Moral Cognition Research Articles

Influence of negative mood states on moral decision-making

Utilitarian behaviours sometimes require harmful actions be performed to benefit the perceived ‘greater good’. Humans are often averse to such actions when they involve inflicting direct harm upon others, regardless of the positive outcomes that are achieved. Predominant theory proposes that anti-utilitarian biases stem from negative emotions evoked by moral dilemmas, which override considerations of the ‘greater good’ produced by utilitarian behaviour. This study examined associations between utilitarian judgment and common domains of negative mood. Participants ( N ​= ​73) responded to self-report measures of depression, anxiety and stress-tension, followed by a moral dilemma paradigm. The dilemmas involved a series of ethically challenging scenarios, including the canonical ‘trolley problem’. Depression scores were robustly associated with increased utilitarian responses, while no associations were identified for anxiety or stress-tension. Depression was selectively associated with utilitarianism in ‘personal’ moral dilemmas invovling emotionally-salient elements, such as directly sacrificing one life to save five. These findings suggest a preliminary link between depressive mood and utilitarian moral judgement. We discuss the nature of these findings regarding conventional theories, including the role of altered emotion in moral cognition and implications for the study of clinical mood disorders. • On average, non-utilitarian responses were preferred, especially in emotionally-salient dilemmas. • Depression was associated with utilitarian judgement in emotionally-salient moral dilemmas. • Other mood domains (anxiety, stress-tension) showed no association with moral judgement. • Age and sex were also associated with utilitarian judgement.

Relationships Among Maternal Interactive Behaviors, Preschoolers’ Hot and Cool Executive Function, and Conscience

Objectives: Preschoolers’ conscience refers to a concept revolving around moral emotion, cognition and behavior. This study investigates the relationships among preschoolers’ conscience, hot and cool executive function, and maternal interactive behaviors. Furthermore, it examines the mediating role of preschoolers’ executive function in the relationship between maternal interactive behaviors and preschoolers’ conscience.Methods: Participants comprised 220 mothers and teachers engaging with preschoolers. Data were collected during the COVID-19 period. Therefore, a research process, which suited the changing operations of day-care centers and kindergartens due to social distancing, was adopted. The mothers answered questionnaires on preschoolers’ conscience and maternal interactive behaviors, and the teachers on hot and cool executive function. Obtained data were analyzed using correlations, multiple regression, hierarchical regression, and bootstrapping.Results: Results revealed that the preschoolers’ conscience was significantly related to maternal interactive behaviors and preschoolers’ hot and cool executive function. The preschoolers’ executive function mediated the effect of maternal interactive behaviors on their conscience. Specifically, the plannning and organizing of the executive function fully mediated the relationship between maternal efficient interactive behaviors and preschoolers’ internalized conduct. The bootstrapping result suggested that the indirect effect is statistically significant.Conclusion: This study explored an area of morality that is less researched and incorporated the importance of executive function into it. Additionally, the results confirmed the mediating effect of preschoolers’ executive function on their conscience. The results obtained are expected to help organize activities for developing morality.

The neural mediators of moral attitudes and behaviors

Morality is central for humanity. It has been suggested that our memories of past events involving moral actions contribute to shaping a positive view of the self. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how individual variability in moral attitudes fosters/affects moral behaviors. Here, we used a button-trigger task, where participants mentally simulated themselves as the agents of moral and immoral behaviors (study 1: N = 96). Helping actions appeared to have significantly faster reaction times (RTs) than neutral and harming actions. We also measured the fMRI activity while undergoing such moral actions in another sample (study 2: N = 117). Individual variability among implicit social attitudes (sIAT) predicted quicker RTs for helping actions, and explicit justice sensitivity (JSI) predicted higher warm-glow ratings for helping. Furthermore, the orbitofrontal cortex mediated sIAT–RTs association, while the right temporoparietal junction mediated the JSI–warm-glow linkage. These findings support the dynamic system framework of moral cognition, providing key knowledge on the neural underpinnings regarding individual variability on moral attitudes.

“Black CNN”: Cultural Transmission of Moral Norms through Narrative Art

Abstract In recent debates in moral psychology and literary Darwinism, several authors suggested that narrative art plays a significant role in the process of the social learning of moral norms, functioning as storage of locally salient moral information. However, an integrative view, which would help explain the inner workings of this morally educative function of narrative art, is still lacking. This paper provides such a unifying theoretical account by bringing together insights from moral psychology (concerning the non-reflective nature of moral cognition), educational sciences (concerning different types of settings and methods of moral learning), cognitive/evolutionary narratology (concerning how easy narrative art lends itself to the transmission of moral information), and cultural evolution (concerning different types of learning strategies/biases in relation to narrative art). A study of contemporary American rap music is included to showcase the benefits of this integrative approach in the context of one particular type of narrative art.

New Directions in Understanding Moral Cognition

New Directions in Understanding Moral Cognition

Research on the Influence of Voluntary Service Activities Participation on University Students' Mental Health and Social Development.

In light of the positive correlation between university students' mental health and their social development, the research combined both social development and student participation theories with the correlation and linear regression analysis to explore the influence of voluntary service activities on university students' mental health and social development. The results show that there are differences in students' participation in voluntary activities in different grades, cadre experience, and academic achievement. All dimensions of university students' participation in voluntary service activities have a significant positive influence on university students' mental health and social development. The degree of participation, investment, interaction with other members, and achievement of expected objectives in university students' voluntary service activities have different degrees of influence on university students' ideological and moral cognition, personality development traits, and social adaptability.

How I Speak Defines What I Do: Effects of the Functional Language Proficiency of Host Country Employees on Their Unethical Pro-organizational Behavior.

Functional language has been used in many multinational corporations (MNCs) as a way to overcome the problems caused by the coexistence of multiple languages in the workplace. The existing literature has explored the importance, adoption, and effectiveness of functional language. Yet, how functional language shapes host country employees’ moral cognition and behavior is insufficiently researched. Guided by the Social Identity Theory, this manuscript shows that host country employees’ functional language proficiency (i.e., English) enhances their unethical pro-organizational behavior through their linguistic group identification and moral disengagement. We tested our predictions using the data collected from 309 full-time host country employees through an online survey, and the results generally supported our hypotheses. The findings make contributions to both international management and language literature and organizational moral behavior literature.

Effects of Integrated Moral Reasoning Development Intervention for Management of Violence in Schizophrenia: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

Moral cognition is an important and multidimensional, but often overlooked, determinant of violence. Very few interventions have systematically examined the role of moral reasoning, anger management and problem-solving together in violence. A randomized controlled trial was conducted to comprehensively evaluate the sustained effects of an integrated Moral Reasoning Development Intervention (MRDI) in the management of repetitive violence in schizophrenia. This study placed special emphasis on essential components related to moral reasoning and violence in patients with schizophrenia. Evaluations, including measures of violence, moral reasoning, ethical valuation and judgement, decision-making, conflict management style, and personality traits, were performed at baseline, end of intervention, and 1-month follow-up after intervention. We found that MRDI was superior to treatment-as-usual, in improving moral reasoning and related variables and violence outcomes (p < 0.05). In comparison with the treatment-as-usual group (n = 22), patients in the MRDI group (n = 21) showed improved levels of moral reasoning, with decreased levels of violent behaviors. The MRDI participants also experienced significantly greater improvements or changes (p < 0.05) in their ethical valuation and judgement, decision-making style and preferences, and conflict management style. Our findings provide important implications for risk assessment and violence management and prevention.

Two Dimensions of Moral Cognition as Correlates of Different Forms of Participation in Bullying.

The present study investigated the extent to which moral disengagement and the tendency to consider moral rules as socio-conventional rules are distinct dimensions of morality, and their association with three different forms of participation in bullying (perpetrating bullying, defending the victim and passive bystander behavior). These two types of moral cognitions have been theorized in different models of morality and are usually studied independently, even if research on moral shifts (the interpretation of a moral rule transgression as a socio-conventional rule transgression) suggests some possible overlaps. A group of 276 Italian students from primary and middle school (aged 8–15) completed self-reports assessing moral disengagement, socio-conventional perception of moral rules, and participation in bullying as bully, defender of the victim and passive bystander. Results from structural equation modeling analysis confirmed that moral disengagement and socio-conventional comprehension of aggressions are separate and moderately connected morality dimensions. Controlling for age, gender and SES, only moral disengagement was positively associated with perpetrating bullying. These results point to moral disengagement as the critical component of moral cognitions to be addressed in interventions.

Construction of Moral Education Evaluation Model Based on Quality Cultivation of College Students

Contemporary young college students are greatly impacted in the aspects of moral cognition and moral choice, which results in the weak moral will of some college students, vague moral concepts, and weak ideals and beliefs, which seriously affect the formation and development of college students’ moral quality. Therefore, the moral education evaluation model based on college students’ quality cultivation is constructed. Firstly, the present situation and defects of college students’ quality training are analyzed. Based on this, association rules in data mining method are constructed and introduced to extract valuable knowledge hidden in the data to assist education managers to make effective decisions and improve management level. Finally, the evaluation index is selected and the weighted principal component TOP-SIS model is constructed to realize the evaluation of moral education based on college students’ quality cultivation. The experimental results show that the evaluation results of the model are consistent with the actual situation, high degree of fit and freedom, and good practical performance.

Jab my arm, not my morality: Perceived moral reproach as a barrier to COVID-19 vaccine uptake

BackgroundVaccinating the public against COVID-19 is critical for pandemic recovery, yet a large proportion of people remain unwilling to get vaccinated. Beyond known factors like perceived vaccine safety or COVID-19 risk, an overlooked sentiment contributing to vaccine hesitancy may rest in moral cognition. Specifically, we theorize that a factor fueling hesitancy is perceived moral reproach: the feeling, among unvaccinated people, that vaccinated people are judging them as immoral. ApproachThrough a highly powered, preregistered study of unvaccinated U.S. adults (N = 832), we found that greater perceived moral reproach independently predicted stronger refusal to get vaccinated against COVID-19, over and above other relevant variables. Of 18 predictors tested, perceived moral reproach was the fifth strongest—stronger than perceived risk of COVID-19, underlying health conditions status, and trust in scientists. ConclusionThese findings suggest that considering the intersections of morality and upward social comparison may help to explain vaccine hesitancy.

Template matching and moral judgment: A new method and empirical test

The sociology of culture provides tools to weigh in on key interdisciplinary debates that hinge around categorization and its underlying processes. For example, at present, there is widespread debate about how individuals come to perceive events as immoral. In this paper, I use sociological approaches to cultural meaning to test one of the leading theories of moral cognition: the idea that individuals attribute immorality through template matching. I use spatial measures of cultural meaning to define and locate a prototypical moral wrong. I then test the theory of template matching and find evidence that distance from the typical moral transgression -in semantic space - is related to the time it takes to categorize an event as immoral or harmful. I then test these results on a corpus of naturally occurring text to assess their external validity. These studies provide empirical evidence supporting the notion that the attribution of immorality occurs through template matching. Furthermore, they also serve to illustrate that productive conversations can emerge when we take the insights that sociologists of culture and cognition have reached in the past few decades out of our disciplinary boundaries.

The puzzle of wrongless harms: Some potential concerns for dyadic morality and related accounts

There is wide-ranging consensus that harm or perceptions of harm play a significant role in judgments of moral wrongdoing. On one prominent view, the pattern that makes up the “essence” (Gray, Waytz, & Young, 2012) of acts of moral wrongdoing is “harm caused by an agent” (Schein, Goranson, & Gray, 2015, p. 983). According to Gray, Schein, and colleagues, events matching this pattern—a thinking/intentional agent inflicting some manner of harm (i.e., emotional/physical pain) upon a suffering patient—will be perceived as immoral. With this proposal in mind, we argue two basic points: (1) the current specification of the dyadic template would need to be further refined or “fortified” to withstand some obvious counter-examples; (2) this “fortified” formulation is still unfit to address the underlying concern: for any general pattern that is supposed to link perceptions of harm and wrongdoing, there are a number of cases (the “wrongless harms” of the title) that match the pattern quite well but are not viewed as immoral. We show this in four studies and one supplementary study. In our original study, we find, across six vignettes, that people may judge a behavior to be intended, self-serving, as well as foreseeably harmful and yet not judge it immoral. In our subsequent studies, we replicate these results with further checks and controls. With these findings in mind, we argue that moral cognition is far too complex and capricious to be reduced to a template.

Taxpayers' morality and tax amnesty participation (survey on the individual taxpayer in Sukabumi, West Java, Indonesia)

The purpose of this study was to examine whether individual taxpayer morality would influence the taxpayer's decision to participate in the tax amnesty program. In this study, morality was measured by three dimensions: 1) moral cognition; 2) moral courage; 3) moral identity. Data were collected by questionnaire and was distributed to 165 respondents. The research hypothesis was tested using binary logistic regression. The result showed that morality has a positive influence on taxpayer's desire to participate in a tax amnesty program. All the control variables also influenced the taxpayer's decision. This study implied that taxpayers with strong morals would try to atone for their past tax sins by utilising the forgiveness given in the form of a tax amnesty. Therefore, this research contributes to a better visualisation of taxpayer's compliance model that can be used by a government to strengthen the level of tax compliance.

The effects of reading narrative fiction on social and moral cognition

AbstractWe present two experiments examining the effects of reading narrative fiction (vs.narrative non-fictionvs.expository non-fiction) on social and moral cognition, using a battery of self-report, explicit and implicit indicators. Experiment 1 (N = 340) implemented a pre-registered, randomized between-groups design, and assessed multiple outcomes after a short reading assignment. Results failed to reveal any differences between the three reading conditions on either social or moral cognition. Experiment 2 employed a longitudinal design.N = 104 participants were randomly assigned to read an entire book over seven days. Outcome variables were assessed before and after the reading assignment as well as at a one-week follow-up. Results did not show any differential development between the three reading conditions over time. The present results do not support the claim that reading narrative fiction is apt to improve our general social and moral cognition.

Temporal dynamics of explicit and implicit moral evaluations

Explicit moral evaluation is often accompanied with active attention and explicit responses to moral information, while implicit moral evaluation happens in passive attention and implicit response to moral information. Previous studies have pointed out the differences in the neural mechanisms underlying explicit and implicit moral processing on the spatial dimension, however, the temporal differences between these two processes have not been clear. This study aimed at comparing the temporal dynamics between explicit and implicit moral evaluation of harm/care-related moral scenarios with high/low emotional arousal by using event-related potentials (ERP) technique. The behavioral results showed that the accuracy of the explicit task is higher than that of the implicit task, especially for high-arousal moral actions. The ERP results mainly revealed that regardless of the task type, the brain responses to moral evaluations can be divided into early emotional arousal processing indexed by the frontal N1, moral intuition indexed by the frontal N2, and middle/late stages of processing integration of emotional arousal and moral cognition which involve elaborative processing and cognitive control, reflected by the frontal P2, parietal P3, parietal LPP, and FSW. Moreover, explicit and implicit moral evaluations mainly differed in the late stage of moral processing indexed by the P3, LPP and FSW. Our findings provide robust evidence for the “hybrid” model supposed by Huebner, which suggested that both explicit and implicit moral evaluations involved a complex interaction between emotional processes and moral cognition, and the later ERP results strongly supported that explicit and implicit moral evaluations represented two relatively independent processes, fitting the multinomial model supposed by Cameron.

Universality and Cultural Diversity in Moral Reasoning and Judgment.

Many theories have shaped the concept of morality and its development by anchoring it in the realm of the social systems and values of each culture. This review discusses the current formulation of moral theories that attempt to explain cultural factors affecting moral judgment and reasoning. It aims to survey key criticisms that emerged in the past decades. In both cases, we highlight examples of cultural differences in morality, to show that there are cultural patterns of moral cognition in Westerners’ individualistic culture and Easterners’ collectivist culture. It suggests a paradigmatic change in this field by proposing pluralist “moralities” thought to be universal and rooted in the human evolutionary past. Notwithstanding, cultures vary substantially in their promotion and transmission of a multitude of moral reasonings and judgments. Depending on history, religious beliefs, social ecology, and institutional regulations (e.g., kinship structure and economic markets), each society develops a moral system emphasizing several moral orientations. This variability raises questions for normative theories of morality from a cross-cultural perspective. Consequently, we shed light on future descriptive work on morality to identify the cultural characteristics likely to impact the expression or development of reasoning, justification, argumentation, and moral judgment in Westerners’ individualistic culture and Easterners’ collectivist culture.

Adam Smith’s relevance for contemporary moral cognition

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to show the relevance of Adam Smith’s moral philosophy for contemporary trends in moral cognition. According to these accounts, research on moral judgment should start focusing more on its diachronic dimension, as opposed to its synchronic one, so that it can properly account for the constitutive and developmental integration of automatic and controlled processes, of emotions and reasons (§1). Smith’s reflective sentimentalism – appropriately interpreted (§2) – can provide the theoretical and philosophical framework for these accounts. On the one hand, Smith’s account makes the collaboration and integration of emotions and reason necessary for an appropriate normative moral judgment in typically developed individuals: developing a moral conscience requires both automatic and controlled processes (§3). Furthermore, since Smith was very aware of the limits and flaws of sympathy and of the impartial spectator’s possibility of error, his theory is capable of explaining the many ways in which typical individuals can misjudge, individual differences in moral judgments, and some of the ways in which the development of a full-blown moral conscience can go wrong (§4).

Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology: Molly J. Crockett.

The Early Career Awards, given for the first time in 1974, recognize the large number of excellent early career psychologists. Recipients of this award may not have held a doctoral degree for more than nine years. For purposes of this award, psychology has been divided into 10 areas: animal learning and behavior, comparative; developmental; health; cognition/human learning; psychopathology; behavioral and cognitive neuroscience; perception/motor performance; social; applied research; and individual differences. Five areas are considered each year, with areas rotated in two-year cycles. The areas considered in 2021 were animal learning and behavior, comparative; developmental; health; cognition/human learning; and psychopathology. Each year, panels are selected for the areas under consideration, and these panels recommend nominees to the Committee on Scientific Awards. The 2021 recipients of the APA Scientific Contribution Awards were recognized by the 2020 Board of Scientific Affairs and selected by the 2020 Committee on Scientific Awards. For distinguished contributions to the psychology of human morality; for exquisite experiments that shed light on the social, cognitive, and neuroscientific processes leading people to decide whether to help or harm, to punish or extend grace, to trust or to condemn. Through the deployment of a vast and impressive methodological toolkit, Molly J. Crockett's work has unearthed basic principles of both moral cognition and behavior, in the lab and the world, that ultimately will inform interventions to increase our prosocial tendencies and reduce our more damning ones. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Exploring the neural correlates of (altered) moral cognition in psychopaths.

Research into the neurofunctional mechanisms of psychopathy has gathered momentum over the last years. Previous neuroimaging studies have identified general changes in brain activity of psychopaths. In an exploratory meta-analysis, we here investigated the neural correlates of impaired moral cognition in psychopaths. Our analyses replicated general effects in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, lateral prefrontal cortex, fronto-insular cortex, and amygdala, which have been reported recently. In addition, we found aberrant brain activity in the midbrain and inferior parietal cortex. Our preliminary findings suggest that alterations in both regions may represent more specific functional brain changes related to (altered) moral cognition in psychopaths. Furthermore, future studies including a more comprehensive corpus of neuroimaging studies on moral cognition in psychopaths should re-examine this notion.