Experimental Analysis of Normative Individuals

Abstract

A series of experiments was performed for the purpose of examining the predictive power of the model. These experiments are based on the assumption that the ‘algebra of conscience’ underlies not only the automatic work of the individual’s cognitive processor, but also his moral intuition which manifests itself in conscious moral reasoning. Each subject is given a questionnaire on conflicts between well-known public personalities or literary characters. In answering the questions, the subject is instructed to: a) declare his opinion concerning either the ethical prevalence of one of the characters or their equivalence and b) express his judgments about their mental domains in a way that allows us to construct reflexive formulae for these characters and compute their modules. In this way we can potentially falsify both the model itself and the assumption that the first ethical system is dominant in American culture and the second ethical system in Soviet culture.