Edward Royzman

Introduction

Edward B. Royzman is an American psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior lecturer in the Master of Behavioral and Decision Sciences program and teaches in the Department of Psychology and in the College of Liberal and Professional Studies. He received his doctorate in experimental psychology at Pennsylvania. Royzman is best known for two things that look unrelated until you notice the connection between them: a general account of why bad weighs more than good, and a sustained skepticism about the claim that emotion does the real work in moral judgment. His most-cited paper, written with Paul Rozin, is the standard modern treatment of negativity bias. His most combative work, on moral dumbfounding and on the role of disgust in moral judgment, takes aim at some of the best-known findings in contemporary moral psychology, including those of Jonathan Haidt. He is a theorist of the minority tradition, arguing that the empirical case for affective primacy in ethics is weaker than it is usually made to look.

Early Life and Education

Little biographical detail about Royzman has been published, and he has not courted a public profile. He took his undergraduate and graduate training in the United States and completed a Ph.D. in experimental psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, remaining there for his subsequent career. The training matters for his style: his work is methodological as much as it is substantive, and a recurring move in his papers is to take a well-known experiment, identify a confound in its design or in the way its questions are interpreted, and rerun it under tighter conditions. Much of his research was conducted in collaboration with the judgment and decision-making group at Penn, including Jonathan Baron, whose work on the costs and benefits of moral rules shaped Royzman's own approach to cost-benefit reasoning in the moral domain. He also worked for years with Paul Rozin, whose research on disgust, contagion and the cultural evolution of the moral emotions provided the other half of his intellectual inheritance.

Academic and Professional Career

Royzman has spent his career at Penn, first in research roles in the Department of Psychology and later as a senior lecturer in the Master of Behavioral and Decision Sciences program, where he teaches the core course in judgment and decision making. Alongside his research he has been an active reviewer and methodological critic, publishing on the inferential limits of the treatment-control designs that dominate behavioral science. His research falls broadly under three headings: the structure and consequences of negativity bias, the nature of the moral-conventional distinction, and the role of affective responding in judgments of harm, responsibility and disgust. In recent years he has also worked on the moral psychology of opposition to genetically modified food and on the evolutionary explanation of puritanical moral codes.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Negativity bias, negativity dominance and contagion

With Paul Rozin, Royzman published "Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion" in 2001, which has become the canonical reference for the claim that negative entities are psychologically stronger than positive ones. The paper distinguished four separate phenomena that had been run together in the literature: negative potency, where bad events outweigh the equivalent good ones; steeper negative gradients, where the aversiveness of a bad outcome grows faster with proximity or magnitude than the attractiveness of a good one; negativity dominance, where the net evaluation of a mixed good-and-bad object is more negative than the arithmetic sum of its parts; and negative differentiation, where negative categories are more finely subdivided in language and in thought. The authors argued that the bias rests on both innate predisposition and experience, and that it explains a family of otherwise puzzling findings about contagion, where a brief contact with something disgusting contaminates an otherwise desirable object. The paper has been cited thousands of times and is standard reading in judgment and decision making.

The preference for indirect harm

In work with Jonathan Baron, Royzman examined a distinction that moral philosophy has drawn but that psychology had largely ignored: whether harm is brought about as the means to an end or as a foreseen side effect. Presenting people with pairs of scenarios in which an action harmed some to aid others, they found that subjects systematically preferred the version in which the harm was an indirect byproduct to the one in which it was the direct instrument. The result could not be explained by outcome magnitude, and it suggested that ordinary moral judgment encodes something close to the doctrine of double effect. It also showed that people are not naive consequentialists, a point that complicates cost-benefit models of moral reasoning without rescuing purely affective ones.

Unsentimental ethics

Royzman's most direct challenge to the affective turn in moral psychology came in a 2009 paper with Robert Leeman and Jonathan Baron in Cognition. The target was Shaun Nichols's neo-sentimentalist argument that emotion is indispensable to the construction of the moral domain, supported by experiments which appeared to show that children and adults classify harmless-but-disgusting violations as moral rather than conventional. Royzman and his colleagues reviewed the developmental literature, argued that it collectively fails to support the claim that emotion plays a substantial contributory role, and then reported two studies whose results ran opposite to Nichols's first two experiments while favoring a version of Elliot Turiel's harm-based account instead. The title of the paper states the thesis: moral judgment tracks content, specifically harm, and does not need to be underwritten by feeling to be moral.

Disgust, divinity and the limits of the CAD hypothesis

The cultural psychology of the emotions, particularly the community-autonomy-divinity framework associated with Rozin, holds that disgust is the characteristic response to violations of the divinity code. Royzman tested this directly. In a 2014 paper in Emotion with Pavel Atanasov, Justin Landy, Andrew Parks and Anthony Gepty, he reported that anger, not disgust, is the predominant response to pathogen-free violations of the divinity code, a finding that cuts against a simple mapping from purity violations onto disgust. Earlier, with John Sabini, he had argued that disgust may not qualify as an emotion at all, on the grounds that an emotion requires abstract elicitors and flexible responses whereas disgust's elicitors are concrete. Both arguments were designed to weaken the inference from feeling disgusted to judging something morally wrong.

Taking apart moral dumbfounding

Royzman's most visible intervention concerns moral dumbfounding, the finding, central to social intuitionism, that people condemn harmless taboo violations such as consensual sibling incest and then, when pressed, cannot give a reason and insist that the act is wrong anyway. The effect has been treated as evidence that moral judgment is driven by intuition and that reasoning is post-hoc rationalization. In a 2015 paper in Judgment and Decision Making with Kwanwoo Kim and Robert Leeman, titled "The Curious Tale of Julie and Mark," Royzman and his colleagues argued that the effect is substantially an artifact. Participants do offer reasons, and the appearance of dumbfounding depends on how questions are asked and on what counts as an adequate justification. Once the procedure is tightened, the phenomenon shrinks and what remains is better explained by ordinary cost-benefit reasoning about risk than by a special faculty of moral intuition.

Major Publications

Rozin, P., & Royzman, E. B. (2001). "Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion." Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5(4), 296-320
Royzman, E. B., & Sabini, J. (2001). "Something It Takes to Be an Emotion: The Interesting Case of Disgust." Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 31(1)
Royzman, E. B., & Baron, J. (2002). "The Preference for Indirect Harm." Social Justice Research, 15(2), 165-184
Royzman, E. B., Cassidy, K. W., & Baron, J. (2003). "'I Know, You Know': Epistemic Egocentrism in Children and Adults." Review of General Psychology, 7(1), 38-65
Monterosso, J., Royzman, E. B., & Schwartz, B. (2005). "Explaining Away Responsibility." Ethics & Behavior, 15(2), 139-158
Royzman, E. B., Leeman, R. F., & Baron, J. (2009). "Unsentimental Ethics: Towards a Content-Specific Account of the Moral-Conventional Distinction." Cognition, 112(1), 159-174
Royzman, E. B., Atanasov, P., Landy, J. F., Parks, A., & Gepty, A. (2014). "CAD or MAD? Anger (Not Disgust) as the Predominant Response to Pathogen-Free Violations of the Divinity Code." Emotion, 14(5), 892
Royzman, E. B., Kim, K., & Leeman, R. F. (2015). "The Curious Tale of Julie and Mark: Unraveling the Moral Dumbfounding Effect." Judgment and Decision Making, 10(4), 296-313

Impact and Legacy

Royzman's influence is concentrated where he is cited rather than where he is followed. The negativity bias paper with Rozin is a foundational reference and is unlikely to be displaced; it is invoked in work on political judgment, risk perception, consumer choice, impression formation and the psychology of loss aversion. His work with Baron on indirect harm is part of the evidence base for the view that ordinary moral judgment is sensitive to the distinction between means and side effects, and it is regularly cited in experimental philosophy and in the psychology of the doctrine of double effect. His methodological writing on the limits of controlled experimentation anticipates the concerns about design and inference that later became central to discussions of replication.

Where he is a critic rather than a source, the reception has been more contested, and that is precisely the interesting part of his standing. The dominant position in moral psychology over the last two decades has been that moral judgment is fast, automatic and affective, with deliberate reasoning arriving afterwards to rationalize what has already been decided. Royzman has been one of the most persistent internal critics of that consensus. His 2009 unsentimental ethics paper argued that the developmental evidence for affective primacy does not say what Nichols took it to say and reported failures to reproduce Nichols's own experiments. His work on disgust argued that the emotion most often recruited to explain moral condemnation of purity violations is not the one people actually report. His 2015 paper on dumbfounding attacked the single most frequently cited demonstration in support of social intuitionism, arguing that the effect depends on a procedural artifact.

The responses have been of two kinds and neither has settled the matter. Proponents of the affective account have argued that Royzman and his colleagues set the bar for an acceptable justification too high, that participants in dumbfounding studies really do fail to produce reasons even when invited to do so at length, and that demonstrations of anger alongside disgust do not show that disgust is causally inert, since the two emotions co-occur and may operate through different pathways. Royzman's reply, in effect, is that a theory which accommodates every outcome is not a theory about content, and that harm-based accounts predict the data with fewer assumptions. There is also a broader judgment on his work that even sympathetic readers make: much of it is negative in character, better at showing what the evidence does not establish than at producing an alternative model with the reach of the one he criticizes. That asymmetry is probably why he remains, despite one of the most cited review papers of his generation, a critic's critic rather than the head of a school.

Learn More

References

Royzman, E. B., & Rozin, P. (2001). Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and contagion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5(4), 296-320.