Order Effects, Moral Cognition, and Intelligence

Abstract

Order effects have to do with how the order in which information is presented to an agent can affect how the information is processed. This paper examines the issue of order effects in the classification of moral situations. Some order effects mark a localized failure of intelligence. The hypothesis examined herein is that the processes or mechanisms that make some undesirable order effects possible may also have highly desirable effects. This will be done by comparing two artificial neural networks (ANNs) that classify moral situations, one subject to order effects and another that is not subject to them. The ANN subject to order effects has advantages in learning and noise tolerance over the other ANN – features hard to ignore in modeling intelligence. After presenting modeling results, there will be discussions of the implications of order effects for (a) cognitive modeling and artificial intelligence as well as (b) debates between moral particularists and generalists.