Moral Judgment Research Articles

Using People to Serve Their Own Interests

Abstract There are some cases where it appears permissible to perform a rescue at someone’s expense, and other cases where it appears impermissible to do so. Existing explanations for our asymmetric moral judgments about such cases either fail to provide intuitive moral verdicts or lack a satisfying rationale. In this article, I propose a new explanation of what is morally problematic about certain rescues that is subject to neither issue. My proposal is a version of the means principle which adds the essential caveat that there is no moral presumption against using someone as a means to benefit herself. By attributing moral significance to the victim’s relationship to the beneficiary rather than the agent alone, my solution points to a new underlying rationale for the means principle as well as extensional and explanatory inadequacies in competing theories.

The outrage heuristic

Abstract Many moral judgments are rooted in the outrage heuristic. In making such judgments about certain personal injury cases, people's judgments are both predictable and widely shared. With respect to outrage (on a bounded scale of one to six) and punitive intent (also on a bounded scale of one to six), the judgments of one group of six people, or 12 people, nicely predict the judgements of other groups of six people, or 12 people. Moreover, outrage judgments are highly predictive of punitive intentions. Because of their use of the outrage heuristic, people are intuitive retributivists. People care about deterrence, but they do not think in terms of optimal deterrence. Because outrage is category-specific, those who use the outrage heuristic are likely to produce patterns that they would themselves reject, if only they were to see them. Because people are intuitive retributivists, they reject some of the most common and central understandings in economic and utilitarian theory. To the extent that a system of criminal justice depends on the moral psychology of ordinary people, it is likely to operate on the basis of the outrage heuristic and will, from the utilitarian point of view, end up making serious and systematic errors.

Moral Future-Thinking: Does the Moral Circle Stand the Test of Time?

Humanity's long-term welfare may lie in the hands of those who are presently living, raising the question of whether people today hold the generations of tomorrow in their moral circles. Five studies (NTotal = 1652; Prolific) reveal present-oriented bias in the moral standing of future generations, with greater perceived moral obligation, moral concern, and prosocial intentions for proximal relative to distal future targets. Yet, present-oriented bias appears stronger for socially close compared with socially distant targets and for human targets relative to non-human animals and entities in nature. Individual differences, including longtermism beliefs and subjective imaginative vividness, predict greater concern for and obligation to the future. Likewise, concern and obligation predict greater future-oriented generosity. Our studies are among the first to explore moral considerations for targets across deep temporal expanses, reconcile conflicting evidence in the extant literature on moral judgment and future-thinking, and offer practical implications for bettering the shared societal future.

Intentions to avoid sibling incest: the roles of disgust, anticipated guilt, and moral judgment

Intentions to avoid sibling incest: the roles of disgust, anticipated guilt, and moral judgment

Being blind (or not) to scenarios used in sacrificial dilemmas: the influence of factual and contextual information on moral responses

IntroductionTraditionally, human morality has been largely studied with classical sacrificial dilemmas. A way to advance current understandings of moral judgment and decision-making may involve testing the impact of contexts that are made available to individuals presented with these archetypal dilemmas. This preliminary study focused on assessing whether the availability of factual and contextual information delivered through classical scenarios would change moral responses.MethodA total of 334 participants were presented with sacrificial dilemmas either with a scenario or without a scenario before performing two moral tasks: one consisted in moral judgment (e.g., is it acceptable to sacrifice one person to save five?) and one was related to choice of action (e.g., would you sacrifice one person to save five?). In the condition with a scenario, participants were presented with a story describing the dilemma, its protagonists, their roles, the location and some background details of the situation, before answering to the two moral tasks. In the condition without a scenario, participants were only asked to perform the two moral tasks without any additional contextual elements usually provided by the scenario. Participants’ emotions were also measured before and after completing the two moral tasks.ResultsThe results indicated that the presence of a scenario did not affect moral judgments. However, the presence of a scenario significantly increased utilitarian action choices (i.e., sacrificing one person in the interest of saving a greater number) and this effect was partially mediated by an increase in the perceived plausibility of the sacrificial action. Regarding emotional reaction to dilemmas, no differences were observed between the two conditions, suggesting that emotions are mainly based on the two moral tasks.DiscussionThese findings underscore the value of carefully considering the role of factual and contextual information provided by the scenarios in moral dilemmas.

The Theory of Dyadic Morality and Moral Identity Explain the Public's Response to Harm Done by Government and Organisations

ABSTRACTHarm functions complexly in moral judgement but has been treated differently in the Social Intuitionist Model (SIM) and the Theory of Dyadic Morality (TDM). Both the SIM and TDM see felt harm as an outcome of experienced negative moral emotions (e.g., disgust), but the SIM regards harm as a kind of epiphenomenon in the sense that it does not affect moral judgement or behaviour, whereas the TDM interprets harm as an essential mediator of the link between negative moral emotions and immorality. The TDM also develops an explanation for how harm functions to initiate reactions to triggering events marked by an intentional agent causing injury to a vulnerable social actor. Here norms serve a regulatory function modulating the effects of harm committed by the agent on negative moral emotions. We conduct two experiments on representative samples of adults () and address two different moral contexts (companies doing badly and government doing badly with respect to a threatened health crisis), two different normative moderators (moral identity and belief in conspiracies) and two different moral action tendencies (intentions and word of mouth). Harm is found to have direct and contingent mediated effects on moral action tendencies, in accord with the TDM. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.

Resource-rational contractualism: A triple theory of moral cognition.

It is widely agreed upon that morality guides people with conflicting interests towards agreements of mutual benefit. We therefore might expect numerous proposals for organizing human moral cognition around the logic of bargaining, negotiation, and agreement. Yet, while "contractualist" ideas play an important role in moral philosophy, they are starkly underrepresented in the field of moral psychology. From a contractualist perspective, ideal moral judgments are those that would be agreed to by rational bargaining agents-an idea with wide-spread support in philosophy, psychology, economics, biology, and cultural evolution. As a practical matter, however, investing time and effort in negotiating every interpersonal interaction is unfeasible. Instead, we propose, people use abstractions and heuristics to efficiently identify mutually beneficial arrangements. We argue that many well-studied elements of our moral minds, such as reasoning about others' utilities ("consequentialist" reasoning) or evaluating intrinsic ethical properties of certain actions ("deontological" reasoning), can be naturally understood as resource-rational approximations of a contractualist ideal. Moreover, this view explains the flexibility of our moral minds-how our moral rules and standards get created, updated and overridden and how we deal with novel cases we have never seen before. Thus, the apparently fragmentary nature of our moral psychology-commonly described in terms of systems in conflict-can be largely unified around the principle of finding mutually beneficial agreements under resource constraint. Our resulting "triple theory" of moral cognition naturally integrates contractualist, consequentialist and deontological concerns.

Influence of Fedor Dostoevsky on Anna Seghers’ Novel “Dead Stay Young”

This article examines the literary connections between Anna Seghers’ “The Dead Stay Young” and Fedor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” It is established that Dostoevsky’s works provoke both positive and negative characters in Seghers’ narrative to engage in profound reflections, thereby reshaping their worldview. Similarities are identified between the characters Ernst von Liven and Ivan Karamazov, including their education, disdain for humanity, demonic traits, and the promotion of the idea of moral permissiveness. The evolution of Ivan’s story unfolds within the context of his family’s history, while Liven’s narrative is set against the backdrop of the rise of Nazism in early 20th-century Germany. Whereas the Russian character is marked by constant reflection on fundamental existential questions, the German protagonist exhibits a demeanor of self-satisfaction and a pursuit of personal gain. Ivan is capable of internal moral judgment, while Liven is devoid of remorse. The character from the Russian classic is ambivalent, whereas Seghers’ character is unequivocally negative. Seghers aligns with Dostoevsky’s idea that individuals must face consequences for their wrongdoings. She engages with Dostoevsky’s traditions concerning moral issues, which are reflected on both character and thematic levels in her novel, while simultaneously maintaining her unique artistic approach as a critic of Nazi ideology and its adherents.

Appealing to consequences, or authority? The influence of explanations on children's moral judgments across two cultures

Recent research shows that children's moral judgments can be influenced by testimony, but it remains unclear whether certain types of testimony are more influential than others. Here we examined two specific types of moral testimony - one that appealed to the authority of the speaker and one that appealed to the consequence of the action - and measured how each type of testimony moved children's judgments about harm. Chinese (N = 181; 45.3 % girls; all ethnically Chinese, middle-class) and U.S children (N = 198; 55.6 % girls; predominantly White, middle-class) were presented with countervailing testimony that justified novel, distress-inducing actions as acceptable, either by appealing to the speaker's authority or by reasoning about the positive consequences of the action. Both types of explanations significantly influenced children's moral judgments, leading children from both cultures to judge harm-related actions as more morally permissible. However, with age, children across both cultures became less receptive towards authority-based explanations. Neither type of explanation affected adults' (N = 180, recruited online from across China and the U.S.) moral judgments. Together, these findings provide developmental evidence on the types of explanations that influence children's moral judgments about actions that cause harm.

Multiple dimensions of immorality

ABSTRACT We conducted a four-part study to map out the conceptual space of a diverse set of immoral items, including those that are extreme and/or intergroup (e.g. child sex abuse, genocide, slavery), with the goal of identifying attributes spontaneously used in moral judgment. In Part 1, we identified 56 immoral items. In Part 2, participants completed a similarity-based card sort task of the 56 immoral items. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) indicated that three-dimensional space was needed to capture the perceived differences among the items. In Part 3, regression analysis indicated that perceived similarity among the immoral items related to their commonness, objectivity, forgivability, and legality. In Part 4, regression analysis indicated that the configuration of immoral items corresponded to the amount of anger and disgust the items elicited and items’ perceived harmfulness. We attempt to synthesize these results and answer questions about the roles of anger, disgust, and harm in moral judgment.

An Eastern Look at a Western Dilemma: Cross-Cultural Differences in Action-Balanced Trolley Dilemmas

Moral judgment has been extensively studied utilizing traditional trolley-like sacrificial dilemmas. However, by building on Western philosophies and relying on WEIRD samples, this approach has potentially introduced a Western-centric bias to our understanding of the morality of sacrificial harm, by (a) assuming an inherent opposition between utilitarian and deontological morality and (b) underestimating cultural differences on the moral value of inaction. To address this bias, our study examined cross-cultural differences in moral judgment using an adapted methodology that equally weighs action/inaction framing and considers utilitarian and deontological choices separately. The findings demonstrate that Chinese participants ( n = 273) embraced a more holistic moral construct with utilitarian and deontological moral approaches being positively correlated, whereas American participants ( n = 240) viewed them as opposing to each other. Moreover, we also found that Chinese participants were more, rather than less utilitarian than American participants in trolley-like dilemmas when balancing action and inaction.

Loyalty from a personal point of view: A cross-cultural prototype study of loyalty.

Loyalty is considered central to people's moral life, yet little is known about how people think about what it means to be loyal. We used a prototype approach to understand how loyalty is represented in Colombia and the United States and how these representations mediate attributions of loyalty and moral judgments of loyalty violations. Across seven studies (N = 1,984), we found cross-cultural similarities in the associative meaning of loyalty (Study 1) but found differences in the centrality of features associated with loyalty (Study 2) and the latent structure of loyalty representations (Study 3). Colombians represent loyalty in terms of more general moral characteristics, while U.S. participants represent loyalty in terms of interpersonal commitment, both in contrast with current approaches to loyalty. By comparing representations of loyalty and honesty, we establish that differences in loyalty conceptualizations reflect a different way of thinking about loyalty rather than morality more generally (Study 4). Further, Colombians attributed greater loyalty to individuals with general moral characteristics compared to participants from the U.S. sample (Study 5) and were more likely to classify nonloyal values as loyalty-related (Study 6). While the centrality of prototypical features predicts categorizing norm violations as loyalty-related, differences in prototypical structure account for differences in the severity of moral judgment for such violations (Study 7), which suggests that loyalty representations have similar functions, even though these representations differ in structural characteristics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The News Framing Analysis Of Vina's Murder Case On Tvonenews.Com

This research analyzes the news framing of the Vina murder case in tvOnenews.com media using a qualitative method with a descriptive approach through Robert N. Entman's framing analysis model, which divides framing into four categories: problem definition, cause diagnosis, moral judgment, and resolution recommendations. The results showed that tvOnenews.com framed this case as a symbol of the weakness of the Indonesian legal system, with an emphasis on justice and openness in the legal process. The media also highlighted the efforts of the victim's family in seeking justice, and debated various factors causing injustice in this case, including the alleged involvement of unscrupulous people and the possibility of false testimony. This research emphasizes that through intense news framing, tvOnenews.com has attempted to be an agent of social change that encourages the creation of justice and improvement of the legal system in Indonesia. This research provides insight into how the media can frame legal issues to build public opinion and influence people's perceptions.

Moral judgment is sensitive to bargaining power.

For contractualist accounts of morality, actions are moral if they correspond to what rational or reasonable agents would agree to do, were they to negotiate explicitly. This, in turn, often depends on each party's bargaining power, which varies with each party's stakes in the potential agreement and available alternatives in case of disagreement. If there is an asymmetry, with one party enjoying higher bargaining power than another, this party can usually get a better deal, as often happens in real negotiations. A strong test of contractualist accounts of morality, then, is whether moral judgments do take bargaining power into account. We explore this in five preregistered experiments (n = 3,025; U.S.-based Prolific participants). We construct scenarios depicting everyday social interactions between two parties in which one of them can perform a mutually beneficial but unpleasant action. We find that the same actions (asking the other to perform the unpleasant action or explicitly refusing to do it) are perceived as less morally appropriate when performed by the party with lower bargaining power, as compared to the party with higher bargaining power. In other words, participants tend to give more moral leeway to parties with better bargaining positions and to hold disadvantaged parties to stricter moral standards. This effect appears to depend only on the relative bargaining power of each party but not on the magnitude of the bargaining power asymmetry between them. We discuss implications for contractualist theories of moral cognition and the emergence and persistence of unfair norms and inequality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Morality in Our Mind and Across Cultures and Politics.

Moral judgments differ across cultures and politics, but they share a common theme in our minds: perceptions of harm. Both cultural ethnographies on moral values and psychological research on moral cognition highlight this shared focus on harm. Perceptions of harm are constructed from universal cognitive elements-including intention, causation, and suffering-but depend on the cultural context, allowing many values to arise from a common moral mind. This review traces the concept of harm across philosophy, cultural anthropology, and psychology, then discusses how different values (e.g., purity) across various taxonomies are grounded in perceived harm. We then explore two theories connecting culture to cognition-modularity and constructionism-before outlining how pluralism across human moral judgment is explained by the constructed nature of perceived harm. We conclude by showing how different perceptions of harm help drive political disagreements and reveal how sharing stories of harm can help bridge moral divides.

Unmasking Moral Hypocrisy: How Preschoolers Perceive and Judge Moral Hypocrites.

Many previous studies indicate that children are highly sensitive to the immoral behavior of others, preferring prosocial over antisocial characters. Accordingly, children avoid transgressors from a very early age. A special kind of transgressor is the moral hypocrite, who not only acts immorally but also acts in contrast to what they preach. There are very few studies establishing whether children recognize moral hypocrisy and if it impacts their moral judgment. We ran three studies with preschoolers aged 4 to 6 years on whether children recognize moral hypocrisy and how children assess moral hypocrisy. In Studies 2 and 3, we also tested false-signaling theory as an explanation of the more negative assessments of moral hypocrites. In Study 1 (N = 133), we showed that children indeed assess moral hypocrites more negatively than nonhypocritical moral transgressors. In Study 2 (N = 115), we initially demonstrated that the assessment of moral hypocrites results from their inconsistency between words and deeds. Study 3 (N = 159) replicated the results of Studies 1 and 2 and, by excluding an alternative explanation, explained that moral hypocrites are perceived as less moral and liked less due to the false signals that they send.

Don’t be rash: how effort, religion, and decision-type influence judgments of morality

ABSTRACT The present study explored how knowledge (Study 1) and inferences (Study 2) about religiosity influence impressions of morality depending on whether effort is exerted to reach a morally controversial decision. In Study 1, undergraduates judged a [religious/nonreligious] doctor who exerted [little/great] effort into their decision to euthanize a patient. Results indicated that when the doctor was nonreligious or exerted low effort, they were considered less moral compared to when they were religious or exerted high effort. In Study 2, Turk Prime participants evaluated a doctor who decided in favor or against euthanizing a patient, with the same effort manipulation as Study 1. Results indicated that the doctor who favored euthanasia was considered less religious than the doctor who did not. As in Study 1, greater morality was associated with the doctor who exerted greater effort, particularly when they favored euthanasia. When the doctor favored euthanasia, they were rated as more moral when their background was inferred to be more religious; however, the opposite pattern of results emerged when the doctor decided against euthanasia.

유아의 도덕적 판단 및 용서개념 연구: 유아의 연령을 중심으로

Objectives The purpose of this study was to examine the moral judgment, differences in the concept of forgiveness, and the developmental stage of the concept of forgiveness according to the age of children aged 3 to 5. Methods Data were collected using video records (VTR) and interviews containing moral judgments and forgiveness concepts for 46 people aged 3 to 5 who are enrolled in kindergartens affiliated with universities in Gyeonggi-do. Descriptive statistics, frequency analysis, and chi-square test were performed on the collected data using SPSS 23.0. Results First, the moral judgment of children aged 3 to 5 differed according to age. Second, there was an age difference in the concept of forgiveness of children aged 3 to 5 in terms of whether or not to play together, which is a sub-factor. Third, the development stage of the concept of forgiveness in children aged 3 to 5 was no age difference in the developmental, children are mainly found to be a second stage of restitutional forgiveness. Conclusions This study verified age differences in children's moral judgment and forgiveness concepts. It is meaningful in that it provides implications and educational directions for forgiveness education to parents and teachers.

Supplemental Material for Moral Judgment Is Sensitive to Bargaining Power

Supplemental Material for Moral Judgment Is Sensitive to Bargaining Power

Autistic people differ from non-autistic people subjectively, but not objectively in their reasoning.

Autistic people often experience challenges in social contexts, and when decisions need to be made quickly. There is evidence showing that autistic people have a tendency for greater deliberation and lower intuition, compared to non-autistic people. This has led to the researchers' proposal that autism is associated with an enhanced level of rationality. However, these theories have been mostly explored through the lens of either only non-social domain or only social domain. To address this gap, we recruited autistic adults and carefully matched them with non-autistic adults for comparison. We used a task representing both social and non-social interactions in a comparison structure and asked participants' moral judgements on scenarios' main characters. This was complemented by subjective and objective measures of reasoning. Our findings did not reveal meaningful differences between groups in terms of deliberation. However, we did observe that autistic participants self-reported lower levels of intuition, compared to non-autistic participants. Autistic people consistently rate themselves as less intuitive than their counterparts. Nevertheless, objective evidence supporting this across tasks and studies is inconsistent.