Undergraduate Course: Moral Judgement and Behaviour (PSYL10148)
Course Outline
| School | School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course covers the main social-cognitive and computational models of moral judgement, situational factors impacting on both moral (e.g. altruistic, helping) and immoral (corrupt/harmful) behaviour in organizational settings. |
| Course description |
This course will cover several of the main models in moral judgement, including dual process models, Social Intuitionist Model, Moral Foundations Theory, and computational models of moral judgement based on reinforcement learning theory and drift diffusion models. Additionally, topics will include socio-cognitive factors impacting justice/fairness judgements (distributive, procedural, and retributive justice), organizational corruption, mass atrocity, and pro-social helping/altruism.
Skills taught/developed within this course include hierarchical information integration, viz. empirical results and theoretical models; critical analysis; structuring arguments to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of competing theoretical models; and writing skills.
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Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | Visiting students should be studying Psychology as their degree major, and have completed at least 3 Psychology courses at grade B or above. We will only consider University/College level courses. Applicants should note that, as with other popular courses, meeting the minimum does NOT guarantee admission. **Please note that upper level Psychology courses are high-demand, meaning that they have a very high number of students wishing to enrol in a very limited number of spaces.** These enrolments are managed strictly by the Visiting Student Office, in line with the quotas allocated by the department, and all enquiries to enrol in these courses must be made through the CAHSS Visiting Student Office. It is not appropriate for students to contact the department directly to request additional spaces. |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Knowledge & understanding of key debates in moral psychology
- Relationships between computational models and verbal models with respect to empirical results
- Understanding of distinction, and relationship, between descriptive models and normative models in developing scientific theory
- Ability to evaluate theoretical debates in light of ambiguous/conflicting evidence (i.e. issues currently not settled).
- Understanding of relationship between moral psychology and wider issues in cognitive science (i.e. dual process models of information processing, etc.).
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Critical analysis of complex theories, experiments, and patterns of data; knowledge and understanding of cognitive psychology of reasoning and decision making; ability to integrate information at multiple levels of conceptual hierarch (empirical to theoretical, and theoretical to meta-theoretical). |
| Keywords | psychology; moral judgement; behaviour |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Adam Moore
Tel: (0131 6)50 3369
Email: amoore23@exseed.ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Ms Alex MacAndrew
Tel: (0131 6)51 3733
Email: alexandra.macandrew@ed.ac.uk |
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