Without thinking twice
A shortened version of my forthcoming paper in the Journal of Cognition and Culture
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About the Author
Jimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University working on cooperation and political economy, ethics, and God. Before he taught at University of Maryland, Georgetown, and Towson University. He loves classic rock and Western, movies, and combat sports. He lives with his wife, a prosecutor, and family at the foot of the Superstition Mountains. He also abides.
It is typical to treat ignorance as a moral liability in that one can either be culpable for their ignorance, or their ignorance can mitigate blame. In either case, ignorance is to be excused, managed, or overcome. However, that picture leaves something out. Because some forms of ignorance can reveal something about one’s moral character or dispositions that knowledge cannot. And in this vein, acting without thinking twice can be a kind of costly signal that transmits the message this person can be trusted (even if the signal isn’t perfect).
Imagine Sammy, driving with his daughter across a bridge, when he sees a baby fall into the the river below. Before his brain can calculate the personal benefits and costs of helping, Sammy dives in to save the baby. He doesn’t stop to estimate the current or his odds of survival, but acts to save the baby and succeeds. That act tells us more about Sammy’s moral character than exclamations of moral purity. Why? Because not thinking twice is the only way to prove that the motive wasn’t self-interested. It’s the moral equivalent of a financial burn rate: a willingness to incur risk in real time for reasons that can’t be faked later.
Compare that to the person who pauses to tally costs and benefits before doing the right thing. They might land on the same action, but we don’t admire them in the same way. This is because we do not trust them in the same way because their choice to act was clearly strategic. Had it not been in the person’s interest to rescue the child, they would have refrained. Empirical research backs this intuition. People judge uncalculating cooperators—those who act without pausing to weigh the tradeoffs—as more trustworthy than those who deliberate first. Even when outcomes are identical, we value the absence of calculation because it minimizes the role of self-interest in the decision making process.
Humans are a reputational species living in what Dan Sperber and Nicolas Baumard call a cooperation market where each of us trades on our reputations. The value of these markets hinges on the fact that our survival frequently depends on finding reliable and trustworthy cooperation partners and avoiding cheaters and free riders. That is why reputations have such social and cooperative weight. These are social technology for trust and cooperation. In several related studies, participants said they would rather suffer imprisonment, mutilation, or death than acquire a reputation as a Nazi or child molester. Lose your reputation and you lose access to many of the benefits of cooperation.
Because reputations are so valuable, we have evolved to be highly sensitive to reliable signals of moral quality that are costly and hard to fake. Signals that cannot (except rarely) be sent in a cheap or hard to fake fashion. That is where ignorance enters the signaling story. Signaling theory—born in economics and evolutionary biology—asks how hidden traits get credibly communicated. A peacock’s tail is the paradigmatic case: biologically useless, even dangerous, but precisely for that reason a trustworthy sign of fitness. A fake diamond may fool a lover, but not a jeweler, and the cost of a real diamond is high.
Some signals are costly, others hard to fake. Lifting two hundred pounds or devising a clever joke—both reveal an underlying trait you either have or don’t. As a signal, ignorance can do both. So, for example, when Sammy dives into the river, his ignorance of personal risk is a hard-to-fake signal of altruism: it is almost impossible to act that way without genuinely caring more about the child than about yourself. It’s also a costly signal: by acting without full information, Sammy handicaps his ability to self-protect. He incurs epistemic (and risks others kind of) costs to display moral credibility.
Here a skeptic might object that it is spontaneity, not ignorance, doing the moral work. But the two are joined at the hip. Spontaneity creates ignorance by closing the deliberative window. When you move first, you forfeit the chance to weigh your own welfare. Suppose the same baby fell into a shallow pond and a crowd shouted that a $10,000 reward awaited whoever saved it. Diving in then wouldn’t tell us much about moral character since anybody who needed the money and could swim well would have a reason to save the child independent of moral factors.
People who act without thinking twice often gain a reputational boost. They seem not just good but genuinely good. Experimental evidence shows that when decision-making processes are visible, people deliberately behave in less calculating ways—apparently to signal sincerity. This dynamic is at play in everyday life with a pause before a lie or strategic apology.
In deception studies, people under time pressure lie less because they have too little time to plan, they default to honesty. The same mechanism applies to altruism: when there is no time to think, we revert to whatever moral identity we have already built. And that is precisely what observers infer. Under uncertainty, your reputation is the story others tell about how trustworthy and reliable you are.
There is another layer to moral signaling though: ignorance not only signals to others but also signals to the self. Behavioral economists Ayelet Gneezy and colleagues argue that people use their own costly moral actions as data points about who they are since we often only have partial knowledge about ourselves. Cost amplifies that inference to better self-knowledge by signaling our traits to future selves. When doing good hurts and our future selves have but partial self-knowledge, the signal are a beacon of self-identity and for future action. Acting altruistically under uncertainty—when the costs are unknown—tells the actor that their character is trustworthy at least to a degree. That is how moral identities are formed, and once formed, they becomes self-stabilizing and predictive of consistent moral action over time.
Ignorance of the right kind makes morality credible. It communicates that the actor is guided by something deeper than calculation. To act without knowing the odds is to bet on who you already are. That is one reason why the rescuer who jumps without thinking twice seems noble, while the one who pauses to calculate seems merely prudent. Ignorance can sometimes be the clearest evidence of integrity. The display of our ignorance can help cultivate moral trust.
I think this is why people also think so highly of the character of dogs. Their loyalty, selflessness, affection is immediate and uncalculated. They have a finely tuned moral instinct toward their person/people.