The illusion of explanatory depth in moral versus non-moral issues

Abstract

Fernbach, Rogers, Fox, and Sloman (2013) found that extremity of people’s political attitudes can be reduced by confronting them with their lack of understanding of political issues. Considering the crucial implications of these findings, we conducted two replications of Fernbach et al.’s experiment 2 (study 1: N = 241; study 2: N = 250). We also differentiated issues based on their morality as moral and non-moral in a pilot study. In these studies, participants were randomly assigned to either mechanistic explanation or reason (control) conditions. In both conditions, participants provided their understanding and position on two moral and two non moral issues. Then, in the mechanistic explanation condition, participants explained four policies' effects (two moral and two non-moral) in a step-by-step manner with causal relations. In contrast, in the reasons condition, they generated reasons for their positions. After providing explanations, participants were asked to rate both understanding and attitudes on the policies. We expected that for non-moral issues, asking for a mechanistic explanation would lead to a greater decrease in reported understanding and attitude extremity, compared to asking for reasons in favor of or against the issue. We also expected that in mechanistic conditions, reported understanding and attitude extremity would decrease more for non-moral issues than moral issues. Our results did not support any of these. Yet, consistent with our expectations, for moral issues, a decrease in reported understanding and attitude extremity was not different between two conditions.