Chapter 6 - Morality Flashcards

Social Psychology of Morality

Overview/Agenda

• Social psychology of morality.
• Morality and social order.
• Social bases of right and wrong.
• Moral self.
• Interplay between thoughts and experiences.
• Themes emerging from research (Ellemers et al., 2019).
• Morality and competence as basic kinds of content in self- and person- perception (Wojciszke, 2005; Wojciszke, Abele, & Baryła, 2009).

Morality Definition

• Morality is an indicator of what is “right“ and “wrong“, how (not) to behave, and what is fair (Haidt & Kesebir, 2010).
• Moral motivations serve as the basis of ensuing behavior.
• Morality includes moral guidelines and rules and a list of possible sanctions for their transgressions.
• Humans live in groups. Insights about people are sometimes derived from animal studies, but morality may be a specifically human aspect of social life.

Judging an Act as Moral (Wojciszke and Grzyb, 2024)

• To judge an act as moral, consider:
  • Whether a given act is immanently good or bad, not whether it is useful or effective.
  • Whether it is universally seen as such (no "it depends").
  • Whether it is sanctioned, as in moral deeds get rewarded, immoral ones are punished.

Moral Dilemma Example

• Scenario: A woman has cancer, and a pharmacist charges 2,000 per dose for a potentially life-saving drug that costs him 200 to make. The woman's husband, Heinz, can only raise 1,000. The pharmacist refuses to sell it for less or accept partial payments. Heinz steals the drug to save his wife.
• Question: Should the husband have done that to save his dying wife?

History of Morality Research

• Early research focused on developmental questions, such as when children acquire the ability to do moral reasoning and experience moral emotions like empathy or guilt (Kohlberg, 1969; Ongley, Nola, & Malti, 2014; Price Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek, 2007).
  • Children around their fourth birthday acquire the basis of moral capabilities similar to those of adults (Dahl & Killen, 2018).
• A turning point was Jonathan Haidt’s 2001 publication on the role of quick intuition vs. deliberate reflection in making moral judgments.
  • Do we always reason before making moral judgments, or do we construct our moral reasoning post hoc, after a judgment has been reached?
• Current research includes investigations of neurobiological mechanisms (fMRI studies of individuals solving moral dilemmas, Greene, 2013; or individuals higher or lower in moral competence, Hoon Jung et al., 2017).

Morality According to Kohlberg

• Inspired by Piaget’s research on moral development of children, Kohlberg became one of the founding fathers of the psychology of morality.
• Assumption that higher order moral reasoning is primarily governed by the abstract justice/fairness principle while resolving moral dilemmas.
• The post-conventional fairness principle-based morality is the ultimate goal.

Newer Outlook

• Most people do not reach the post-conventional morality levels; according to some research, 53% are at the pre-conventional, 25% at the conventional, and only 21% at the post-conventional level (Jean-Tron et al., 2022).
• The justice and fairness principle and the welfare (vs. harm) of the individual are equally important.

Moral Foundations Theory (Haidt & Joseph, 2004; Haidt, 2012; Graham et al., 2013)

• A social psychological theory explaining the origins of human moral reasoning, derived from the work of cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder (autonomy, community, and divinity).
• In opposition to work by Lawrence Kohlberg and Jean Piaget (justice as a central concept, being a cognitive activity).
• Morality is “more than one thing” – has five/six basic foundations (strong evidence across various cultures):
  • Care/harm – virtues of kindness, gentleness, nurturance.
  • Fairness/cheating – virtues of justice and rights (in 2023 split into Equality and Proportionality).
  • Loyalty/betrayal – virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group.
  • Authority/subversion – virtues of leadership and followership, respect for traditions and authority figures.
  • Purity (sanctity/degradation) – virtues of self-discipline, self-improvement, naturalness, and spirituality.

Social Order and Morality

• Moral principles of “good“ vs. “bad“ behavior make us refrain from selfish behavior, such as lying, cheating, stealing, etc., and instead engage in prosocial acts that are altruistic, cooperative, and fair (Ellemers, 2017).
• As such, they guarantee the maintenance of social order, where we really depend on one another, observe and reciprocate the treatment we receive (Tomasello & Vaish, 2013).
• Moral principles as regulatory, governing the interactions, often incorporated into broadly understood cultural systems of meaning and behavior.

Social Anchoring of Morality

• Social implications of moral judgments.
• Those are not like other attitudes or beliefs but more compelling (“oughts“ and “shoulds“).
• Higher expectation for others to follow those guidelines, more distress when someone does not, to the extent of violence towards the transgressors (Skitka & Mullen, 2002).
• Shared ideas and culturally defined values (as such may differ between broadly understood cultures): as socially shared, those are identity-related, acquired via implicit learning of peer group norms and cultural socialization (Haidt, 2001; Haidt & Graham, 2007).
• Goes beyond evolutionary and biological approaches.
• Rooted in the specificity of human self-awareness.
• Moral failures have serious implications = people are highly motivated to protect their self-views of being moral (Pagliaro et al., 2016; Van Nunspeet et al., 2015).
• Self-defensive and self-justifying responses: redefining own behavior, averting responsibility, disregarding the impact on others, excluding them from the right to receive moral treatment, failure to recall own moral transgressions, displaying symbolic acts, etc.
• Driven by both the external image (impression management) and the internalized self-concept (Reed & Aquino, 2003).

Thoughts & Experiences

• Involves deliberate thoughts and ideals, consideration of formal rules and their implications (philosophy inheritance).
• How about “moral intuition“? (Blasi, 1980; Haidt, 2001).
• Both possible, in any order = reasoning informing intuition (as in philosophy), intuitive behaviors justified with post hoc reasoning (Haidt).
• Presence and importance of moral emotions: Role of distress and empathy (and other moral emotions, like anger) as implicit cues prompting us to decide whom to help (Eisenberg, 2000; Tetlock, 2003).
• Moral emotions (guilt, shame, embarrassment, pride) as possibly distinguishing humans from animals (but is that still the case? See Monsó, Benz-Schwarzburg, & Bremhorst, 2018 article and the blog post by Suttie, 2013).

Shame vs. Guilt (Price Tangney, Stuewig, and Mashek, 2007)

• Those two terms are not synonymous.
• Shame is often treated as more ”public” although both can happen in public situations.
• Shame evokes egocentric interpersonal concerns (”How will they evaluate me now?”) vs. guilt is other-oriented (”How will my actions affect others?”).
• Newer approaches (based on Lewis’ 1971 proposition): focus on self vs. focus on behavior.
• Shame = a negative evaluation of the global self (more costly???) vs. guilt = negative evaluation of a specific behavior (more adaptive???).
  • Shame: I did that horrible thing. (emphasis on self)
  • Guilt: I did that horrible thing. (emphasis on behavior)

Psychology of Morality (Ellemers et al., 2019)

• Literature search: 1.278 articles from 1940 through 2017.
• Content analysis to investigate emerging themes.
• Antecedents and implications of moral behaviors

Psychology of Morality (Ellemers et al., 2019) - Themes

• Moral reasoning - most popular research theme, connection with social roles and life experiences, the consequences of moral reasoning (plenty of inconsistencies with own moral reasoning).
• Moral judgments - information about morality as more heavily weighing in determining overall impressions of others (vs. competence or sociability info; see later, the slides based on Wojciszke’s readings), inferences derived from features suggestive of agreeableness + communality (honesty, reliability, other-orientedness, dependability).
• Moral behavior – an interplay between individual moral guidelines and social norms, personal convictions, social rules, normative pressures, or motivational lapses may induce immoral behavior, regardless of attempts to behave morally.
• Moral emotions – self-conscious emotions evoked by self-reflection and self-evaluation; emotional responses (immediate punishment or reward) to moral acts (self + others) in relation to the nature of the situation (moral dilemmas) + characteristics of the victim/target of immoral acts (physical proximity, similarity, etc.).
• Moral self-views - we reflect upon those, but try to preserve moral self-regard, instead of improving, even if improvement would be necessary (self-esteem, egocentric social motive).

Psychology of Morality (Ellemers et al., 2019) - Levels of Analysis

• Intrapersonal, interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup mechanisms.

Moral Dilemmas

• Moral reasoning - What is right—moral guidelines people endorse.
• Moral judgments - What others do— evaluating morality of others.
• Moral behavior - Whether what we self-report is (un)cooperative.
• Moral emotions - What we feel as we experience morally relevant issue.
• Moral self-views - Whether how you behave(d) or with what you are primed affects your self-views.

Trolley Problem

• A thought experiment in ethics, credited to Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson.
• Scenario: An onlooker can save five people from being run over by a trolley by diverting it to another track, where it will kill one person. Would you switch tracks? Sacrifice some for the benefit of many?

Trolley Problem in Class

• Basic function of social perception: recognizing beneficial vs. harmful social objects and environments, to decide whether to approach vs. avoid.
• Attitudinal and evaluative responses as one of the mechanisms here: forming global, evaluative impressions, based on self-interest criterion.
• Dimensionality of social perception of self and others: other-profitability (e.g., kind, honest, aggressive) vs. self-profitability (e.g., intelligence, inefficiency) as determining global favorability of traits.
• Two independent dimensions (various labels for the same):
  • Agentic vs. communal (Bakan, 1966; Helgeson, 1994).
  • Intellectually good-bad vs. socially good-bad traits (Rosenberg & Seldak, 1972).
  • Competence vs. morality (Wojciszke, 2005).
  • Independent vs. interdependent self (Markus & Kitayama, 1991).
  • Competence vs. warmth (Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2006).

Morality and Social Perception (Wojciszke, 2005; Wojciszke, Abele, & Baryła, 2009)

• Moral traits are other-profitable: goals of an acting person are beneficial vs. harmful to others.
• Competence (efficiency of goal attainment) is self-profitable: directly rewards the person acting/having a given trait; others affected indirectly.
• Morality and competence-related considerations constitute the majority of overall impressions we form about specific targets, but there is an asymmetry here (actor-observer perspective).
• Perception of others is dominated by the concern with morality rather than competence-related information (dominance of morality hypothesis = our interest in target’s morality).
• Perception of self (acting, achieving goals) is rather via competence and agency dimension (self-efficacy concerns).
• Global evaluations: liking as dependent on communion, respect depends on the agency.

Take-Home Message

• Morality as a complex phenomenon, which may be looked at from so many angles, that it remains fuzzy, yet we all ”feel” that something is or isn’t moral (only our perspectives may differ).