Felipe De Brigard

Primary Theme: Brain & Society

When faced with a moral decision, people often have many diverse reasons for and against the possible choices. Many philosophers argue that making and revising moral decisions ought to be a matter of deliberating over reasons, because reasons serve to favor or to justify choices for action. Duke researchers’ recent work has shown, however, that people typically make an initial moral decision and then set out to confirm the validity of that decision through biased and motivated reasoning. Because of this, people very rarely change their moral decisions. This is only part of the story, however. Memory for reasons likely plays a critical role in our propensity to keep our moral decisions fixed over time. This Bass Connections project will conduct experiments to investigate this issue.