(from Sept 30, 2010)

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Following the Harriman Machine Gun Fire, the largely Mormon population of those affected by the fire were counseled by their church leaders against filing excessively inflated, or otherwise bogus claims, against the National Guard.

 Apparently sparked by reports of claimant opportunists, unconflicted by any apparent moral dilemma in going after a large chunk of Uncle Sam’s Long Green, church leaders were asked that members be reminded about which side of the street they were supposed to be working, in God’s plan.

Coincidentally, studies by Harvard University’s Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, are real close to getting a handle on exactly what it is, about our sense of right and wrong behavior, that informs and motivates our moral judgment of people and their actions.Along with a great many other things, Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist, looks into the dissociation that often arises between moral judgments, and justifications for our own actions, as well as those of others.

Marc Hauser on How We Judge Bad Behavior

On behalf of the CEL’s efforts to gather salient data, he invites anyone interested in helping to further research into this subject, to take their brief online Moral Sense Test.

Who knows – maybe they can either help us to better understand ourselves, or we can help them to better understand what undoubtedly lies at the core of all of us.

Sponsored by the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, Harvard University:

The Moral Sense Test is a Web-based study into the nature of human moral judgment. How do human beings decide what is right and wrong? To answer this question, we have designed a series of moral dilemmas to probe the psychological mechanisms underlying our moral judgments. By presenting these dilemmas on the Web, we hope to gain insight into the similarities and differences between the moral judgments of people of different ages, from different cultures, with different educational backgrounds and religious beliefs, involved in different occupations and exposed to very different circumstances. Participation in the study is easy, quick, and completely confidential. Click here to learn more about our research, and to take the test.

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