REASONING and the importance on moral judgement

Made it to the target number of 150 on my mTurk form of my Qualtrics survey in a short hour or two!

Another wonderful week of research has come and nearly passed in the blink of an eye. This week has been rewarding and very fruitful: my mTurk study on Qualtrics was launched and received the target number of respondents within a few short hours! I now have data to evaluate.

Additionally, I came across a wonderful TED talk that I learned a great deal from and wanted to share. The long reach of reason by Steven Pinker and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2012) blew my mind. It relates well with my research as it talks about morals and ethics, specifically how they have evolved in the past and how they might possibly evolve in the future. Thus, although cultures my not agree on all moral concepts, we often do progress towards similar moral systems through the effect of reasoning.

I find it interesting because it deals with the past, current, and future outlook of moral operating systems. In previous weeks, I did research on moral operating systems, which currently focus on the moral operating system necessary for autonomous vehicles. Thus, this TED talk relates well because it talks about current areas of interest as well: specifically, the morals and reasoning surrounding animal rights interested me.

As a hot topic of conversation with the release of a video portraying the abuse of animals at Fair Oaks Farm (Fair life milk), this is an area of great interest for many currently. However, the video also explained that these were once irrelevant issues in conversation of morals. Reasoning has allowed us to build up societal norms of what is morally correct (not having slaves, treating women equal to men) and move to other issues. Thus, we may also be able to develop moral operating systems surrounding current issues (animal rights) and will someday take these moral obligations as truth without needing to justify why it is morally correct, it just is. Therefore, we also cannot predict what some of these “issues” may be that we take for granted today, but just might come to light with some reasoning to reveal that we need to behave in moral ways that we once had never thought of needing to treat morally before.

Further, I took a look at some Google Trends reports for terms related to the topics discussed in the TED talk. I was surprised by some of the findings I came across in that many seemed much different, even opposite, than expected according to the TED talk. However, I concluded that this might be due to the fact that I was only looking at 1) the U.S., 2) a time period from 2004 to the present, and 3) only Google searches. The most interesting of my findings was that the term 'reasoning' appeared to follow a trend that I expected, except for one oddity: every September, it seems to increase greatly (more research on this may reveal why this trend is occurring, but at this moment, I am unsure of what this change implies). I find this very interesting and worthwhile of sharing and further exploring.

Last, the topic of professional development was of interest this week in the SUSP workshop. Dana, my fellow psychology researcher, and I left with so many questions of how we could further 'develop professionally' as undergraduate students. Dr. Kameko Halfmann helped us (worried) students realize what more we could be doing to further develop our skills and immerse ourselves in the science of psychology. This was a wonderful experience and helped to clarify what professional development means at the undergraduate stage (more on this in the next blog post).

Overall, it was a productive, eye-opening, reflective week full of growth and enjoyment.

Pinker, S. & Newberger Goldstein, R. (2012, February). Steven Pinker and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: The long reach of reason. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_and_rebecca_newberger_goldstein_the_long_reach_of_reason

#research #undergraduateresearch #SUSP #PEDL #TEDtalk #googletrends #reasoning #mTurk