Ahlak Psikolojisine Giriş: Temel Kavramlar, Kuramsal Yaklaşımlar ve Tartışmalar

This article aims to provide a brief introduction to moral psychology, which is frequently studied in different subfields of the cognitive sciences today. For this purpose, first, a description of the field of moral psychology and the cognitive and evolutionary origins of morality will be presented. Then, the current theoretical discussions in the field will be summarized. In general, the article will adopt the interactionist paradigm, claiming that at least some of the moral judgments stem from biological predispositions, and environmental factors shape this biological draft. The empirical evidence from different disciplines will be summarized, and the strengths/weaknesses of this claim will be described. As a result, crucial points that should be focused on in future research will be attempted to be clarified by critically evaluating the current status of moral psychology.Bu makalenin amacı, günümüzde bilişsel bilimlerin farklı alt disiplinlerinde sıklıkla çalışılan ahlak psikolojisi alanına kısa bir giriş sunmaktır. Bu amaçla, makalede ilk olarak ahlak psikolojisi alanının ne olduğu ve ahlakın bilişsel ve evrimsel kökenleri anlatılacaktır. Ardından alandaki güncel kuramsal tartışmalar özetlenecektir. Genel olarak makalede, ahlaki yargıların en azından bir kısmının biyolojik niteliklerden kaynaklandığını ve çevresel etmenlerin bu biyolojik taslağı şekillendirdiğini iddia eden etkileşimci paradigma ele alınacaktır. Farklı bilim dallarından gelen görgül kanıtlar özetlenecek ve bu iddianın güçlü/zayıf yönleri anlatılacaktır. Sonuç olarak ahlak psikolojisinin bugünkü konumu eleştirel bir gözle değerlendirilerek gelecekteki araştırmalarda odaklanılması gereken kritik noktalar netleştirilmeye çalışılacaktır

Onurcan Yılmaz ve Sinan Alper’le Paradigma ve Disiplinler Üzerinden Bir Ahlak Söyleşisi

Yağmur Nuhrat ve Kadir Has Üniversitesi Moral Intuitions Laboratory’den Onurcan Yılmaz ve Yaşar Üniversitesi’nden Sinan Alper Reflektif’in bu sayısı için bir söyleşi yaptılar. Farklı yaklaşımların benzer soruları nasıl ele aldığını tartışan bu söyleşinin metnini okuyucularımıza sunuyoruz.Yağmur Nuhrat ve Kadir Has Üniversitesi Moral Intuitions Laboratory’den Onurcan Yılmaz ve Yaşar Üniversitesi’nden Sinan Alper Reflektif’in bu sayısı için bir söyleşi yaptılar. Farklı yaklaşımların benzer soruları nasıl ele aldığını tartışan bu söyleşinin metnini okuyucularımıza sunuyoruz

Is negativity bias intuitive for liberals and conservatives?

Previous research suggests that conservatives (right-wingers) tend to show more negativity bias than liberals (left-wingers) in several tasks. However, the majority of these studies are based on correlational findings and do not provide information on the cognitive underpinnings of this tendency. The current research investigated whether intuition promotes negativity bias and mitigates the ideological asymmetry in this domain in three underrepresented, non-western samples (Turkey). In line with the previous literature, we defined negativity bias as the tendency to interpret ambiguous faces as threatening. The results of the lab experiment revealed that negativity bias increases under high-cognitive load overall. In addition, this effect was moderated by the participants’ political orientation (Experiment 1). In other words, when their cognitive resources were depleted, liberals became more like conservatives in terms of negativity bias. However, we failed to conceptually replicate this effect using time-limit manipulations in two online preregistered experiments during the COVID-19 pandemic, where the baseline negativity bias is thought to be already at peak. Thus, the findings provide no strong evidence for the idea that intuition promotes negativity bias and that liberals use cognitive effort to avoid this perceptual bias

The relation between different types of religiosity and analytic cognitive style

Bahçekapılı, Hasan Galip (Dogus Author) -- Yılmaz, Onurcan (Dogus Author)Analytic cognitive style (ACS) has usually been found to be negatively correlated with religiosity. Several recent studies, however, challenged this finding claiming, for example, that the presumed association is an artifact of the order of presentation of the ACS and religiosity measures or that ACS might be differently related to different types of religiosity. Furthermore, almost all data in this field of research come from Western Christian samples. We, therefore, investigated whether ACS is related to four types of religiosity (intrinsic, extrinsic, quest, and general religious belief) and whether this relation stems from an order effect in three different studies with four different non-western samples (total n = 1329). The results reveal that there is no order effect and that ACS is negatively correlated to intrinsic/extrinsic religiosity and general religious belief, corroborating initial findings. Additionally, we found a positive correlation between ACS and quest religiosity. The results point to the importance of distinguishing different types of religiosity in religiosity-cognitive style studies

Is religion necessary for morality?

Bahçekapılı, Hasan Galip (Dogus Author)As a possible Hilbert question in the scientific study of religion, this article tries to explicate one specific relation between religion and morality: whether religion is necessary for morality. More specifically, how does the introduction of religion transform morality? The article operationalizes morality as normative and meta-ethical judgments and tries to specify ways to answer the question at three different levels: phylogenetic, historical, and ontogenetic. At the phylogenetic level, the possibility of moral judgments in non-human (and non-religious) primates is explored. At the historical level, a way to explore the question of how the rise of religions with Big Gods transformed morality is proposed. At the ontogenetic level, the effect of religious training in childhood and a shift to non-belief in adulthood on morality is explored. Finally, investigating the reverse causal influence (i.e., moral beliefs transforming religiosity) and the role of religious rituals (rather than religious beliefs) on morality are proposed as future directions

Meta-ethics and the mortality: Mortality salience leads people to adopt a less subjectivist morality

Yılmaz, Onurcan (Dogus Author) -- Bahçekapılı, Hasan Galip (Dogus Author)Although lay notions in normative ethics have previously been investigated within the framework of the dual-process interpretation of the terror management theory (TMT), meta-ethical beliefs (subjective vs. objective morality) have not been previously investigated within the same framework. In the present research, we primed mortality salience, shown to impair reasoning performance in previous studies, to see whether it inhibits subjectivist moral judgments in three separate experiments. In Experiment 3, we also investigated whether impaired reasoning performance indeed mediates the effect of mortality salience on subjectivism. The results of the three experiments consistently showed that people in the mortality salience group reported significantly less subjectivist responses than the control group, and impaired reasoning performance partially mediates it. Overall, the results are consistent with the dual-process interpretation of TMT and suggest that not only normative but also meta-ethical judgments can be explained by this model

Supernatural and secular monitors promote human cooperation only if they remind of punishment

Yılmaz, Onurcan (Dogus Author) -- Bahçekapılı, Hasan Galip (Dogus Author)People’s large-scale cooperation with genetically unrelated people is widely assumed to lie beyond the scope of standard evolutionary mechanisms like kin selection and reciprocal altruismand to require mechanisms specific to human sociality. The emergence of the idea of being monitored by supernatural agents who can punish social norm violations has been proposed as one solution to this problem. In parallel, secular authorities can have similar functions with those of religious authority based on supernatural agents in today’s secularized world. However, it is not clear whether it is the idea of religious or secular authority in general or the punishing aspects of both institutions in particular that leads to increased cooperation and prosociality. Study 1 showed that people reported more prosocial intentions after being implicitly primed with punishing religious and secular authorities (versus non-punishing ones or a neutral one) in a scrambled sentence task. Study 2 showed that explicitly priming the punishing aspects of God (versus the non-punishing aspects or a neutral prime) led to an increase in the level of prosocial intentions. The findings support the supernatural punishment hypothesis and suggest a similar mechanismfor the influence of secular authority on prosociality.More generally, the findings are consistentwith views that punishment,whether real or imagined, played an important role in the evolution of large-scale cooperation in the human species

Analytic cognitive style and cognitive ability differentially predict religiosity and social conservatism

Yılmaz, Onurcan (Dogus Author)Motivated by the dual-process model of the mind, recent research has tested the relationship between cognitive variables and sociopolitical attitudes. There are reasons to believe that religiosity and conservatism may be differentially predicted by analytic cognitive style (ACS) and cognitive ability (CA), respectively. We collected data with three ACS measures, two CA measures, and separate measures of social and economic conservatism. ACS uniquely predicted religiosity and CA uniquely predicted social and general, but not economic, conservatism, controlling for demographic variables. Further research and theorizing are needed to establish the potentially closer coupling between ACS and religiosity and CA and conservatism

Sosyal Psikolojinin Altın Çağını Yeniden Düşünmek

It is tragic yet curious to realize that a historical period of great human misery canmotivate great scientific endeavour. This paper argues that the “golden age” ofsocial psychology was driven by the traumas of fascism. We first trace the rootsof the World War II to modernism. We then compare the social psychologicalstudies conducted before and after the World War II in relation to this historicalbackground and the rationality-irrationality debate. Overall, we present a seriesof examples which purport to show that the “golden age” of social psychologyemerged as a response to humans’ violation of different rationality norms. Weconclude with a set of proposals for the amelioration of irrationality derivedagain from social psychological studies.İnsanlığın büyük acılar çektiği tarihsel bir dönemin önemli bilimsel çalışmalara yol açabildiğinin farkına varmak gerek trajik gerekse ilginçtir. Bu yazı sosyal psikolojinin “altın çağı”nın faşizmin yarattığı travmalardan kaynaklandığını savunmaktadır. İlk olarak, İkinci Dünya Savaşı’nın kökenlerini modernizmle ilişkilendiriyoruz. Daha sonra, İkinci Dünya Savaşı öncesi ve sonrası yapılan sosyal psikolojik çalışmaları bu tarihsel dönemle ve rasyonellik-irrasyonellik tartışmasıyla bağlantılı olarak karşılaştırıyoruz. Genel olarak, bu makalede sosyal psikolojinin “altın çağı”nın insanların farklı tipteki rasyonellik normlarını ihlal etmesine bir tepki olarak ortaya çıktığını gösteren bir dizi örnek sunmaktayız. Son olarak gene sosyal psikolojik araştırmalardan yola çıkarak irrasyonelliğin giderilmesine dair bir takım çözüm yolları öneriyoruz

Without God, everything is permitted? The reciprocal influence of religious and meta-ethical beliefs

Yılmaz, Onurcan (Dogus Author) -- Bahçekapılı, Hasan Galip (Dogus Author)The relation between religious and moral thought has been difficult to unravel because of the multifaceted nature of both religion and morality. We chose to study the belief dimension of religion and the meta-ethics dimension of morality and investigated the relation between God-related thoughts and objectivist/subjectivist morality in three studies. We expected a reciprocal relation between the idea of God and objective morality since God is one prominent way through which objective moral truths could be grounded and thus the lack of such objective truths might imply the absence of God who could set such truths. Study 1 revealed negative correlations between moral subjectivism and several measures of religious belief. Study 2 showed that people adopt moral objectivism more and moral subjectivism less after being implicitly primed with religious words in a sentence unscrambling task Study 3 showed that people express less confidence about the existence of God after reading a persuasive text about the subjective nature of moral truths. Taken together, the results demonstrate that religious and meta-ethical beliefs are indeed related and can reciprocally influence each other