Intuitions About Science, Technology, and Nature: A Fruitful Approach to Understand Judgments About Socio-Scientific Issues - Affective Dimensions in Chemistry Education - page 89

and leads to the abstract, logical thinking. Here, the skill of changing perspectives
develops combined with a gradual detachment from external authorities. Lawrence
Kohlberg ( 1969 ), who is probably the most prominent representative of this
research tradition, describes the highest stage of development as being the auton-
omy of a principle-oriented thinking directly following the stage oriented at a
principle of justice. But from a psychological point of view, human beings only
have limited possibilities to reflect on the thinking process, which is responsible for
the own ethical judgments and moral behavior. We become aware of the results, not
of the mental information processes.
Studies about moral judgments showed that people rather doubted their reason-
ing than their judgment when facing irritations. Test persons were confronted with a
breach of a taboo, and when they were not able to justify their judgment any further,
they became insecure or made up preposterous reasons to maintain their justifica-
tion (Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993 ). An understanding of moral judgments based on
the current discussion about the significance of the sociocultural influence and
intuitive decisions helps to understand the reasons for discrepancies between
judging and acting or why apparently nonrational or rather nonscientific aspects
play an important role in decision-making processes.

3 The Social-Intuitionist Model of Moral Judgment

The social-intuitionist model of moral judgment (Haidt, 2001 ) agrees with the social
psychological view on the relation between perception and judgment. Furthermore
judging complex moral issues is understood as a simultaneous process of situational
perception and information processing (see Gilovich, Griffin, & Kahneman, 2002 ).
The moral judgment or its justification afterwards is comparable to the behavior of a
defense lawyer in court instead of the ideal of the unaffected and truth-searching
researcher. And human beings do not judge as isolated individuals: “The social part
of the social intuitionist model proposes that moral judgment should be studied as
an interpersonal process” (Haidt, 2001 , p. 814).
Embedded in the social context in which the subject and the object of judgment
are situated, the reasons for the judgment often have an indirect origin and effect:

“Moral reasoning is usually an ex post facto process used to influence their intuitions (and
hence judgments) of other people. [ ... ] Then, when faced with a social demand for a verbal
justification, one becomes a lawyer trying to build a case rather than a judge searching for
the truth” (Haidt, 2001 , p. 814).

Humans possess a comprehensive pool of culturally passed-on convictions.
Haidt refers to “a priori causal theories” (Haidt, 2001 , p. 822) on which humans
automatically draw when asked to justify their intuitions. The social dimension of
Haidt

s model posits that judging a situation or topic must also be understood as a
socially influenced process. Humans live in social contexts, oriented at socially
shared and internalized values and norms. Haidt characterized this phenomenon as

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