TeachingBase

Noticing moral intuitions

Students identify the moral intuitions underlying people’s opinions in quoted texts and images.

Using these teaching materials, students are introduced to the moral intuitions and then identify the role of emotions and intuitions in the language of people and reflect on the functions and effects of emotions and intuitions in social exchange.

Note to teachers/adaptations to local context: You can integrate other examples of quotes, pictures, election posters, protest signs, excerpts from the media etc., that relate more to your students’ everyday experiences or current political issues in your context, or let students collect their own examples from different media sources after discussing a few examples in class.

Teaching material type Full lesson plan, Reading text, Sorting activity

Subject Areas Ethics, Language, Literature, Philosophy, Social Studies, Social-Emotional Learning

Learning Goals Cooperation Competency, Critical Thinking, Evaluation Competency, Intercultural Competence, Metacognitive Competency, Self-Regulation Competency

Suitable Grade Levels 6-8, 9-12

Concepts Cognition, Moral cognition, Morality, Perception, Thinking

Content Anchors Cultural diversity, Our Mind

Author: Susan Hanisch

Related Lesson Materials

Causes of our moral intuitions

In this lesson students explore the causes of our moral intuitions with the help of a sorting activity and reflection questions.

Discussion guide about moral issues

Lesson plan and worksheets to apply understandings of moral psychology in classroom discussions about ethical issues

Fast thinking or slow thinking

In this lesson students sort their own experience of thinking into fast and slow processes. Based on this, they come to understand that our thinking is shaped through experience such that things we do often and regularly become easier over time.

Moral taste buds

In this lesson students explore the causes and functions of, as well as ways to flexibly relate to our moral intuitions by engaging the analogy to our taste buds.

True stories of people who left radical movements

In this unit students explore stories of people who have left a radical movement, or deliberately discuss with representatives of the “other side” and build respectful relationships. These let us explore the circumstances, experiences and insights about why prejudice, hatred and violence against other people or a group can arise and how they can dissolve again.

Two stories of capitalism

Students explore two contrasting stories about the benefits and failures of capitalism, identify the moral intuitions behind each story, and write a third story about capitalism that integrates aspects of both stories.

Related Literature

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York, NY, USA: Pantheon Books.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion is a 2012 social psychology book by Jonathan Haidt, in which the author describes human morality as it relates to politics and religion. In the first section, Haidt demonstrates that people’s beliefs are driven primarily by intuition, with reason operating mostly to justify beliefs that are intuitively obvious. In the second section, he lays out his theory that the human brain is organized to respond to several distinct types of moral violations, much like a tongue is organized to respond to different sorts of foods. In the last section, Haidt proposes that humans have an innate capacity to sometimes be “groupish” rather than “selfish”. (Source: Wikipedia)