of visual versus verbal processing, then present a set of related hypotheses concerning the respective influences of visual and verbal thinking on moral judgment, followed by evidence indicating a special connection between visual imagery and deontological moral judgment. We also consider a possible relationship between visual and verbal cognition on the one hand, and the primary and secondary emotion distinction on the other. Finally, we conclude with some speculative thoughts concerning the relationships among the various cognitive distinctions discussed in this chapter.