Moral Psychology

Moral psychology is the empirical counterpart to moral philosophy: rather than asking what people should do, it studies what people actually do when faced with ethical decisions — and why. Research in this field reveals that human moral judgments are often fast, intuitive, and influenced by irrelevant factors like framing, disgust, or social proximity rather than principled reasoning. This has direct relevance to AI behavior work: human feedback used to train models reflects the moral psychology of the raters, including their biases and inconsistencies. For behavior architects, moral psychology helps explain why model behavior — shaped by human judgment — often feels inconsistent or contextually strange, and why careful annotation design is essential to avoid baking in arbitrary moral intuitions.