Moral Psychology

Chapter Five: WEIRD Morality

• Stuart Mill put forth in 1859 “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against as well, is to prevent harm to others."
• Penn State students were just as likely as people in the other 11 groups to say that it would bother them to witness the taboo violation, but they were the only group that frequently ignored their own feelings of disgust and said that an action that bothered them was nonetheless morally permissible. They were also the only group in which a majority 73% were able to tolerate the chicken story. As one pin student said, "it's perverted, but if it's done in private, it is right."
• The authors pointed out that nearly all research in psychology is conducted on a very small subset of the human population: people from cultures that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic, WEIRD.
• They are the least typical, least representative people you could study if you want to make generalizations about human nature.
• "The WEIRDer you are the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships."
• Most people think holistically (seeing the whole context and the relationship among parts) but weird people think more analytically (detaching the focal object from his contacts, assigning it to a category, and then assuming that was true about the category is true about the object).
• If you see a world full of individuals, then you'll want the morality of Kohlberg and Turiel – a morality that protects those individuals and their individual rights you emphasize concerns about harm and fairness
• Non-WEIRD societies have a more sociocentric morality, which means that you place the needs of groups in institutions first, often ahead of the needs of individuals. Reality based on concerns about harm in fairness won't be sufficient

Framed-Line Task

• You are shown a square with a line drawn inside. And then you turn the pages and see an empty square that is larger or smaller than the original square. Your task is to draw the line that is the same as the ladies on the previous page, either in absolute terms or in relative terms.
• Westerners, and particularly Americans, excel at the absolute task because they saw the line as an independent object in the first place and stored it separately in memory. East Asians outperform Americans at the relative task because they automatically perceived and remember the relationship among the parts.

Three Ethics are More Description than One

• You can't study the mind while ignoring the culture

• Mines function only once they've been filled out by a particular culture

• You can't study culture while ignoring the psychology

• Three major clusters of moral themes

• Ethics of autonomy

• The ethic of autonomy is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs, and preferences.

• Ethics of community

• The ethic of community is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, members of larger entities such as families, teams, armies, companies, tribes, and nations.

• Ethics of divinity

• I think of divinity as based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implemented.

• The ethic of divinity is sometimes incompatible with compassion, egalitarianism, and basic human rights.

• The ethic of divinity lets us give voice to inchoate feelings of elevation in the degradation – our sense of  "higher" and "lower." It gives us a way to condemn crass consumerism and mindless or trivialized sexuality

• Penn students spoke almost exclusively on the language of the ethic of autonomy whereas other groups made much more use of the ethic of community, and a bit more use of the ethic of divinity.

• There is no homogeneous "backcloth" to our world. We are multiple from the start.

• We are multiple from the start. Our minds have the potential to become righteous about many different concerns, and only a few of those concerns are activated through childhood.

Sum

• The WEIRDer  you are, the more you perceive a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships
• Moral pluralism is true descriptively. As a simple matter of anthropological fact, the moral domain varies across cultures
• The moral domain is unusually narrow and WEIRD cultures, where it is largely limited to the ethic of autonomy. It is broader – including the ethics of community and ability – in most other societies, and within religious and conservative moral matrices within WEIRD societies
• Moral matrices bind people together and bind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices.

Chapter 6 Tastebuds of the Righteous Mind

Tastebuds in Relation to Morals

• We humans all have the same five taste receptors, but we don't all like the same foods.
• It's the same for moral judgments. To understand why people are so divided by moral issues, we can start with an exploration of our common evolutionarily heritage, but we also have to examine the history of each culture and the childhood socialization of each individual within that culture.
• The righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors

Moral Foundations Theory

• Modules are like little switches in the brain of all animals. They are switched on by patterns that were important for survival in a particular ecological niche, and when they detect that pattern, they send out a signal that eventually changes the animal’s behavior in a way that is usually adaptive
• Identifying the adaptive challenges of social life that evolutionary psychologists frequently wrote about and they're connecting those challenges to virtues that are found in some form in many cultures

Myllers Illusion

• We can't help but see one line is longer, even when we know consciously that they are the same length

  Sum

  • Morality is like taste in many ways
  • Deontology and utilitarianism are "one receptor" morality that is likely to appeal most strongly to people who are highly on systemizing and low on empathizing
  • Humes's pluralist, sentimentalist, and naturalist approach to ethics is more promising than utilitarianism or deontology for moral psychology
  • Modularity can help us think about innate receptors, and how they produce a variety of initial perceptions that get developed in culturally variable ways
  • Five good candidates for being taste receptors of the righteous mind or care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity

Chapter 7 Moral Foundation of Politics

• Moral Foundations Theory

• Our sense of taste

• Everyone's tastebuds are different, we like different things.

• Morality is the same. we are all born with intuitions.

• Morality is revised over time according to our experiences

• Sanctity Foundation

  • Sanctity Foundation is used most heavily by the religious

• right, but it is also used on the spiritual left

• The sanctity foundation is crucial for understanding the American cultural wars, particularly over biomedical issues. If you do Mrs. sanctity foundation entirely then it's hard to understand the first over most of today's biomedical controversies

• Leon Kass argued that our feelings of disgust can sometimes fried us with a valuable warning that we are going too far, even when we are morally dumbfounded and can't justify those feelings by pointing to victims

  The Moral Foundations

  • The care/harm foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of caring for vulnerable children. It makes us sensitive designs of suffering in need; it makes us desire cruelty and wants to care for those who are suffering
  • The fairness/cheating foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of reaping the rewards of cooperation without getting exploited. It makes us sensitive to indications that another person is likely to be a good (or bad) partner for collaboration and reciprocal altruism. It makes us want to shun or punish cheaters
  • The loyalty/betrayal foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions. It makes us sensitive designs that another person is (or is not) a team player. It makes us want to hurt, ostracized, or even kill those who betray us or our group.
  • The authority/subversion foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forging relationships that will benefit us within social hierarchies. It makes us sensitive to signs of ranks or status, and two signs that other people are (or are not) behaving properly, given their position
  • The sanctity/Degradation foundation is involved initially in response to the adaptive challenge of the omnivores dilemma, and then to the broader challenge of living in a world of pathogens and parasites. It includes a behavioral immune system, which can make us wary of a diverse array of symbolic objects and threats. It makes it possible for people to invest objects with irrational and extreme values – both positive and negative – which are part important for biding groups together
  • Liberty/oppression: This foundation helped our egalitarian hunter-gatherer ancestors to rally against tyrannical alpha males who abused their power within the hierarchy of the group. For liberals, this foundation is almost as important as Care/harm, and it motivates them to advocate for sub-groups who appear to have been oppressed by traditional social structures.

• It appears that the left relies primarily on the care and fairness foundations, whereas the right uses all five.

Chapter 8 The Conservative Advantage

• Moral psychology can help to explain why the Democratic Party has had so much difficulty connecting with both since 1980. Republicans understand the social intuitionist model better than Democrats do. Republicans speak more directly to the elephant. They also have a better grasp of moral foundations theory; they trigger every single taste receptor.
• We added the liberty/oppression foundation, which makes people notice in recent any sign of attempted domination.
• It triggers an urge to ban together to resist or overthrow bullies and tyrants. This foundation supports the egalitarianism and antiauthoritarianism of the left, as well as the, don't tread on me and give me liberty anti-government anger of libertarians and some conservatives
• We modified the fairness foundation to make it focus more strongly on proportionality
• The fairness foundation begins with the psychology of reciprocal altruism, but its duties expanded once humans created gods in punitive moral communities. Most people have a deep intuitive concern for the law of karma – they want to see cheaters punished and good citizens rewarded in proportion to the deeds
• Democrats often say that Republicans have duped these people into voting against their economical self-interest. But from the perspective of moral foundations theory, the role of working-class voters was in fact voting for their moral interests

Moral Psychology: Some terms

Moral Dyad

• Before you can make claims regarding different kinds of immorality, you have to control the amount of immorality
• Research questions should include “how much” do x seem harmful/immoral?
• Must take into account cultural norms, emotions, etc after moralizing an act

How Do We Make Moral Judgments?

• Moral judgment occurs via dyadic comparison-
• “The more something seems harmful, the more it seems immoral”
• Harm both amplifies and directly causes moral judgment- even in objectively harmless acts
• Not all judgments are in the “known”

Why do Moral Judgments Affect Perceptions?

• Dyad: agent and patient
• Dyadic Completion
• “The more something seems immoral, the more it seems harmful”
• Incomplete Dyadic-
• (lacking one of the three) is completed by perceiving the missing element
• Comparison is the bottom process
• Perceived harm in the judgment of immorality
• Completion is a top-down process
• Transforms judgment into immorality

Moral Foundation Theory

• Argues that five innately prepared cognitive modules, one for each kind of moral content: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity.

Moral conflict of suicide

• The moral conflict of suicide is researched in this study
• One argument made is it is considered wrong and there are significant efforts made toward preventing it
  • there is no logical argument against suicide
• One of the questions raised was what are the normative judgments of suicide which are researched in a few empirical studies.
• They wanted to look further into the normative judgments from a pragmatic, applied perspective to understand what considerations underlie opposition to revising prevention strategies
• Time left - The people who may commit suicide are forfeiting future years of their lives that would potentially be worth living
• Social Harm - The harm and internal conflict other people may feel whenever the actor commits
• Soul Taint - The prevention of the tainting of a person's soul through acting
• Self-Harm - the violation of social norms that takes place through the act of self-harm
• The severity of Circumstances - Sometimes suicide is a response to circumstances for a person so a reevaluation of the severity may change a person’s mind
• Self-Euthanasia - To relieve a chronic medical condition or financial trouble. - This is viewed slightly differently where there is a different moral interpretation where it may not be as bad based situationally and may not actually define as suicide
• Prior exposure to Suicide - suicide can be recognized as contagious and being impacted by one can potentially push others
• Attempted Suicide already - Failed attempts are interpreted differently due to the moral consequences of suicide not being a factor.
• Impulsiveness - the actor has not fully processed the idea and decision of committing and has not fully acknowledged the consequences, therefore, making it not necessary
• Moral-Religious Background -  The religious perception of suicide for different people’s moral-religious backgrounds can cause variance in the perception of normative judgments of suicide based on their own religious backgrounds
• Study 1 showed that factors such as the amount of time the actor would have lived afterward, emotional harm to the actor’s close, whether the actor is healthy, and the level of impulsivity along with their moral or religious background, their social impact, and personal morals are all potential factors that shift judgment for people in terms of normative opposition to suicide and according to study 2 when all factors are combined, it leads to a neutral view of suicide.
• Although the soul failed in terms of a manipulation check, it still showed a significant effect on moral judgments
• Suicide is shown to be viewed as more incorrect when it is done based on impulsivity.
• In Study 2, The control condition is shown to be viewed as less wrong than any other individual condition in study one showing that as the different manipulation checks are combined, the effects are multiplied

Liberals and Conservative Meta-Analysis

• One study would have 100 people and try to get 50 liberals and 50 conservatives and see what side was more biased about marijuana
• Another study would have a larger sample, but this would be about capital punishment and still separate the two political parties
• Collective these studies and conduct one model over all of them (heretical model)
• Individuals
• Level of study
• What we observe overall studies
• Metal Analysis can be a measure of precision since not one study is definitive.
• Doing a meta-analysis you are looking for effect sizes
• A table that shows a list of effect size that shows liberal or conservative bias
• The list shows that they are both equally biased
• Asymmetrical: conservatives are more biased than liberals
• Conservatives might have a higher need for closure
• Symmetrical: There are both equally biased

Objectification

• Viewing someone as just a body induces de-mentalization, meaning that you are just stripping away their psychological traits. This study focuses on the fact that a focus on the body does not diminish the attribution of all mental capacities, but leads perceivers to infer a different kind of mind.
• Hypothesis: Focusing on just the body does not cause objectification but leads to a redistribution of the perceived mind. Viewing someone as just a body induces de-mentalization, meaning that you are just stripping away their psychological traits. This study focuses on the fact that a focus on the body does not diminish the attribution of all mental capacities, but leads perceivers to infer a different kind of mind.
• Hypothesis: Focusing on just the body does not cause objectification but leads to a redistribution of the perceived mind.
• Through six studies, researchers found that focusing on the body does not lead to de-mentalization but, instead, to redistribution of mind, whereby perceptions of the agency are decreased and perceptions of experience are increased. Redistribution of mind was found using different manipulations
• Conceiving someone as a body does not take the mind away but, instead, confers a different kind of mind, turning people into experiencers (moral patients) instead of agents (moral agents).
• These experiments showed that objectification is often discussed in terms of men objectifying women. Still, they found that both men and women strip agency and confer experience to both genders when a bodily focus is induced. But, in real life there is a more bodily focus applied to women, so women are more likely to be the target of the redistribution of mind.

The Concept of Intentional Action

• If we think someone does something bad intentionally, we view it as more morally wrong than if they did it by accident