Journal article
2009
Alice Gabrielle Twight Professor of Psychology & Education
(847)467-1272
Department of Psychology
Northwestern University
APA
Click to copy
Dehghani, M., Gentner, D., Forbus, K. D., Ekhtiari, H., & Sachdeva, S. S. (2009). Analogy and moral decision making.
Chicago/Turabian
Click to copy
Dehghani, Morteza, D. Gentner, Kenneth D. Forbus, H. Ekhtiari, and Sonya S. Sachdeva. “Analogy and Moral Decision Making” (2009).
MLA
Click to copy
Dehghani, Morteza, et al. Analogy and Moral Decision Making. 2009.
BibTeX Click to copy
@article{morteza2009a,
title = {Analogy and moral decision making},
year = {2009},
author = {Dehghani, Morteza and Gentner, D. and Forbus, Kenneth D. and Ekhtiari, H. and Sachdeva, Sonya S.}
}
It is well known that analogy plays an important role in the process of decision making. However, this role has not yet been systematically examined in the domain of moral decision making. This paper investigates the role of cultural narratives in understanding novel moral situations. We examine whether the processes by which core cultural narratives are applied in people’s lives follow the principles of analogical retrieval and mapping. In particular, we examine how analogical accessibility and alignability influence the use of canonical moral narratives. We also show how access to different moral stories results in differences in moral preference across cultures. We report on the results of two experiments performed among Iranian and American participants. Our results indicate that analogical accessibility to cultural narratives that are similar in structure to a given dilemma is the differentiating factor in our participants’ responses across the different variants and between the two cultural groups.