Recently, there was an article in the New Statesman about Gordon Brown and his moral compass… Of course many, many other public figures have wanted us to see and hear them have a moral compass of some sort… Heck, I attempt to display my very own here on this blog most days…

What is inherent within statements by people claiming to have this moral compass is this idea that to follow a moral code of some sort is somehow a good thing… For some it shows that they were reaised a certain way, or have come to live by a moral code through life experience and as a result they are a good person… I think morals are very hypnotic, aren’t they?

So today, I’d like to highlight that this is actually all a bit naive… Because I have been reading today some of what is a growing body of research indicating that much of our moral thinking is automatic and nonconscious — mindless even.

Ha! How do you like that all you moralistic so and so’s? 😉

Let me explain where I am going with this today…

Ok, so do we hypnotically take on board the morals of those we have encountered? Or get them from our life? Or what we have been led to believe through various means? What do you think?

A rather uncomfortable example I’d like to cite today is offered up by psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He states that the majority of people register moral objection when told a story about a brother and sister who slept together, consensually, with no harm arising.

I mean when that storyline hit Channel 4’s TV soap Hollyoaks a couple of years back, there was uproar!

Yet if you asked the same people why they find it objectionable, such people can’t explain their reasoning — a phenomenon that Haidt has dubbed moral dumbfounding… “Err… It’s just wrong, innit?” Is the kind of morally dumbfounded response I’d tend to give… Ahem… Although I would actually pronounce the words “isn’t it?” Ok, I digress… 

Just recently a piece of research was conducted entitled Assessing the Automacity of Moral Processing — rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? You have to love the world of academic researchers…

The research aims to provide further evidence for the automaticity of moral processing.

The researchers asked three groups of students to read different versions of short stories that either ended with a morally good or morally bad punchline.

It showed that the participants had processed the contrasting moral implications of the stories in different ways and took different periods of time to process negative moral implications.

So, perhaps I have to resign myself to the fact that being moralistic is not something we are being fed by our chosen favourite media… Or by elderly relatives or politicians preaching old-style values of some sort… I need to stop raging against the machine and just accept that we are hardwired to be moral in some sense…

There you go… I can just go back to blogging about hypnosis news and stop making attempts to convert everyone to believe that they are being hypnotised all day every day… Are you sensing my sarcasm? Is my sense of irony being subtle enough today?

😉