For most people morality is approximately how we should treat others,for the common estimable – so we are attracted to people of estimable heart rather than intellectualsWho would you trust more, someone whose moral principles are absolute, and black and white,or someone who carefully considers the rights and wrongs of specific situations before leaping to judgment? My guess is that most people reading this would say the latter. “Rigidity” is a dirty word for most thinking folk, and being comfortable with ambiguity the hallmark of sophistication. But according to new research by experimental psychologists at Oxford and Cornell, and in practice most people trust the absolutists more than the ponderers.
In fact,all the experiments exhibit is that people who refuse to kill an harmless person to save the lives of many others are considered more trustworthy than those who would finish so for the greater estimable. It’s quite an inferential leap to go from that to the view that rigidity in general confers trust.
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Source: theguardian.com