Purity matters more than harm in moral judgments of suicide: Response to Gray (2014)

Many people judge suicide to be immoral. We have found evidence that these moral judgments are primarily predicted by people’s belief that suicide taints the soul and by independent concerns about purity. This finding is inconsistent with accounts that define morality as fundamentally based upon harm considerations. In this commentary, we respond to a critique of our finding, and we provide further support for our original conclusions. Even when applying new exclusion criteria to our data, an examination of effect sizes demonstrates that concerns about purity robustly and meaningfully explain variance in moral judgments of suicide. While harm concerns sometimes predict moral judgments of suicide alongside purity concerns, they reliably explain a much smaller proportion of the variance than do purity concerns. Therefore, data from six studies continue to suggest that the relevance of harm concerns for moral judgments of suicide is substantially overshadowed by the contribution of purity concerns.     

道德判断的整合和分离效应:ERP的证据

该研究采用双选择oddball范式,探索不同类型的道德违反事件的时程加工特点。结果发现,不同类型道德违反事件在P2成分上未出现明显差异。在N2成分上,所有道德违反事件和中性事件差异显著,且涉及性的道德违反的波幅大于涉及身体伤害和诚信的道德违反事件。在P300和晚期正成分上,只有涉及性的道德违反事件和中性事件出现差异。结果表明,不同领域的道德违反事件在早期阶段可能存有共同的加工机制,而在后期的加工阶段中开始出现分离趋势。     

Harm concerns predict moral judgments of suicide: Comment on Rottman,Kelemen and Young (2014)

Two prominent theories offer different perspectives on the role of harm in moral cognition. Dyadic morality suggests that harm-related concerns are pervasive, whereas moral pluralism suggests that these concerns apply only to canonically harmful violations (e.g., murder), and not impure violations (e.g., suicide). Rottman et al. (2014) contrast these two theories by examining moral judgments of suicide. They conclude that suicide wrongness is independent of harm, therefore arguing against dyadic morality and for moral pluralism. However, these conclusions may be overstated; across all these studies, a meta-analysis reveals that harm is a significant predictor of suicide judgments. Moreover, the association between harm and suicide wrongness may be suppressed in individual studies by insufficient power, restrictive exclusion criteria, a single bivariate outlier, and reliance upon the conventional significance threshold of p < .05. In revised analyses harm is robustly associated with suicide wrongness, consistent with dyadic morality.     

Subjective probabilities and moral judgments

The two experiments reported here examined the relationship between subjective probability estimates and moral judgments (credit and blame assignment, trait attributions, and behavior evaluations). Subjects read about situations that varied in outcome valence (moral or immoral); in addition, the nature of situational demands (Experiment 1) or behavior frequency (Experiment 2) was varied. In the first experiment, subjective probabilities were related to judgments of immoral behaviors (but not moral behaviors), whereas the situational demands only had an impact on judgments of moral behaviors. Experiment 2 included a wider range of behavioral situations, and the probability estimates and moral judgments were assessed independently. In contrast to the first experiment, subjective probabilities were related to trait and behavior ratings of both moral and immoral acts. Consistent with the first experiment, however, subjective probabilities predicted blame but not credit. Across both studies, the prior expectancies were more strongly related to evaluations of immoral acts than moral acts. Implications for understanding the determinants of judgments of moral and immoral acts are discussed.     

Spitefulness and moral values

The relationship between spitefulness and an individual’s sense of morality or lack thereof has been neglected in studies of personality. It seems probable that individuals with higher levels of spitefulness exhibit fewer moral concerns relative to those with lower levels of spite. To examine associations between spitefulness and moral concerns, 436 community participants completed self-report measures concerning their spitefulness, basic personality dimensions, and moral concerns. Spitefulness was negatively associated with individualizing values (i.e., sensitivity to harm and fairness) such that spiteful individuals were less concerned about issues related to avoiding harm or injustice to others when making moral judgments. However, spitefulness was not simply associated with a general reduction in moral concerns as it was not significantly associated with binding values (i.e., concerns about ingroup loyalty, authority, and purity).     

A bad taste in the mouth: gustatory disgust influences moral judgment

Can sweet-tasting substances trigger kind, favorable judgments about other people? What about substances that are disgusting and bitter? Various studies have linked physical disgust to moral disgust, but despite the rich and sometimes striking findings these studies have yielded, no research has explored morality in conjunction with taste, which can vary greatly and may differentially affect cognition. The research reported here tested the effects of taste perception on moral judgments. After consuming a sweet beverage, a bitter beverage, or water, participants rated a variety of moral transgressions. Results showed that taste perception significantly affected moral judgments, such that physical disgust (induced via a bitter taste) elicited feelings of moral disgust. Further, this effect was more pronounced in participants with politically conservative views than in participants with politically liberal views. Taken together, these differential findings suggest that embodied gustatory experiences may affect moral processing more than previously thought.     

When ignorance is no excuse: Different roles for intent across moral domains

A key factor in legal and moral judgments is intent. Intent differentiates, for instance, murder from manslaughter. Is this true for all moral judgments? People deliver moral judgments of many kinds of actions, including harmful actions (e.g., assault) and purity violations (e.g., incest, consuming taboo substances). We show that intent is a key factor for moral judgments of harm, but less of a factor for purity violations. Based on the agent’s innocent intent, participants judged accidental harms less morally wrong than accidental incest; based on the agent’s guilty intent, participants judged failed attempts to harm more morally wrong than failed attempts to commit incest. These patterns were specific to moral judgments versus judgments of the agent’s control, knowledge, or intent, the action’s overall emotional salience, or participants’ ratings of disgust. The current results therefore reveal distinct cognitive signatures of distinct moral domains, and may inform the distinct functional roles of moral norms.     

The response model of moral disgust

The philosophical debate over disgust and its role in moral discourse has focused on disgust’s epistemic status: can disgust justify judgments of moral wrongness? Or is it misplaced in the moral domain—irrelevant at best, positively distorting at worst? Correspondingly, empirical research into disgust has focused on its role as a cause or amplifier of moral judgment, seeking to establish how and when disgust either causes us to morally condemn actions, or strengthens our pre-existing tendencies to condemn certain actions. Both of these approaches to disgust are based on a set of assumptions that I call, in what follows, the evidential model of disgust. This paper proposes an alternative model, which I call the response model. Instead of looking at disgust as a cause and justification of judgments of moral wrongness, I will argue that disgust is better understood as a response to wrongness. More precisely, I argue that disgust is a response to norm violations, and that it is (sometimes) a fitting response insofar as norm violations are potentially contagious and therefore pose a threat to the stability and maintenance of norms.     

Do emotions play an essential role in moral judgments?

The past few decades of moral psychology research have yielded empirical anomalies for rationalist theories of moral judgments. An increasing number of psychologists and philosophers argue that these anomalies are explained well by sentimentalism, the thesis that the presence of an emotion is necessary for the formation of a sincere moral judgment. The present review reveals that while emotions and moral judgments indeed often co-occur, there is scant evidence that emotions directly cause or constitute moral judgments. Research on disgust, anger, sympathy, and guilt indicates that people only reliably experience emotions when judging conduct that is relevant to the welfare of the self and valued others. Moreover, many recent studies have either failed to replicate or exposed crucial confounds in the most cited evidence in support of sentimentalism. Moral psychologists should jettison sentimentalism, and focus instead on how considerations of harm and welfare—the core concepts of rationalist theories— interact with empirical beliefs to shape moral judgments.     

The Good and the Gross

Recent empirical studies have established that disgust plays a role in moral judgment. The normative significance of this discovery remains an object of philosophical contention, however; ‘disgust skeptics’ such as Martha Nussbaum have argued that disgust is a distorting influence on moral judgment and has no legitimate role to play in assessments of moral wrongness. I argue, pace Nussbaum, that disgust’s role in the moral domain parallels its role in the physical domain. Just as physical disgust tracks physical contamination and pollution, so moral disgust tracks social contamination. I begin by examining the arguments for skepticism about disgust and show that these arguments threaten to overgeneralize and lead to a widespread skepticism about the justifiability of our moral judgments. I then look at the positive arguments for according disgust a role in moral judgment, and suggest that disgust tracks invisible social contagions in much the same way as it tracks invisible physical contagions, thereby serving as a defense against the threat of socio-moral contamination.     

Consequences of agreement versus disagreement on physical disgust: How do people perceive the cleanliness and morality of someone who expresses inappropriate disgust

We examined how people perceived a person who expressed inappropriate physical disgust—a person who was either under-disgusted by physically disgusting stimuli or over-disgusted by neutral stimuli. Participants formed an impression of a target after receiving information on how s/he rated disgusting (Studies 1, 2) or neutral (Studies 2, 3) pictures, and disgusting or angering scenarios (Study 4). Studies 1, 2 and 4 found that a target person who failed to experience disgust was seen as disgusting, immoral (but only to the extent that s/he was also seen unclean), and not socially desirable. A target who rated neutral stimuli as disgusting was not judged as disgusting but was nevertheless judged as immoral and not socially desirable (Studies 2, 3). Our results show that a target whose judgments of physical disgust deviate from one's own by showing either too much or too little disgust is perceived to be immoral.     

厌恶情绪对法律判断的影响:基于进化心理学的视角

进化心理学认为,厌恶是人类在疾病、资源缺乏等适应性压力情境下,为抵御有害物质入侵通过自然选择而形成的进化心理机制。根据进化的观点,道德厌恶是由生理厌恶进化而来。道德厌恶有利于避免违反社会规范的行为。厌恶的激活会使道德判断更加苛刻,由此提出厌恶在法律判断中的几点启示:(1)避免直觉情绪对判断的干扰;(2)保持审议厅清洁,避免外在环境引起的厌恶情绪干扰法律判断;(3)对陪审团成员进行个体意识性和厌恶敏感性测量,避免道德过度警觉的现象发生。     

Immoral Beliefs

In this paper, I argue that there exists a class of immoral beliefs. These beliefs are immoral not for the usual reasons, i.e. because of their tendency to cause harm, their immoral acquisition, or the fact that they involve unjustified moral judgments. Rather, the class of beliefs to which I wish to draw attention includes beliefs that do not even have any moral content, but whose non‐moral content is still morally significant. These beliefs are immoral because holding them constitutes an immoral condition of the belief‐holder. This usually involves a moral failure of the belief‐holder. We may object to such beliefs for all of the usual reasons, but I wish to draw attention to their objectionable content based on the kind of character they represent a person as having. 1     

Anger, disgust, and presumption of harm as reactions to taboo-breaking behaviors

Three experiments investigated the relationship between the presumption of harm in harmfree violations of creatural norms (taboos) and the moral emotions of anger and disgust. In Experiment 1, participants made a presumption of harm to others from taboo violations, even in conditions described as harmless and not involving other people; this presumption was predicted by anger and not disgust. Experiment 2 manipulated taboo violation and included a cognitive load task to clarify the post hoc nature of presumption of harm. Experiment 3 was similar but more accurately measured presumed harm. In Experiments 2 and 3, only without load was symbolic harm presumed, indicating its post hoc function to justify moral anger, which was not affected by load. In general, manipulations of harmfulness to others predicted moral anger better than moral disgust, whereas manipulations of taboo predicted disgust better. The presumption of harm was found on measures of symbolic rather than actual harm when a choice existed. These studies clarify understanding of the relationship between emotions and their justification when people consider victimless, offensive acts.     

宽以待己，严于律人：道德伪善的双加工机制研究

道德伪善是指个体对同一道德违规行为进行评判时,对自己宽松而对他人严苛的现象。双加工理论认为道德伪善是个体对自身道德违规行为有意识辩护以维护道德自我形象的结果。为此,本研究通过两个行为实验考察直觉思维和分析思维对道德伪善的影响。结果发现,分析性思维可易化道德伪善,直觉性思维无此作用。实验果支持道德伪善的双加工机制模型,道德自利性行为并非自动化的反应,需要认知努力和分析推理的参与。     

Aliens behaving badly: children's acquisition of novel purity-based morals

The traditional cognitive developmental perspective on moral acquisition posits that children actively construct moral beliefs by assessing the negative impacts of antisocial behaviors. This account is not easily applied to actions that are considered immoral despite lacking consequences for others' welfare. We studied the moralization of behaviors without tangible impacts, specifically examining the independent and joint roles of feelings and norms in children's acquisition of purity-based morals. Seven-year-olds were shown pictures of anthropomorphic aliens engaged in unfamiliar activities and were asked to judge whether these actions were wrong or OK. Relative to a control condition matched for valence and informational complexity, children made elevated wrongness judgments when they were either disgusted or led to believe that the behaviors were unnatural. However, it was only in a condition that included both disgust induction and information about unnaturalness that children exhibited robust tendencies to judge the actions as wrong. This research therefore demonstrates that feelings and norms work in concert such that purity morals are most readily acquired when both factors are involved. The implications for accounts of moral development are discussed.     

Observers' benefit finding for victims: Consequences for perceived moral obligations

In three studies we examined how observers making meaning of victimization by finding benefits for the victim leads to the perception that victims are morally obligated to help others and not do harm. In Experiment 1, participants perceived a victim as having greater moral obligations when the meaning of victimization was considered for the victim rather than the perpetrator. This effect on moral obligations was mediated by the extent to which participants believed victims should have found benefits. Experiments 2 and 3 examined the consequences when victims fail or fulfill their moral obligations. Greater social distance from a victim who did harm was sought when participants focused on the meaning of victimization for the victim as compared to the perpetrator. Less social distance from a victim who helped was sought when participants focused on the meaning of victimization for the victim as compared to the perpetrator or when they made no meaning. These studies show that how observers make meaning of victimization has implications for subsequent responses to victims. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Multiple moral foundations predict responses to sacrificial dilemmas

Moral dilemmas, by definition, demand trade-offs between competing moral goods (e.g., causing one harm to prevent another). Although moral dilemmas have served as a methodological pillar for moral psychology, surprisingly little research has explored how individual differences in moral values influence responses to dilemmatic trade-offs. In a cross-sectional study (N = 307), we tested competing claims regarding the relationship between the endorsement of foundational moral values and responses to sacrificial dilemmas, in which one judges the moral acceptability of causing fatal harm to one person to save multiple others. Inconsistent with Moral Dyad Theory, our results did not support the prediction that Harm concerns would be the unequivocally most important predictor of sacrifice endorsement. Consistent with Moral Foundations Theory, however, multiple moral values are predictive of sacrifice judgments: Harm and Purity negatively predict, and Ingroup positively predicts, endorsement of harmful action in service of saving lives, with Harm and Purity explaining similar amounts of unique variance. The present study demonstrates the utility of pluralistic accounts of morality, even in moral situations in which harm is central.     

On an Observer’s Reaction to Hearing of Someone Harming Him or Herself

Anthropological studies in India inspired the idea of a distinct domain of moral purity, but a precise characterization of that domain has been elusive. One proposal based on current theorizing in psychology is that prototypical purity violations are self-harming actions, which are perceived as disgusting and immoral whether done accidentally or intentionally. In three studies (Ns?=?400, 80, 132), we examined judgments of self-harming actions in two cultural groups—American and Indian. There was little support for the proposed characterization of the purity domain: Self-harms were slightly to modestly immoral for Indians and Americans. Both Indians and Americans found self-harms to be sad, not disgusting. And intentionality influenced how immoral and how sad the action was judged. Instead, the findings supported a view that all immorality, including those concerning self-harm, depends on perceived harm.