How morality signals, benefits, binds, and teaches

Abstract

We hypothesize that people can use the extremity of their moral intuitions—the extent to which something feels moral versus immoral—to make functional social inferences that signal inner character, benefit individual welfare, bind groups together, and teach normative behavior. We find strong support for this hypotheses across four preregistered studies (N = 1224). Our measure of these social functions has four reliable, distinct dimensions that map onto signaling, benefiting, binding, and teaching (Studies 1–3). These social functions uniquely predict judgments of morality and immorality across a wide variety of moral contexts (Study 1), and experimentally manipulating the operation of these social functions causes stronger moral judgments (Study 4). Critically, an experimental manipulation of moral extremity—in which participants write about their own recalled (Study 2) or hypothetical (Study 3) moral event of varying severity—causes stronger inferences about these social functions. Aggregate analyses provide complementary support these hypotheses. Finally, we discuss how morality facilitates life in groups and the asymmetries between moral versus immoral judgment.