Are Humans Moral Creatures? A Dual-Process Approach for Natural Experiments of History

The decline in violence and growing awareness of human rights can be viewed as natural experiments in history answering the question if humans are moral creatures. A dual-process approach, which assumes the intuitive and reflective systems, is adopted to examine how the reflective system controls the intuitive system, which possibly produces our cruelty. Reading a story may enhance our reflective system to suppress our cruelty. However, the power of the reflective system is weak in arousing people’s action against violence. Hence, theory of mind (ToM) accompanied by emotional empathy is necessary for the suppression of cruelty. However, ToM is modular in nature and one of the subsystems of the intuitive system; hence, empathy is narrow in its focus, which possibly causes social fragmentation and political polarisation.