Should AI Trust Its Gut? The Cost of Deliberative Moral Reasoning in Humans and AI
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: People prefer deliberation to intuition, when judging how others solve hard problems, and they extend this to artificial agents. Yet in the moral domain, the preference may reverse as intuitive moral responses appear to signal good character. One explanation is that fast, intuitive responses show real emotional engagement. Since machines are thought to lack emotion, it is unclear whether a preference for intuition in the moral domain extends to AI. Across three preregistered studies (N = 2,173), we find that it does, but that it appears to be driven by commitment to moral norms and precedents rather than emotion. In Study 1, participants preferred intuitive reasoning for moral decisions and systematic reasoning for non-moral decisions, for human and AI agents alike. Intuitive moral reasoning signalled better character but was not clearly expected to produce better outcomes. In Study 2, the character preference persisted when the AI was described as being incapable of emotion. In Study 3, we held the decision fixed and varied how firmly the agent held the relevant moral norm. An agent who would never reconsider applying a moral norm was rated above one who would reconsider given sufficiently high stakes; and both above one who weighed costs and benefits case by case. Commitment raised character ratings more than expected-outcome ratings. The character-based cost of moral deliberation appears to be a cost of treating a moral norm as negotiable, and we found strong evidence that people apply this inference to machines and people alike.
Source: PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Authors: Simon Myers, Nick Chater
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7223200415