Dr Guy Kahane and colleagues from Cologne and Groningen have been awarded a €400,000 grant for a 3-year interdisciplinary project on "Emotion and Intuition in Moral Decision-Making: Empirical Evidence and Ethical Implications"
The past decade has witnessed dramatic developments in the psychology and neuroscience of morality. Evidence from neuroimaging, brain lesion studies, psychological experimentation, and internet surveys has been taken to show that moral judgments are largely the product of immediate intuitions and emotions, not of careful reasoning and deliberation. This interdisciplinary project will bring together ethicists, sociologists and social psychologists to analyse these developments, to consider their possible ethical implications, and to investigate how expertise might influence moral decision-making. The planned research will include philosophical and ethical analysis, historical and sociological investigation, and psychological and neuroscientific experiments.
Co-applicants: Professor Dr Birte Englich, Applied Social Psychology, Universität Köln, and Dr Stephan Schleim, Theory and History of Psychology, University of Groningen.
Visit Volkswagen Foundation website.