Harming Ourselves and Defiling Others: What Determines a Moral Domain?

Recent work has distinguished “harm” from “purity” violations, but how does an act get classified as belonging to a domain in the first place? We demonstrate the impact of not only the kind of action (e.g., harmful versus impure) but also its target (e.g., oneself versus another). Across two experiments, common signatures of harm and purity tracked with other-directed and self-directed actions, respectively. First, participants judged self-directed acts as primarily impure and other-directed acts as primarily harmful. Second, conservatism predicted harsher judgments of self-directed but not other-directed acts. Third, while participants delivered harsher judgments of intentional versus accidental acts, this effect was smaller for self-directed than other-directed acts. Finally, participants judged self-directed acts more harshly when focusing on the actor’s character versus the action itself; other-directed acts elicited the opposite pattern. These findings suggest that moral domains are defined not only by the kind of action but also by the target of the action

From impure to harmful:asymmetric expectations about immoral agents

How does information about agents' past violations influence people's expectations about their future actions? We examined this question, with a focus on the contrast between past harmful and past impure actions. Participants' judgments reflected two independent influences: action consistency and expectation asymmetry. An expectation asymmetry was observed across seven studies, including two pilot studies and two supplemental studies: impure agents were judged as more likely to be harmful than harmful agents were judged likely to be impure. This expectation asymmetry is not due to an expectation that impure agents will be globally deviant, i.e., likely to commit all kinds of violations (Study 1), nor is it due to differences in the perceived wrongness or weirdness of harmful versus impure acts (Study 2). Study 3 demonstrated that this asymmetry is not attributable to the perceived harmfulness of impure actions; only impure agents, and not harmful agents, were expected to be more harmful than they were previously. These findings highlight an important asymmetry in the way people make predictions about future wrongdoing: immoral agents are expected to behave consistently, and are also expected to be harmful, regardless of their prior violation

What disgust does and does not do for moral cognition

https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cps_facbooks/1642/thumbnail.jp

Reexamining the role of intent in moral judgements of purity violations

Perceived intent is a pivotal factor in moral judgement: intentional moral violations are considered more morally wrong than accidental ones. However, a body of recent research argues that intent is less important for moral judgements of impure acts-that it, those acts that are condemned because they elicit disgust. But the literature supporting this claim is limited in multiple ways. We conducted a new test of the hypothesis that condemnation of purity violations operates independently from intent. In Study 1, participants judged the wrongness of moral violations that were either intentional or unintentional and were either harmful (e.g., stealing) or impure (e.g., public defecation). Results revealed a large effect of intent on moral wrongness ratings that did not vary across harmful and disgusting scenarios. In Study 2, a registered report, participants judged the wrongness of disgust-eliciting moral violations that were either mundane and dyadic (e.g., serving contaminated food) or abnormal and self-directed (e.g., consuming urine). Results revealed a large effect of intent on moral wrongness judgements that did not vary across mundane and abnormal scenarios. Findings challenge the claim that moral judgements about purity violations rely upon unique psychological mechanisms that are insensitive to information about the wrongdoer's mental state

Addressing climate change with behavioral science: a global intervention tournament in 63 countries

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions’ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior—several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people’s initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors

Weighing Outcome vs. Intent Across Societies: How cultural models of mind shape moral reasoning

Mental state reasoning has been theorized as a core feature of how we navigate our social worlds, and as especially vital to moral reasoning. Judgments of moral wrong-doing and punish worthiness often hinge upon evaluations of the perpetrator’s mental states. In two studies, we examine how differences in cultural conceptions about how one should think about others’ minds influence the relative importance of intent vs. outcome in moral judgments. We recruit participation from three societies, differing in emphasis on mental state reasoning: Indigenous iTaukei Fijians from Yasawa Island (Yasawans) who normatively avoid mental state inference in favor of focus on relationships and consequences of actions; Indo-Fijians who normatively emphasize relationships but do not avoid mental state inference; and North Americans who emphasize individual autonomy and interpreting others’ behaviors as the direct result of mental states. In study 1, Yasawan participants placed more emphasis on outcome than Indo-Fijians or North Americans by judging accidents more harshly than failed attempts. Study 2 tested whether underlying differences in the salience of mental states drives study 1 effects by inducing Yasawan and North American participants to think about thoughts vs. actions before making moral judgments. When induced to think about thoughts, Yasawan participants shifted to judge failed attempts more harshly than accidents. Results suggest that culturally-transmitted concepts about how to interpret the social world shape patterns of moral judgments, possibly via mental state inference

Discovering Structure in the Moral Domain

Early moral psychologists identified the moral domain with a class of actions that negatively impacted the wellbeing of others or violated their rights. However, anthropological work suggested that this view failed to capture the full extent of the moral domain, which can include victimless actions (e.g., food taboos), especially among socially conservative or non-Western individuals. Which kinds of acts are included in the moral domain? Along which dimensions do the acts differ from one another? Paper 1 utilizes a data-driven approach to mapping the moral domain, revealing a simple two-factor structure that captures variance in moral judgments across individuals, as well as reliable cross-voxel pattern information within individual brains. The remaining papers investigate judgments of agents who perform “harmful” acts (e.g., assault) versus “impure” acts (e.g., incest), which are each representative of the separate factors discovered in Paper 1. In Paper 2, we see an asymmetry in people’s causal attributions for the actions of harmful versus impure agents: impure acts are judged as more internally generated, and less due to the situation, compared to harmful acts. This asymmetry is due to differences in abnormality, a key dimension along which the moral domain may be organized. Paper 3 probes agent evaluations: how are harmful and impure agents expected to act in other contexts? People expect harmful agents to be harmful but not impure. In contrast, people expect impure agents to be both impure and harmful. This effect is connected to a model of the moral domain with a conceptual “core” of dyadic harm, surrounded by a periphery of victimless moral violations. Together, this work highlights a simple structure in the moral domain that can explain moral judgments, causal attributions, action predictions, as well as patterns of activity in the cortex.Psycholog

From impure to harmful: Asymmetric expectations about immoral agents

How does information about agents' past violations influence people's expectations about their future actions? We examined this question, with a focus on the contrast between past harmful and past impure actions. Participants' judgments reflected two independent influences: action consistency and expectation asymmetry. An expectation asymmetry was observed across seven studies, including two pilot studies and two supplemental studies: impure agents were judged as more likely to be harmful than harmful agents were judged likely to be impure. This expectation asymmetry is not due to an expectation that impure agents will be globally deviant, i.e., likely to commit all kinds of violations (Study 1), nor is it due to differences in the perceived wrongness or weirdness of harmful versus impure acts (Study 2). Study 3 demonstrated that this asymmetry is not attributable to the perceived harmfulness of impure actions; only impure agents, and not harmful agents, were expected to be more harmful than they were previously. These findings highlight an important asymmetry in the way people make predictions about future wrongdoing: immoral agents are expected to behave consistently, and are also expected to be harmful, regardless of their prior violation