Temporal variability in moral value judgement

Moral judgments are known to change in response to changes in external conditions. But how variable are moral judgments over time in the absence of environmental variation? The moral domain has been described in terms of five moral foundations, categories that appear to capture moral judgment across cultures. We examined the temporal consistency of repeated responses to the moral foundations questionnaire over short time periods, fitted a set of mixed effects models to the data and compared them. We found correlations between changes in participant responses for different foundations over time, suggesting a structure with at least two underlying stochastic processes: one for moral judgments involving harm and fairness, and another for moral judgments related to loyalty, authority, and purit

Personal Identity

Our aim in this entry is to articulate the state of the art in the moral psychology of personal identity. We begin by discussing the major philosophical theories of personal identity, including their shortcomings. We then turn to recent psychological work on personal identity and the self, investigations that often illuminate our person-related normative concerns. We conclude by discussing the implications of this psychological work for some contemporary philosophical theories and suggesting fruitful areas for future work on personal identity

Flexibility is the Key to Stability: An Investigation of the Malleability of Personality Judgements with a Focus on the Moral Domain.

This thesis investigates the malleability of individuals’ self-concept by extending the anchoring and choice blindness paradigms to the domain of the self. In a series of online experiments, I explore how others’ behaviour and one’s own (alleged) previous behaviour influence current personality judgements and decisions. Study 1 investigates whether moral choices are more malleable than choices in other domains in response to social anchors. Study 2 asks whether participants are especially vulnerable to self-serving anchors, i.e., anchors heightening participant’s qualities. Studies 3 and 4 explore the potential self-serving aftereffect of anchoring on subsequent personality judgements (Study 3) and prosocial choices (Study 4). Study 5 investigates whether personality judgements are susceptible to choice blindness manipulations, especially when the manipulations elevate the self-view. Throughout the studies, I contrast moral and non-moral attitudes to explore whether moral behaviours and personality judgements are more susceptible to cognitive influences.The main conclusion from the present thesis is that personality judgements are flexible in response to cognitive influences in a self-serving manner: personality judgements seem flexible enough to accommodate adjustments elevating the self-image, however they remain relatively stable in the face of diminishing manipulations. Although, there was no unanimous evidence that self-serving manipulations of personality judgements influence the general self-image, enhancing anchors led to nearly 15% more generous donations in a subsequent Dictator Game. The analysis did not support magnified anchoring or choice blindness effects for moral traits, rather morality had a general elevating effect with individuals ranking themselves more positively on moral than on non-moral traits. The data also provided evidence for a “phrasing effect” with participants ranking themselves higher, on average, for negatively than positively phrased traits. These findings suggest that personality judgements are constructed and adjusted in a somewhat different way than previously thought. Implications for the anchoring and choice blindness frameworks are also discussed

Flexibility is the Key to Stability: An Investigation of the Malleability of Personality Judgements with a Focus on the Moral Domain.

This thesis investigates the malleability of individuals’ self-concept by extending the anchoring and choice blindness paradigms to the domain of the self. In a series of online experiments, I explore how others’ behaviour and one’s own (alleged) previous behaviour influence current personality judgements and decisions. Study 1 investigates whether moral choices are more malleable than choices in other domains in response to social anchors. Study 2 asks whether participants are especially vulnerable to self-serving anchors, i.e., anchors heightening participant’s qualities. Studies 3 and 4 explore the potential self-serving aftereffect of anchoring on subsequent personality judgements (Study 3) and prosocial choices (Study 4). Study 5 investigates whether personality judgements are susceptible to choice blindness manipulations, especially when the manipulations elevate the self-view. Throughout the studies, I contrast moral and non-moral attitudes to explore whether moral behaviours and personality judgements are more susceptible to cognitive influences.The main conclusion from the present thesis is that personality judgements are flexible in response to cognitive influences in a self-serving manner: personality judgements seem flexible enough to accommodate adjustments elevating the self-image, however they remain relatively stable in the face of diminishing manipulations. Although, there was no unanimous evidence that self-serving manipulations of personality judgements influence the general self-image, enhancing anchors led to nearly 15% more generous donations in a subsequent Dictator Game. The analysis did not support magnified anchoring or choice blindness effects for moral traits, rather morality had a general elevating effect with individuals ranking themselves more positively on moral than on non-moral traits. The data also provided evidence for a “phrasing effect” with participants ranking themselves higher, on average, for negatively than positively phrased traits. These findings suggest that personality judgements are constructed and adjusted in a somewhat different way than previously thought. Implications for the anchoring and choice blindness frameworks are also discussed

The Moral Self and Moral Duties

Recent research has begun treating the perennial philosophical question, “what makes a person the same over time?” as an empirical question. A long tradition in philosophy holds that psychological continuity and connectedness of memories are at the heart of personal identity. More recent experimental work, following Strohminger & Nichols (2014), has suggested that persistence of moral character, more than memories, is perceived as essential for personal identity. While there is a growing body of evidence supporting these findings, a critique by Starmans & Bloom (2018) suggests that this research program conflates personal identity with mere similarity. To address this criticism, we explore how loss of someone’s morality or memories influence perceptions of identity change, and perceptions of moral duties towards the target of the change. We present participants with a classic ‘body switch’ thought experiment and after assessing perceptions of identity persistence, we present a moral dilemma, asking participants to imagine that one of the patients must die (Study 1) or be left alone in a care home for the rest of their life (Study 2). Our results highlight the importance of the continuity of moral character, suggesting lay intuitions are tracking (something like) personal identity, not just mere similarity

Essentialist Views of Criminal Behavior Predict Increased Punitiveness

Like spilled ink, one bad act can permanently stain perceptions of someone’s character. Being labeled a criminal potentially has such an enduring stigma because of people’s willingness to believe that people have an internal, unchanging essence leading them to transgress. In Study 1, we developed a novel scale to assess individual differences in essentialist beliefs about criminality and found that these beliefs predicted punitiveness. Study 2 replicated these findings and also revealed that participants’ attitudes toward people who had committed crimes mediated this link. Study 3 found that participants who held essential beliefs about criminality were more likely to choose retributive punishments over those that prevented future harm. These results illustrate the importance of essentialist beliefs in the context of the legal system. Keywords: criminal justice, essentialism, law, legal system, moral cognition, moral psychology, morality, psychology and law, punishmen

Does Cognitive Psychology Imply Pluralism About the Self?

Psychologists and philosophers have recently argued that our concepts of ‘person’ or ‘self’ are plural. Some have argued that we should also adopt a corresponding pluralism about the metaphysics of the self. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, I sketch and motivate an approach to personal identity that supports the inference from facts about how we think about the self to facts about the nature of the self. On the proposed view, the self-concept partly determines the nature of the self. This approach provides new justification for the recent empirical turn in the philosophy of personal identity. Second, I argue that closer examination reveals that the empirical evidence does not in fact support pluralism about the self. Instead, the evidence points toward a model of the self-concept as a complex web of attitudes that is disposed toward integration and unity. I ultimately suggest that this unifying disposition of the self-concept helps ground the existence of a singular self

The Aesthetic Self. The Importance of Aesthetic Taste in Music and Art for Our Perceived Identity

To what extent do aesthetic taste and our interest in the arts constitute who we are? In this paper, we present a series of empirical findings that suggest an Aesthetic Self Effect supporting the claim that our aesthetic engagements are a central component of our identity. Counterfactual changes in aesthetic preferences, for example, moving from liking classical music to liking pop, are perceived as altering us as a person. The Aesthetic Self Effect is as strong as the impact of moral changes, such as altering political partisanship or religious orientation, and significantly stronger than for other categories of taste, such as food preferences (Study 1). Using a multidimensional scaling technique to map perceived aesthetic similarities among musical genres, we determined that aesthetic distances between genres correlate highly with the perceived difference in identity (Study 2). Further studies generalize the Aesthetic Self Effect beyond the musical domain: general changes in visual art preferences, for example from more traditional to abstract art, also elicited a strong Self Effect (Study 3). Exploring the breadth of this effect we also found an Anaesthetic Self Effect. That is, hypothetical changes from aesthetic indifference to caring about music, art, or beauty are judged to have a significant impact on identity. This effect on identity is stronger for aesthetic fields compared to leisure activities, such as hiking or playing video games (Study 4). Across our studies, the Anaesthetic Self Effect turns out to be stronger than the Aesthetic Self Effect. Taken together, we found evidence for a link between aesthetics and identity: we are aesthetic selves. When our tastes in music and the arts or our aesthetic interests change we take these to be transformative changes.Peer Reviewe

Me, My (Moral) Self, and I

In this chapter we critically review interdisciplinary work from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to shed light on perceptions of personal identity and selfhood. We review recent research that has addressed traditional philosophical questions about personal identity using empirical methods, focusing on the “moral self effect”: the finding that morality, more so than memory, is perceived to be at the core of personal identity. We raise and respond to a number of key questions and criticisms about this work. We begin by considering the operationalization of identity concepts in the empirical literature, before turning to explore the boundary conditions of “moral self effect” and how generalizable it is, and then reflecting on how this work might be connected more deeply with other neuroscience research shedding light on the self. Throughout, we highlight connections between classical themes in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, while also suggesting new directions for interdisciplinary collaboration