Why Is the Affect Heuristic Significant?

Why does it matter whether or not we use the Affect Heuristic? According to its defenders, it has implications for the foundations of ethics.

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Two Implications of the Affect Heuristic for Ethics

First implication: ‘if moral intuitions result from heuristics, [... philosophers] must stop claiming direct insight into moral properties’ (Sinnott-Armstrong, Young, & Cushman, 2010, p. 268).^[1]

Second implication: ‘Just as non-moral heuristics lack reliability in unusual situations, so do moral intuitions’ (Sinnott-Armstrong et al., 2010, p. 268).

The second implication is relevant to evaluating objections to consequentialism:

‘Critics often argue that consequentialism can’t be accurate, because it implies moral judgments that are counter-intuitive, such as that we are morally permitted to punish an innocent person in the well-known example where this is necessary to stop riots and prevent deaths. With the heuristic model in hand, consequentialists can respond that the target attribute is having the best consequences, and any intuitions to the contrary result from substituting a heuristic attribute’ (Sinnott-Armstrong et al., 2010, p. 269).

Wilson (who does not explicitly endorse the hypothesis that moral intuitions are a consequence of reliance on the Affect Hypothesis) makes an even stronger claim:

‘ethical philosophers intuit the deontological canons of morality by consulting the emotive centers of their own hypothalamic-limbic system ... Only by interpreting the activity of the emotive centers as a biological adaptation can the meaning of the canons be deciphered’ (Wilson, 1975, p. 563 quoted in Haidt, 2008, p. 68).

If this is right, you cannot understand ethics at all without knowledge of emotional processes. Wilson links this claim to a strong form of ethical pluralism:

‘a schedule of sex- and age-depend­ent ethics can impart higher genetic fitness than a single moral code which is applied uniformly to all sex-age groups. [...] no single set of moral standards can be applied to all human populations, let alone all sex-age classes within each population. To impose a uniform code is therefore to create complex, intractable moral dilemmas—these, of course, are the cur­rent condition of mankind’ (Wilson, 1975, pp. 563--4).

But should we accept any of these claims? Are they supported by evidence (or argument)?

Background: Understanding Heuristics

To gain a better understanding of heuristics, it may be helpful to consider a nonmoral case where we have good evidence that heuristics matter.

Pachur, Hertwig, & Steinmann (2012) investigated how naive humans’ answer track three questions:

• frequency—Which cause of death has a higher annual mortality rate?
• risk—Which cause of death represents a higher risk of dying from it?^[2]
• Value of a Statistical Life (VSL)—How much money should be spent to avoid one fatality due to this cause of death?^[3]

You can see the actual frequencies (in Switzerland) and the subjects’ median estimates of frequency for various causes of death in Table 2 of Pachur et al. (2012).

What did the subjects compute that enabled them to answer questions about frequency, risk and the value of a statistical life? Since these attributes tracked were inaccessible to the subjects, they cannot have been computing the attributues themselves. Instead they must have been computing something which, within limits, correlates with the attributes (like tracking toxicity by computing how smelling or tasting a potential food makes you feel; see Moral Intuitions and an Affect Heuristic).

In this situation, there are at least two heuristics the subjects might use:

Availability Heuristic The easier it is to bring a case of this cancer to mind, the more frequent or risky it is.

Affect Heuristic (for frequency and risk^[4]) The more dread you feel when imagining it, the more frequent or risky it is.

Pachur et al. (2012) propose a hypothesis about how different attributes are tracked using different heuristics:

Hypothesis: The Availability Heuristic dominates frequency judgements, whereas the Affect Heuristic dominates risk and VSL judgements.

This hypothesis generates a readily testable prediction:

Prediction: Number of cases in a subject’s social network will better predict frequency judgements, whereas feelings of dread will better predict risk and VSL judgements.

Pachur et al. (2012) tested these predictions. They found that:

‘availability-by-recall offered a substantially better descriptive account than the affect heuristic when people judged deindividualized, statistical mortality rates. Affect, however, was at least on par with availability when people were asked to put a price tag on a single life saved from a risk, or when they were asked to indicate the perceived risk of dying’ (p. 324).

These findings provide a paradigm case where a hypothesis about a heuristic was successfully established.

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