Upstanding
The Chain of Being: A Hierarchy of Morality
Mark Brandt & Christine Reyna
Perspectives on Psychological Science, September 2011, Pages 428-446
Abstract:
For centuries, philosophers, theologians, and scientists have used the idea of the Great Chain of Being to rank all beings, from demons to animals, humans, and gods, along a vertical dimension of morality. Although the idea of a chain of being has largely fallen out of academic favor, we propose that people still use an embodied vertical moral hierarchy to understand their moral world. This social cognitive chain of being (SCCB) encapsulates a range of research on moral perception including dehumanization (the perception of people as lower on the SCCB), anthropomorphism (the perception of animals as higher and the perceptions of gods as lower on the SCCB), and sanctification (the perception of people as higher on the SCCB). Moral emotions provide affective evidence that guide the perception of social targets as moral (e.g., elevation) or immoral (e.g., disgust). Perceptions of social targets along the SCCB enable people to fulfill group and self-serving, effectance, and existential motivations. The SCCB serves as a unifying theoretical framework that organizes research on moral perception, highlights unique interconnections, and provides a roadmap for future research.
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Jesse Graham et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, August 2011, Pages 366-385
Abstract:
The moral domain is broader than the empathy and justice concerns assessed by existing measures of moral competence, and it is not just a subset of the values assessed by value inventories. To fill the need for reliable and theoretically grounded measurement of the full range of moral concerns, we developed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire on the basis of a theoretical model of 5 universally available (but variably developed) sets of moral intuitions: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. We present evidence for the internal and external validity of the scale and the model, and in doing so we present new findings about morality: (a) Comparative model fitting of confirmatory factor analyses provides empirical justification for a 5-factor structure of moral concerns; (b) convergent/discriminant validity evidence suggests that moral concerns predict personality features and social group attitudes not previously considered morally relevant; and (c) we establish pragmatic validity of the measure in providing new knowledge and research opportunities concerning demographic and cultural differences in moral intuitions. These analyses provide evidence for the usefulness of Moral Foundations Theory in simultaneously increasing the scope and sharpening the resolution of psychological views of morality.
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Bad to the bone: Facial structure predicts unethical behavior
Michael Haselhuhn & Elaine Wong
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Researchers spanning many scientific domains, including primatology, evolutionary biology and psychology, have sought to establish an evolutionary basis for morality. While researchers have identified social and cognitive adaptations that support ethical behaviour, a consensus has emerged that genetically determined physical traits are not reliable signals of unethical intentions or actions. Challenging this view, we show that genetically determined physical traits can serve as reliable predictors of unethical behaviour if they are also associated with positive signals in intersex and intrasex selection. Specifically, we identify a key physical attribute, the facial width-to-height ratio, which predicts unethical behaviour in men. Across two studies, we demonstrate that men with wider faces (relative to facial height) are more likely to explicitly deceive their counterparts in a negotiation, and are more willing to cheat in order to increase their financial gain. Importantly, we provide evidence that the link between facial metrics and unethical behaviour is mediated by a psychological sense of power. Our results demonstrate that static physical attributes can indeed serve as reliable cues of immoral action, and provide additional support for the view that evolutionary forces shape ethical judgement and behaviour.
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Is beauty a gift or a curse? The influence of an offender's physical attractiveness on forgiveness
April Phillips & Cassandra Hranek
Personal Relationships, forthcoming
Abstract:
Two studies examined the influence of a female offender's level of physical attractiveness on forgiveness. In Study 1, an apology offered to a male participant (role-playing a victim) by an attractive female offender was more effective at increasing forgiveness compared to the same apology offered by a less attractive offender. In contrast, female participants displayed the opposite pattern, responding more positively to the less attractive offender. Study 2 revealed that this effect was mediated by participants' judgments about the quality of the apology received. Male participants judged the apology as higher in quality when it was offered by the attractive offender, whereas female participants rated the apology as higher quality when it was offered by the less attractive offender.
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Hagop Sarkissian et al.
Mind & Language, September 2011, Pages 482-505
Abstract:
It has often been suggested that people's ordinary understanding of morality involves a belief in objective moral truths and a rejection of moral relativism. The results of six studies call this claim into question. Participants did offer apparently objectivist moral intuitions when considering individuals from their own culture, but they offered increasingly relativist intuitions considering individuals from increasingly different cultures or ways of life. The authors hypothesize that people do not have a fixed commitment to moral objectivism but instead tend to adopt different views depending on the degree to which they consider radically different perspectives on moral questions.
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War as a moral imperative (not just practical politics by other means)
Jeremy Ginges & Scott Atran
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 7 October 2011, Pages 2930-2938
Abstract:
We present findings from one survey and five experiments carried out in the USA, Nigeria and the Middle East showing that judgements about the use of deadly intergroup violence are strikingly insensitive to quantitative indicators of success, or to perceptions of their efficacy. By demonstrating that judgements about the use of war are bounded by rules of deontological reasoning and parochial commitment, these findings may have implications for understanding the trajectory of violent political conflicts. Further, these findings are compatible with theorizing that links the evolution of within-group altruism to intergroup violence.
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Skin Conductance Response to the Pain of Others Predicts Later Costly Helping
Grit Hein et al.
PLoS ONE, August 2011, e22759
Abstract:
People show autonomic responses when they empathize with the suffering of another person. However, little is known about how these autonomic changes are related to prosocial behavior. We measured skin conductance responses (SCRs) and affect ratings in participants while either receiving painful stimulation themselves, or observing pain being inflicted on another person. In a later session, they could prevent the infliction of pain in the other by choosing to endure pain themselves. Our results show that the strength of empathy-related vicarious skin conductance responses predicts later costly helping. Moreover, the higher the match between SCR magnitudes during the observation of pain in others and SCR magnitude during self pain, the more likely a person is to engage in costly helping. We conclude that prosocial motivation is fostered by the strength of the vicarious autonomic response as well as its match with first-hand autonomic experience.
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Organ Allocation Policy and the Decision to Donate
Judd Kessler & Alvin Roth
NBER Working Paper, August 2011
Abstract:
Organ donations from deceased donors provide the majority of transplanted organs in the United States, and one deceased donor can save numerous lives by providing multiple organs. Nevertheless, most Americans are not registered organ donors despite the relative ease of becoming one. We study in the laboratory an experimental game modeled on the decision to register as an organ donor, and investigate how changes in the management of organ waiting lists might impact donations. We find that an organ allocation policy giving priority on waiting lists to those who previously registered as donors has a significant positive impact on registration.
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Jacob Hirsh, Adam Galinsky & Chen-Bo Zhong
Perspectives on Psychological Science, September 2011, Pages 415-427
Abstract:
Social power, alcohol intoxication, and anonymity all have strong influences on human cognition and behavior. However, the social consequences of each of these conditions can be diverse, sometimes producing prosocial outcomes and other times enabling antisocial behavior. We present a general model of disinhibition to explain how these seemingly contradictory effects emerge from a single underlying mechanism: The decreased salience of competing response options prevents activation of the Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS). As a result, the most salient response in any given situation is expressed, regardless of whether it has prosocial or antisocial consequences. We review three distinct routes through which power, alcohol intoxication, and anonymity reduce the salience of competing response options, namely, through Behavioral Approach System (BAS) activation, cognitive depletion, and reduced social desirability concerns. We further discuss how these states can both reveal and shape the person. Overall, our approach allows for multiple domain-specific models to be unified within a common conceptual framework that explains how both situational and dispositional factors can influence the expression of disinhibited behavior, producing both prosocial and antisocial outcomes.
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Why are some moral beliefs perceived to be more objective than others?
Geoffrey Goodwin & John Darley
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent research has investigated whether people think of their moral beliefs as objectively true facts about the world, or as subjective preferences. The present research examines variability in the perceived objectivity of different moral beliefs, with respect both to the content of moral beliefs themselves (what they are about), and to the social representation of those moral beliefs (whether other individuals are thought to hold them). It also examines the possible consequences of perceiving a moral belief as objective. With respect to the content of moral beliefs, we find that beliefs about the moral properties of negatively valenced acts are seen as reliably more objective than beliefs about the moral properties of positively valenced acts. With respect to the social representation of moral beliefs, we find that the degree of perceived consensus regarding a moral belief positively influences its perceived objectivity. The present experiments also demonstrate that holding a moral belief to be objective is associated with a more ‘closed' response in the face of disagreement about it, and with more morally pejorative attributions towards a disagreeing other person.
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Carolyn Parkinson et al.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, October 2011, Pages 3162-3180
Abstract:
Much recent research has sought to uncover the neural basis of moral judgment. However, it has remained unclear whether "moral judgments" are sufficiently homogenous to be studied scientifically as a unified category. We tested this assumption by using fMRI to examine the neural correlates of moral judgments within three moral areas: (physical) harm, dishonesty, and (sexual) disgust. We found that the judgment of moral wrongness was subserved by distinct neural systems for each of the different moral areas and that these differences were much more robust than differences in wrongness judgments within a moral area. Dishonest, disgusting, and harmful moral transgression recruited networks of brain regions associated with mentalizing, affective processing, and action understanding, respectively. Dorsal medial pFC was the only region activated by all scenarios judged to be morally wrong in comparison with neutral scenarios. However, this region was also activated by dishonest and harmful scenarios judged not to be morally wrong, suggestive of a domain-general role that is neither peculiar to nor predictive of moral decisions. These results suggest that moral judgment is not a wholly unified faculty in the human brain, but rather, instantiated in dissociable neural systems that are engaged differentially depending on the type of transgression being judged.
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Predicting premeditation: Future behavior is seen as more intentional than past behavior
Zachary Burns, Eugene Caruso & Daniel Bartels
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
People's intuitions about the underlying causes of past and future actions might not be the same. In 3 studies, we demonstrate that people judge the same behavior as more intentional when it will be performed in the future than when it has been performed in the past. We found this temporal asymmetry in perceptions of both the strength of an individual's intention and the overall prevalence of intentional behavior in a population. Because of its heightened intentionality, people thought the same transgression deserved more severe punishment when it would occur in the future than when it did occur in the past. The difference in judgments of both intentionality and punishment was partly explained by the stronger emotional reactions that were elicited in response to future actions than in response to past actions. We consider the implications of this temporal asymmetry for legal decision making and theories of attribution more generally.
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How corruptible are you? Bribery under uncertainty
Dmitry Ryvkin & Danila Serra
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
We model corruption in a society as a result of bargaining for bribes between private citizens and public officials. We investigate the role that incomplete information with respect to the intrinsic moral cost of one's potential corruption partner plays out in his or her propensity to engage in bribery, and, consequently, the equilibrium level of corruption in the society. We assume that the cost of engaging in corruption is subject to strategic complementarities, which may lead to multiple corruption equilibria. We find that corruption is lowest when potential bribers and potential bribees are uncertain regarding each other's "corruptibility" and have asymmetric bargaining powers. Our uncertainty result provides theoretical support in favor of anti-corruption strategies, such as staff rotation in public offices, aimed at decreasing the social closeness of bribers and bribees. Our bargaining power result suggests that, under uncertainty, monopolistic public good provision has the same corruption-reducing effect as competitive public good provision.
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Leveling the Playing Field: Dishonesty in the Face of Threat
Pavel Atanasov & Jason Dana
Journal of Economic Psychology, October 2011, Pages 809-817
Abstract:
We examined the effects of framing and perceived vulnerability on dishonest behavior in competitive environments. Participants were randomly matched into pairs and took a short multiple-choice test, the relative score of which determined their merit-based payoffs. After learning about the test scores, participants were asked to report them, thus affecting the final payoffs. Framing was varied as participants could either report their own scores or the scores of their counterparts. The presence of threat, or vulnerability to other players' dishonesty, was varied as either one or both players in a pair could misreport scores. Participants who reported their counterparts' scores were more likely to report honestly than participants who entered their own score. Participants, whose payoffs were threatened by their opponents' misreporting, were more likely to cheat to the fullest extent. Furthermore, we found that framing significantly reduced misreporting in the absence, but not in the presence of threat. Results suggest that when actors feel vulnerable to other people's dishonesty they would often cheat as much as they can in order to "level the playing field", even when they strongly disapprove of the behavior.
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Moral judgment in adults with autism spectrum disorders
Tiziana Zalla et al.
Cognition, October 2011, Pages 115-126
Abstract:
The ability of a group of adults with high functioning autism (HFA) or Asperger Syndrome (AS) to distinguish moral, conventional and disgust transgressions was investigated using a set of six transgression scenarios, each of which was followed by questions about permissibility, seriousness, authority contingency and justification. The results showed that although individuals with HFA or AS (HFA/AS) were able to distinguish affect-backed norms from conventional affect-neutral norms along the dimensions of permissibility, seriousness and authority-dependence, they failed to distinguish moral and disgust transgressions along the seriousness dimension and were unable to provide appropriate welfare-based moral justifications. Moreover, they judged conventional and disgust transgressions to be more serious than did the comparison group, and the correlation analysis revealed that the seriousness rating was related to their ToM impairment. We concluded that difficulties providing appropriate moral justifications and evaluating the seriousness of transgressions in individuals with HFA/AS may be explained by an impaired cognitive appraisal system that, while responsive to rule violations, fails to use relevant information about the agent's intentions and the affective impact of the action outcome in conscious moral reasoning.
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Susanne Täuber & Martijn van Zomeren
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine how group members paradoxically refuse intergroup help where they might need it most: In the moral status domain. Based on the Sacred Value Protection Model (Tetlock, 2002), we predicted and found that group members felt stronger group-based anger and a stronger motivation to reaffirm their group's moral status when an outgroup was morally superior to them. Despite this moral motivation, however, we also predicted and found that group members more strongly refused intergroup help to improve their moral status vis-à-vis the morally superior outgroup (compared to an uninvolved outgroup). Consistent with the Social Identity model of Deindividuation Effects (Reicher, Spears, & Postmes, 1995), group members thus strategically refused intergroup help to defend their group identity. Supporting this interpretation, particularly highly identified group members were most likely to refuse intergroup help when they needed it most. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of our findings.
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The embarrassed bystander: Embarrassability and the inhibition of helping
Peggy Zoccola et al.
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Two studies tested whether individual differences in the tendency to experience embarrassment could predict interpersonal helping behavior (informing another individual about a correctible flaw). In Study 1, 84 participants were given a chance to help an experimenter by telling her that she had ink on her face. Some knew she had an interview immediately following the experiment; some did not. Some participants were there with a confederate; some were alone. The presence of the confederate or of the interview predicted (negatively and positively, respectively) whether the participant would point out the ink. Among those who pointed out the ink, individuals higher in embarrassability were slower to help. In Study 2, participants reported on real-life interactions with others who had a temporary flaw (e.g., food in their teeth). Conceptually replicating Study 1, participants higher in embarrassability were less likely to point out the flaw. These studies suggest that fear of embarrassment is a strong inhibitory factor in social helping situations, and that personality factors can predict who will be inhibited from helping.
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Who am I to judge? Self-disgust predicts less punishment of severe transgressions
Bunmi Olatunji, Bieke David & Bethany Ciesielski
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although recent research has shown that experimentally induced disgust and the personality trait of disgust sensitivity is associated with more severe moral decisions, no study to date has examined how disgust, experienced specifically toward the self, influences morally relevant decisions. Participants (n = 109) in the present study completed a measure of self-disgust, disgust sensitivity, and depressive symptoms and then evaluated nonoffenses, moderate offenses, and severe offenses with regard to level of disgust and punishment deserved. The results showed that self-disgust significantly predicted more disgust and punishment ratings of nonoffenses when controlling for individual differences in both depressive symptoms and disgust sensitivity. In contrast, self-disgust significantly predicted less disgust and punishment ratings of severe offenses when controlling for individual differences in depressive symptoms and disgust sensitivity. The implications of these findings for further conceptualizing how the heterogeneous construct of disgust operates in the moral domain are discussed.
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Who Helps Natural-Disaster Victims? Assessment of Trait and Situational Predictors
Zdravko Marjanovic, Ward Struthers & Esther Greenglass
Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
This investigation examined whether trait variables (empathy, global social responsibility) and perceived human responsibility predict and interact to predict people's helping of natural-disaster victims. In Study 1, participants completed a questionnaire and read one of two bogus earthquake reports which portrayed victims as either prepared or unprepared for a foreseeable earthquake. In Study 2, participants completed a questionnaire about the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Across studies, helping was best elicited from high-empathy individuals who attributed responsibility for disasters to human actions (e.g., government), not natural phenomena (e.g., hurricane). Trait variables correlated with helping when assessed individually, but accounted for little unique variance in helping in multiple regression analyses. Judgment of human responsibility predicted helping when participants were familiar with the target disaster (Study 2) but did not predict helping when the disaster was unfamiliar (Study 1). Theoretical implications for researchers and practical implications for aid agencies are discussed.
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Sharon Wayne et al.
Academic Medicine, July 2011, Pages 877-882
Purpose: Little published research details the risk factors for the decline in students' attitudes toward underserved populations during medical school. The authors assessed the association between this attitude change and intolerance of ambiguity (the tendency to perceive novel or complex situations as sources of threat), since treating underserved populations often involves a high level of complexity.
Method: The University of New Mexico School of Medicine administered a survey assessing attitudes toward underserved populations at matriculation and at graduation to seven consecutive medical school classes (matriculation years 1999 to 2005). The university also administered a survey measuring tolerance of ambiguity at matriculation. Five hundred twenty-nine students were eligible to complete both surveys between 1999 and 2009.
Results: Three hundred thirteen (59%) students completed the attitude survey at matriculation and graduation. Attitude scores for a majority of students (69%) decreased from matriculation to graduation. Changes in scores ranged from +25 to -35; the average change was -4.5. Linear regression analysis showed that those who were tolerant of ambiguity (top 20% of tolerance of ambiguity scores) were significantly less likely to have declines in attitudes toward the underserved; the coefficient was 3.69 (P = .003). Other factors independently associated with maintaining high attitude scores were being female and starting medical school at age 24 or younger.
Conclusions: Attention to, and practice with, ambiguous situations may help moderate decreases in attitudes toward underserved populations. Medical education should address the fact that physicians face much ambiguity and should offer students tools to help them respond to ambiguous clinical situations.