Groups and morality.

Abstract

Across social and personality psychology, there is renewed interest in morality. Consistent with these fields’ general emphasis on subjective psychological processes, recent work tends to view any thought, feeling, or behavior that includes a notion of right and wrong as moral (for a review, see Haidt & Kesebir, 2010). This makes moral psychology an unusually diverse topic. Therefore, this chapter reviews a wide swath of relevant work, on topics ranging from personality, self-perception, and self-esteem; to social cooperation, trust, and interdependence; to stereotypes, prejudice, and group identity. Although social and personality psychologists examine individuals’ use of specific notions of right and wrong—based on such concepts as justice, trustworthiness, warmth, cooperation, and harm— they tend to avoid the question of whether individuals’ subjective notions of right and wrong are actually moral in an objective sense (Blasi, 1990). In this respect, psychology diverges sharply from a philosophical or ethical approach, which typically compares individuals’ subjective notions of morality to a conception of morality that is defined objectively by principle or shared practice (Blasi, 1990; for discussions in philosophy, see MacIntyre, 1984; Rawls, 1971). Given that morality is not defined objectively in social and personality psychology, we must attend closely to which notions of right and wrong researchers consider to be in the moral domain. As explained in the following section, some notions of morality, such as trustworthiness and justice, are more compatible with an objective sense of the concept, given their basis in principles or shared practices. Perhaps because social psychology defines moral thought, feeling, and behavior as that which individuals subjectively consider right or wrong, the focus has been on individuals in general (for reviews, see Haidt & Kesebir, 2010; Monin & Jordan, 2009; Pagliaro, 2012). Thus, the morality of particular individuals has been relatively neglected by social psychologists. The first section discusses the roots of the individual approach to morality in social psychology. It also reviews distinct approaches to moral personality and honor, which focus on individuals’ particular moral self-views. Although moral personality may appear to have little to do with groups, individual ideas about morality rely on some reference to what a moral person is like (for a general discussion, see Harre, 1993). And, whatever their particularities, individuals are moral or immoral in their families, in their neighborhoods, in their workplaces, and in their countries. Thus, even individual morality operates within groups. For these reasons, and others that will be discussed, understanding groups and morality is essential to understanding morality in general. Thus, the second section reviews four of the central ways in which groups are important to morality. The third section reviews the ways in which perceived morality is important to examinations of stereotypes and prejudice toward out-groups. The fourth section