Judging social issues: difficulties, inconsistencies, and consistencies

The three studies reported in this Monograph examine high school and college students' reasoning about the issues of abortion, homosexuality, pornography, and incest. The studies stemmed from previous research on reasoning in the "prototypical" moral, social conventional, and personal domains. We postulated that abortion, homosexuality, pornography, and incest are nonprototypical issues. We expected that reasoning about nonprototypical and prototypical issues would differ and that reasoning about nonprototypical issues would be inconsistent and involve ambiguities in informational assumptions. Two groups were preselected in Study 1, those who negatively and those who positively evaluated the nonprototypical issues. Assessments were made of criterion judgments (evaluations, rule contingency, and generalizability) and justifications regarding moral, personal, and nonprototypical issues. The groups differed in judgments about the nonprototypical issues but not the moral issues. Both groups gave noncontigent and generalized judgments about moral issues, with justifications of justice and rights. Subjects who evaluated nonprototypical acts negatively used varied and often inconsistent configurations of criterion judgments. Responses coded for general reasoning types often entailed juxtapositions of prescriptive judgments and assertions of personal choice. Subjects who evaluated nonprototypical acts positively judged that they should be legal and nongeneralized and gave justifications based on personal choice. Using similar procedures, Study 2 was conducted with practicing Catholics attending parochial high schools. The findings paralleled those of Study 1, including a split among subjects in their evaluations of the nonprototypical issues. The results suggested a bidirectional relation between individual judgments and group positions. The findings of Studies 1 and 2 suggested that variations in evaluations and judgments about the nonprototypical issues were associated with variations in ambiguously held informational assumptions. Study 3 examined the role of such informational assumptions. It was found that assumptions associated with judgments about abortion and homosexuality were ambiguous and inconsistently applied. Thus, we propose that ambiguity around assumptions is a central component of the nonprototypicality of these issues.