Pursuing moral outrage: Anger at torture

Moral outrage—anger at violation of a moral standard—should be distinguished from anger at the harm caused by standard-violating behavior. Recent research that used experimental manipulation to disentangle these different forms of anger found evidence of personal and empathic anger, but not of moral outrage. We sought to extend this research by assessing anger at a more extreme moral violation: torture. If the person tortured is a member of one’s group (nationality), anger may not be over the moral violation but over the harm done to one of “us.” In an experiment designed to create the necessary appraisal conditions, we found clear evidence of identity-relevant personal anger (anger when a person from one’s nationality is tortured) but little evidence of moral outrage (anger even when a person from an identity-irrelevant nationality is tortured). Implications for understanding moral emotion and moral motivation are discussed.     

Tracing the threads: How five moral concerns (especially Purity) help explain culture war attitudes

Commentators have noted that the issue stands taken by each side of the American “culture war” lack conceptual consistency and can even seem contradictory. We sought to understand the psychological underpinnings of culture war attitudes using Moral Foundations Theory. In two studies involving 24,739 participants and 20 such issues (e.g. abortion, immigration, same-sex marriage), we found that endorsement of five moral foundations predicted judgments about these issues over and above ideology, age, gender, religious attendance, and interest in politics. Our results suggest that dispositional tendencies, particularly a person’s moral intuitions, may underlie, motivate, and unite ideological positions across a variety of issues and offer new insights into the multiple “moral threads” connecting disparate political positions.     

Unable to resist temptation: How self-control depletion promotes unethical behavior

Across four experimental studies, individuals who were depleted of their self-regulatory resources by an initial act of self-control were more likely to “impulsively cheat” than individuals whose self-regulatory resources were intact. Our results demonstrate that individuals depleted of self-control resources were more likely to behave dishonestly (Study 1). Depletion reduced people’s moral awareness when they faced the opportunity to cheat, which, in turn, was responsible for heightened cheating (Study 2). Individuals high in moral identity, however, did not show elevated levels of cheating when they were depleted (Study 3), supporting our hypothesis that self-control depletion increases cheating when it robs people of the executive resources necessary to identify an act as immoral or unethical. Our results also show that resisting unethical behavior both requires and depletes self-control resources (Study 4). Taken together, our findings help to explain how otherwise ethical individuals predictably engage in unethical behavior.     

Possessing Moral Concepts

Moral discourse allows for speakers to disagree in many ways: about right and wrong acts, about moral theory, about the rational and conative significance of moral failings. Yet speakers’ eccentricities do not prevent them from engaging in moral conversation or from having (genuine, not equivocal) moral disagreement. Thus differences between speakers are compatible with possession of moral concepts. This paper examines various kinds of moral disagreements and argues that they provide evidence against conceptual-role and informational atomist approaches to understanding our moral concepts. Conceptual role approaches fail because they cannot account for shared concepts among speakers with different commitments to the practical and conative ramifications of moral judgments. Informational atomist views fail because speakers need not be locked on to the same moral properties to share moral concepts.

Ignorance is no excuse: moral judgments are influenced by a genetic variation on the oxytocin receptor gene

Perspective-taking has become a main focus of studies on moral judgments. Recent fMRI studies have demonstrated that individual differences in brain activation predict moral decision making. In particular, pharmacological studies highlighted the crucial role for the neuropeptide oxytocin in social behavior and emotional perception. In the present study N=154 participants were genotyped for a functional polymorphism (rs2268498) in the promoter region of the OXTR gene. We found a significant difference between carriers and non-carriers of the C-allele in exculpating agents for accidental harms (F((1,152))=11.49, p=.001, η(2)=.07) indicating that carriers of the C-allele rated accidentally committed harm as significantly more blameworthy than non-carriers. This is the first study providing evidence for a genetic contribution to moral judgments.     

Age-related changes in cognitive processing of moral and social conventional violations

Moral and conventional violations are usually judged differently: Only moral violations are treated as independent of social rules. To investigate the cognitive processing involved in the development of this distinction, undergraduates (N = 34), adolescents (N = 34), and children (N = 14) read scenarios presented on a computer that had 1 of 3 endings: moral violations, conventional violations, or neutral acts. Participants judged whether the act was acceptable or unacceptable in a condition in which social rules were assumed, or in a condition in which they imagined the absence of rules (rule-removed condition). At all ages reaction times (RTs) were faster for moral than conventional violations when a rule was assumed. RTs in the rule-removed condition were longer than in the rule-assumed condition, only for adults’ moral judgments. In addition to this age difference, adolescents made more normative judgments than children. These findings extend previous work by showing different time courses of processing conventional versus moral violations and revealing age-related differences in the tendency to make normative judgments.     

论信用的道德限度

社会诚信的研究和建设是当前伦理学研究和道德建设的重点,且很多学者都把信用制度的建设作为主要途径和突破口,但这是否抓出了问题的要害,却是需要慎思的。我们通过对这两个概念的反思和比较,发现诚信比信用有更高的立意和更丰富的内涵,而信用有其内在的道德限度,表现为:信用主体是抽象的人,诚信主体是现实的人;信用要实现的是外在利益,诚信则立足于人的内在价值;信用体现的是工具理性,诚信体现一种实践智慧。通过两者的比较,我们就能合理地确定信用制度起作用的性质、范围和程度,认识到它的必要性和局限性,从而摆正它在社会诚信建设中的地位。     

The effects of interpersonal relationship and character gender on adolescents' resolutions of moral dilemmas

An experimental study using two forms of the Defining Issues Test [Rest, J. R. (1979). Revised manual for the Defining Issues Test. Minneapolis: Moral Research Project, University of Minnesota.], modified to present either a high degree of relationship among characters or a low degree of relationship among characters, was conducted with 114 college students. The gender of the characters in the dilemmas was also systematically varied. Both male and female students evidenced principled (Stages 5 and 6) reasoning more often when dilemma characters were male than when story characters were female. Participant gender and relationship condition were significant factors in the frequency of Stage 4 reasoning. Male students in the low-relationship condition evidenced Stage 4 (“Law and order”) reasoning most often when story characters were male, while male students, like female students in all conditions, showed Stage 4 reasoning more often when female characters were presented in the high-relationship condition. The degree to which moral decisions were supportive of an affected character revealed more support when story characters were female than when they were male. Results indicate that even in hypothetical situations, moral judgments vary with the gender of the person being judged and to some degree with the relationships among those involved in the dilemma. These findings are consistent with a view that multiple, equally valid approaches to moral judgment might exist and affect the development of male and female students differently.     

Morphological Rationalism and the Psychology of Moral Judgment

According to rationalism regarding the psychology of moral judgment, people’s moral judgments are generally the result of a process of reasoning that relies on moral principles or rules. By contrast, intuitionist models of moral judgment hold that people generally come to have moral judgments about particular cases on the basis of gut-level, emotion-driven intuition, and do so without reliance on reasoning and hence without reliance on moral principles. In recent years the intuitionist model has been forcefully defended by Jonathan Haidt. One important implication of Haidt’s model is that in giving reasons for their moral judgments people tend to confabulate – the reasons they give in attempting to explain their moral judgments are not really operative in producing those judgments. Moral reason-giving on Haidt’s view is generally a matter of post hoc confabulation. Against Haidt, we argue for a version of rationalism that we call ‘morphological rationalism.’ We label our version ‘morphological’ because according to it, the information contained in moral principles is embodied in the standing structure of a typical individual’s cognitive system, and this morphologically embodied information plays a causal role in the generation of particular moral judgments. The manner in which the principles play this role is via ‘proceduralization’ – such principles operate automatically. In contrast to Haidt’s intuitionism, then, our view does not imply that people’s moral reason-giving practices are matters of confabulation. In defense of our view, we appeal to what we call the ‘nonjarring’ character of the phenomenology of making moral judgments and of giving reasons for those judgments.

Desire for a positive moral self-regard exacerbates escalation of commitment to initiatives with prosocial aims

Across three experiments, people escalated commitment more frequently to a failing prosocial initiative (i.e., an initiative that had the primary aim of improving the outcomes of others in need) than they did to a failing egoistic initiative (i.e., an initiative that had the primary aim of improving the outcomes of the decision-maker). A test of mediation (Study 1b) and a test of moderation (Study 2) each provided evidence that a desire for a positive moral self-regard underlies people’s tendency to escalate commitment more frequently to failing prosocial initiatives than to failing egoistic initiatives. We discuss the implications of these findings for the resource-allocation decisions that people and organizations face when undertaking initiatives with prosocial aims.