Abstract

How do humans make moral decisions and judgments? What information do they seek and how do they combine it? I this chapter I review common approaches to moral psychology and argue that they do not answer these questions. I call for an approach to studying moral cognition that is rooted in the fast-and-frugal heuristics framework. This framework postulates the need for precisely specifying psychologically plausible decision mechanisms and experimentally testing whether humans use them. I discuss whether and how research principles of this program are applicable to moral psychology.