Why do some people seem to incline towards moral relativism more often than others? Is it because they have a more powerful imagination and greater openness to experience? Joshua Knobe, Assistant Professor, Program in Cognitive Science and Department of Philosophy at Yale, finds experimental results that he claims suggest this (also see the interesting comments section beneath his article):

[Many studies suggest that] people are more inclined to be relativists when they are high in openness to experience, when they have an especially good ability to consider multiple possibilities … my collaborators and I thought that it might be possible to offer a single unifying account that explained them all. Specifically, our hypothesis was that people are drawn to relativism to the extent that they open their minds to alternative perspectives. There might be all sorts of different factors that lead people to open their minds in this way (personality traits, cognitive dispositions, age), but regardless of the instigating factor, researchers seem always to be finding the same basic effect. The more people have a capacity to truly engage with other perspectives, the more they seem to turn toward moral relativism… [so a team ran many new studies to test the hypothesis.]

[The studies suggest that we] do not typically come to [moral] questions with any kind of pre-established view about the nature of moral truths. Rather, we look at a moral claim and just try to imagine any way in which it could be true for some people and false for others. If we have spent our whole lives in a small community of like-minded others, it will often prove impossible to imagine any such possibility, and we will immediately conclude that the claim is objectively true. But modern life is moving increasingly in a different direction. We are gaining ever more access to other perspectives, other ways of life. With this access comes an ever greater ability to imagine alternatives — and an ever greater inclination toward moral relativism.

Update: The article above also appears in The Philosopher’s Magazine.