CAD Triad Hypothesis
Previous research on moral development has generally focused on rationality and cognitive development. Since Lawrence Kohlberg, an American psychologist, developed what is now known as Kohlberg’s stages of moral development in 1958, it has been universally accepted that moral development is driven by cognitive processes. However, recently psychologists have begun to examine the relationship between morality and emotionality. It has been widely debated among philosophers and psychologists what concepts comprise the foundation of human morality: cognition or emotion. Human social life has been evolving to incorporate both aspects of moral judgment. As technology advances and social interactions become more complicated, the definition of morality has morphed into an expanding notion that includes emotional reactions.
It is human nature to attach emotion to uncontrollable events in life in an attempt to provide meaning. An emotional reaction allows humans to more accurately gauge the morality of any given situation. Many psychologists have argued that emotional reactions are the best predictors of moral judgment. In an effort to learn more about the link between morality and emotionality, anthropologist and psychologist Richard Shweder and his colleagues affirmed that there are three distinct values that cultures implement to resolve moral issues: community, autonomy, and divinity. These three principals are known as the CAD Triad Hypothesis. This theory provides an innovative way to associate emotions to moralization by emphasizing that morality not only includes reasoning, but also emotional reactions.
Read more about this topic: Moral Psychology
Famous quotes containing the words cad and/or hypothesis:
“The Cad is the entire epitome, the complete blossom and fruit in one, of what we are told is an age of culture. Behold him in the vélodrome as he yells insanely after his kind as they tear along on their tandem machines in a match, and then ask yourself candidly, O my reader, if any age before this in all the centuries of earth ever produced any creature so utterly low and loathsome, so physically, mentally, individually, and collectively hideous?”
—Ouida [Marie Louise De La Ramée] (1839–1908)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)