Our decisions about right and wrong are heavily influenced by automatic, intuitive responses. Some of these responses are beneficial, enabling us to smoothly navigate complex social situations, while others are detrimental, leading to decisions that either systematically ignore relevant concerns, or that take into account irrelevant ones. Fortunately, our automatic moral intuitions can sometimes be corrected by controlled, reflective processes. The goal of my research is to identify the factors that enable us to override our automatic moral intuitions using more controlled, reflective processing, particularly in cases where our intuitions may lead us astray.

For example, in one recent study (Paxton, Ungar, and Greene, 2011), we asked subjects to complete a number of math problems that have intuitively appealing, but demonstrably false answers (Frederick, 2005). Responding successfully to these problems reinforced the value of reflection, reminding subjects that their intuitive responses are sometimes incorrect. In a subsequent moral judgment task, subjects were more utilitarian, favoring the "greater good" over a number of competing concerns.

My research is motivated in part by the belief that identifying the factors that encourage reflection will give us the knowledge necessary to make more reflective moral decisions, while also helping us to better distinguish decisions that are based on reflection from those that are based on (at times) misleading moral intuitions.