Thinking about Age-Appropriateness: Understanding the Role of Culture in Moral Evaluation

• In Event: 230 - Theory Section. New Developments in Contemporary Theory

Abstract

What is the role of culture in moral evaluation? Recent research informed by the dual-process framework has found that cognition is primarily driven by nondeclarative culture and that evaluation is primarily a function of the automatic activation of habituated schemas. While this may be true, many questions remain. For example: Does nondeclarative culture drive both “fast” Type I moral evaluation as well as “slow” Type II evaluation? What exactly does this nondeclarative culture consist of, and how are these elements organized? What role, if any, does declarative culture play in this process? Answering these questions requires a more thorough examination of the process through which nondeclarative culture motivates evaluation. In this paper I investigate the cognitive process of moral evaluation by analyzing the way parents make evaluations regarding the age-appropriateness of different practices. I argue that all evaluation tasks activate nondeclarative cultural models, but these models vary in their degree of complexity, which may produce differences in response efficiency. Additionally, I argue that all parents rely on one of two cultural models to make evaluations about age appropriateness, but these models may produce different evaluations because of differences in long-term memory that make different content more or less salient or have different qualities. In this way, the analysis illuminates the process of evaluation by identifying the different kinds of culture it entails (both declarative and nondeclarative) and specifying their relations.

Author

• Michael Lee Wood, University of Notre Dame