Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Theories about the role of emotions in moral cognition makedifferent predictions about the relative speed of moral andaffective judgments: those that argue that felt emotions arecausal inputs to moral judgments predict that recognition ofaffective states should precede moral judgments; theoriesthat posit emotional states as the output of moral judgmentpredict the opposite. Across four studies, using a speededreaction time task, we found that self-reports of felt emotionwere delayed relative to reports of event-directed moraljudgments (e.g. badness) and were no faster than person-directed moral judgments (e.g. blame). These results pose achallenge to prominent theories arguing that moraljudgments are made on the basis of reflecting on affectivestates.