Non-conformity and Counter-conformity to Group Norms - An Exploration Using Gay Marriage and a Government Apology to Australian Aborigines

Matthew Hornsey,  Louise Majkut, Deborah Terry, and Blake McKimmie's 2003 article examines the conditions under which University of Queensland students in favor of legal recognition of gay couples or in favor of a government apology to the Aborigines would act on these attitudes either publicly or privately.  They specifically analyzed the roles of moral conviction, perceived societal support, and perceived support by the rest of the student body.  They found that, in general, a strong moral basis for the attitude, perceived societal opposition, and perceived group support correlated positively with intention to act, both privately and publicly.  Interestingly, intention to act publicly was sometimes greater than intention to act privately and group support sometimes had no effect at all.  

Using Emotions to Motivate Action and Constrain Cognition - A Speculative Perspective on ACT UP's Tactics

In Gould’s Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS, different emotions privilege different acts of contention. Gould, for example, directly links anger to ACT UP’s use of nonviolent direct action. In Gould’s account, members of ACT UP believed that anger would inspire direct action and explicitly encouraged anger in order to sustain their own and others' participation. Gould argues that members of ACT UP embraced these tactics and the anger that inspired them because doing so provided a more effective alternative to less confrontational tactics already in use by other organizations. This anger, sustained by the emotion-work of ACT UP members, served to sustain both ACT UP and its cause.

However, as Gould discusses, emotions exist within a set of frames, including political ideology, social-normative assumptions, and identity. Throughout Gould’s account, these frames shape not only which emotions are relevant but the actions that these emotions privilege and the targets of these actions. It is not clear, however, how emotions interact with these frames—whether they reflect them, amplify them, or transform them. Underlying this ambiguity in Gould’s text is an ambiguous account of the indeterminacy of emotions. Focusing on anger and emotions that moderate the effects of anger, I will here suggest a definition of emotion as modular frame that both fits Gould’s evidence and generates a set of testable hypotheses that could render her model applicable to a range of other contentious movements.

In Gould’s account, emotions reflect existing frames and help motivate but do not restrict action. I argue that emotions both create new frames and directly cause action, although they do so in coordination with wider frames. Specifically, emotions frame personal and social goals. Emotions are intimately bound to—and may even be partially constituted by—appraisals of whether a goal can or should be achieved, how much control the actor has over goal achievement, and the actor’s ability to cope with achievement or non-achievement of these goals.

Anger, for example, tends to arise when another individual’s goals are interfering with yours, when you believe that they have control over their actions, and when you believe that you cannot tolerate (cope with) interference. This pattern tends to hold even when individuals are experiencing anger as group members rather than simply as individuals.

Last, anger, like all emotions, can be instantaneous and, to a degree, transferable. If you see an angry person, you form a theory about what they are thinking and feeling that is based on the appraisals described above. If you identify with that person, you can adopt those appraisals as your own even before you have experienced their situation for yourself.

ACT UP deliberately framed events in terms of the core narrative of anger, creating an amplifying resonance between sociopolitical beliefs and instantaneous emotion. ACT UP, for example, shifted blame for the epidemic from the gay community to the government, arguing that the gay community had responded to the virus by developing safe sex practices while government actors had callously refused to act or acted in a way that further threatened the health and safety of the gay community. Further, they made anger normative, encouraging its display and privileging demonstrations of anger over demonstrations of other, potentially frame-threatening, emotions. It was impossible to be a member of ACT UP and not feel anger, impossible to be a member of ACT UP and not see the epidemic, and actors in the epidemic, through the lens of anger.

By choosing to embrace anger (over alternatives) ACT UP members were driven to direct action. Anger involves the appraisal that another person’s actions (or your own past actions, or a group’s actions, or the actions of God or fate) are intolerable. Both nonviolent and violent resistance are possible results of anger, but an emphasis on resistance is almost assured if anger is given free reign.

Hope and anger interact when an individual or group is deciding when, where, and who to resist. Anger establishes threat and the intentionality of the offending actor, but hope provides a sense of the angry person’s agency, their ability to affect change. ACT UP managed hope, framing nonviolent direct action as the most effective action and framing other tactics as hopeless. When hope was lost, some people surrendered anger, finding numbness or renewed compassion. Numbness shifted focus to inaction, leading activists to both leave ACT UP and to resist re-involving themselves in the fight to manage the AIDS crisis. Renewed compassion shifted focus away from political activism and instead emphasized helping others to cope with the epidemic, leading former ACT UP members to volunteer to care for AIDS victims. The loss of hope also brought a redirection of anger, emphasizing the perceived failings of individual ACT UP members. This new anger, expressed as a sense of betrayal, both amplified existing divisions and spurred the emergence of new social identities.

Moralization was evident in both attitudes towards government actors and, later, attitudes toward ACT UP members. By emphasizing the intentional, negative, and intolerable actions of others, anger can, when appropriately framed, create the perception that an individual’s bad behavior reflects essential badness. It is associated with increased stereotyping, both automatic and more deliberate.

Anger however, only tends to moralize around justice and fairness, not other markers of “badness” like pollution or weakness. Interestingly, anger may not only have focused the attention of ACT UP members on justice and fairness, but may have focused governmental attention on these issues as well. When medical and scientific officials paid attention, even defensively, to ACT UP’s anger, they may have been more attentive to ACT UP’s justice and fairness frames and it is possible that a combination of anger and hope encouraged frame bridging between these officials and members of ACT UP.

References:

Chapter Two; “New Feelings and an Expanding Political Horizon After Hardwick;” “Individuals and the Social Space for Militancy.”
Gould, Deborah. “Moving Politics.” Chapter Seven; “From Despair to Activism;” “Act Up’s Antidote to Despair”
Gould, Deborah. “Moving Politics.” Introduction. “New Curves in the Emotional Turn;” “Affect, Feelings, and Emotions.”
Kuppens, Peter, Van Mechelen, Iven, Smits, Dirk J. M., and De Boeck, Paul. “The Appraisal Basis of Anger: Specificity, Necessity, and Sufficiency of Components.” Emotion. 2003:3(3). 254-269.
Mackie, Diane M., Devos, Thierry, and Smith, Eliot. “Intergroup Emotions: Explaining Offensive Action Tendencies in an Intergroup Context.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2000. 79(4):602-616.
Smith, Eliot R., Seger, Charles R., Mackie, Diana M. “Can Emotions Be Truly Group Level? Evidence Regarding Four Conceptual Criteria.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2007. 93(3):443.
Snow, David, Rochford, E. Burke, Worden, Steven K., Benford, Robert D. “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation.” American Sociological Review, 1986. 51(4):477
Gould, Deborah. “Moving Politics.” Chapter 2; “The Affects and Emotions of Framing;” “Aids as Genocide: Linking Fear, Grief, and Anger to Action.”
Gould, Deborah. “Moving Politics.” Chapter 4; “ACT UP and a New Emotional Habitus;” “Grief into Anger.”
Gould, Deborah. “Moving Politics.” Chapter 7; “What Despair Does;” “Forbidding Despair.”
Gould, Deborah. “Moving Politics.” Chapter 6; “Moralism.”

Prejudice and Motivations to Respond Without Prejudice

Over the last three decades, the category of low-prejudiced individuals has been revealed to be a diverse one.  An individual may have low levels of explicit prejudice and high levels of implicit prejudice, low levels of explicit and implicit prejudice, or, more rarely, higher levels of explicit and low levels of implicit prejudice (Petty and Brinol, 2009).  Further, in a society where both prejudice and egalitarian goals are common, individuals may seek to avoid acting on existing prejudices (Plant and Devine, 1998).  Some individuals may do so to avoid external censure and to conform to social norms, some individuals may do so because it is personally important to them to feel nonprejudiced, other individuals may do so for a combination of internal and external reasons.  Different motivations are correlated to different self-regulation strategies and each strategy can have different effects on levels of explicit and implicit prejudice (Devine, Amodio, Harmon-Jones, & Vance, 2002) and associated behaviors towards out-group members (Butz & Plant, 2009).   The self-regulation strategies themselves may directly influence processing of messages by stigmatized sources.

Participants that score high on Plant and Devine’s Internal Motivation to Respond Without Prejudice Scale and low on their External Motivation to Respond Without Prejudice Scale demonstrate lower levels of implicit and explicit prejudice.  Plant and Devine’s Internal Motivation to Respond Without Prejudice Scale asks participants to report the extent to which they agree with the following statements:

• I attempt to act in nonprejudiced ways toward Black people because it is personally important to me.
• According to my personal values, using stereotypes about Black people is OK.
• I am personally motivated by my beliefs to be nonprejudiced toward Black people.
• Because of my personal values, I believe that using stereotypes about Black people is wrong.
• Being nonprejudiced toward Black people is important to my self-concept.

The External Motivation to Respond Without Prejudice Scale asks participants to report the extent to which they agree with the following statements:  

• Because of today's PC (politically correct) standards I try to appear nonprejudiced toward Black people.
• I try to hide any negative thoughts about Black people in order to avoid negative reactions from others. 
• If I acted prejudiced toward Black people, I would be concerned that others would be angry with me.
• I attempt to appear nonprejudiced toward Black people in order to avoid disapproval from others. 
• I try to act nonprejudiced toward Black people because of pressure from others.

Solely internal motivation to respond without prejudice (IMS) is negatively correlated with both explicit, self-reported prejudice and implicitly measured prejudice.  Interestingly, the activation of egalitarian goals is a known mediator of the negative correlation between scoring high on the IMS alone and demonstrating lower levels of implicit prejudice, suggesting that this correlation occurs at least in part because of the moment to moment efforts of research participants.  Solely external motivation to respond without prejudice (EMS) is positively correlated with both explicitly measured and implicitly measured prejudice.

Individuals high in IMS alone, high in both EMS and IMS, and solely high in EMS have distinct motivations and abilities to regulate their prejudiced attitudes.  For example, individuals high in IMS may put less effort into regulating their automatic prejudiced attitudes out of the assumption that they are already doing so, that doing so should not require great effort, or out of a conscious concern for more deliberative attitudes.  However, when Fehr and Sassenberg (2010) informed their German participants that they had demonstrated implicit prejudice towards Arabs on an IAT test, their participants high in IMS alone learned to efficiently reduce this prejudice.  Other studies have demonstrated that individuals high in IMS alone will pursue opportunities to train themselves to reduce their prejudice but will not engage this training in an effortful way until informed of failure (Plant & Devine, 2009).  This suggests that unless individuals high in IMS alone believe that they will behave in a prejudiced way, they may either a) not elaborate messages attributed to a stigmatized source or b) not notice that they are elaborating these messages in a biased way.

Taking a more careful look at the motivations underlying self-regulation of prejudiced behavior may reveal patterns of motivation that moderate motivation to elaborate.   The items of the Internal Motivation to Respond Without Prejudice Scale and the External Motivation to Respond without Prejudice Scale are correlated with another scale, created by Legault and colleagues, that describes six categories of motivation to be nonprejudiced.  Their Motivation to be Nonprejudiced Scale (MNPS) divides these motivations into the intrinsic, the integrated, the identified, the introjected, the external, and the amotivated (Legault, Green-Demers, Grant, & Chung, 2007).

Items in the intrinsic motivation category describe a motivation to act in a non-prejudiced way because it is “enjoyable or satisfying.”  Items related to intrinsic motivation on their Motivation to be Nonprejudiced Scale (MNPS) include:

• Enjoyment relating to other groups.
• Pleasure of being open-minded.
• For the joy I feel when learning about new people.
• For the interest I feel when discovering people/groups.

This measure correlates positively to the IMS at a p < .01.  It also marginally negatively correlates with the EMS.  It negatively correlates with both explicit and implicit measurements of racism and sexism (using p-values between .05 and .001).

Moving from intrinsic to external motivations for self-regulation, Legault and colleagues next describe those who demonstrate integrated regulation.  Integrated regulation “occurs when personally endorsed goals, values, and needs are fused with the self . . . that is, they align with other needs and values of the overarching value system.” Measures of this form of self-regulation include: 

• I appreciate what understanding adds to my life.
• Striving to understand others is part of who I am.
• Because I am tolerant and accepting of difference.
• Because I am an open-minded person.
• I place an importance on egalitarian beliefs.

Like the previous measures of intrinsic regulation, this measure positively correlates with the IMS at p < .001 and is marginally negatively correlated with the EMS.  It is also significantly negatively correlated with explicit measures of racism and sexism in different studies conducted by Legault and colleagues.  It is negatively correlated with scores on a Race IAT at p < .01.  

Identified regulation is defined as having “goals that are sought because they are valued or seen as important” and demonstrates similar correlations with the IMS and EMS scales as well as with implicit and explicit measures of prejudice.  Its items include:

• Because I value nonprejudice.
• Because I admire people who are egalitarian.
• I place an importance on egalitarian beliefs.
• Because tolerance is important to me. 

It is also possible that identified individuals may exhibit a moral credentialing effect, feeling less-motivated to control prejudice if they feel that they normally act without prejudice.  Moral credentialing can increase prejudiced behaviors for individuals with both internal and external motivations to respond without prejudice (Monin, 2001).

Introjected regulation is defined by “[e]xternal incentives . . . [that] have been turned inward but not truly accepts as one’s own.”  “[T]his type of self-regulation feels quite controlling.  Introjected behaviors are ego involved and performed to avoid guilt or to enhance contingent self-worth” (Legault et al., 2007).  In 2002, Devine et al. suggested that individuals that are high in both internal and external motivation to respond without prejudice would fall into the introjected category.  This statement is not supported by Legault and colleagues’ research.  Only marginal positive correlations to the IMS and EMS were found.  In addition, Legault and Green found that introjected regulation was marginally negatively correlated with implicit racial prejudice as measured by the IAT.

It is possible that their measures correspond to a different set of motivations that those held by high EMS and IMS participants.  Their measures of introjected regulation included:

• Because I feel like I should avoid prejudice.
• Because I would feel guilty if I were prejudiced.
• Because I would feel ashamed if I were prejudiced.

Monteith, Mark, and Ashburn-Nardo (2010) found that participants who were more focused on the possibility of behaving badly reported both more frequent experiences with acting in a prejudiced way and less effort to act in less-prejudiced ways in the future.

  

Describing their participants high in IMS and EMS, Plant and Devine (2009) found that, when given the opportunity to engage in training to reduce their level of prejudice, these participants put forth more effort than participants that were high in IMS alone.  In contrast, Amodio, Devine, and Harmon Jones (2008) demonstrated that participants high in both IMS and EMS are less effective at regulating implicit prejudice than individuals high in IMS alone, as measured by neural activity in response to a variety of race-based primes.  They further argue that conflict monitoring, awareness of conflict measured at the level of neural activity, accounts for these differences, with high IMS individuals being more likely to notice the conflict between a prejudiced reaction and their egalitarian values.  This research suggests that high IMS individuals are better at self-monitoring their implicit attitudes, at least in certain contexts.  Individuals high in both EMS and IMS, however, may still experience sufficient conflict to prompt prejudice-reduction strategies.

The next category on Legault and colleagues’ scale is “external regulation” (2007).  Individuals that demonstrate external regulation do so because they wish to avoid social reprimand or to earn praise.  Items in this category of the scale include:

• So that people will admire me for being tolerant.
• Because I don’t want people to think I’m narrow-minded.
• Because biased people are not well-liked.
• Because I get more respect/acceptance when I act unbiased.

Surprisingly, these measures correlated positively with both the IMS and the EMS.  The former correlates only marginally and the latter correlates when p < .01.  This category marginally correlates positively with explicit and implicit racial measures, although it correlates negatively for explicit measures of sexism.  Only one significant correlation was found.  Explicit racism and external motivation correlated at p < .05.  There is no evidence that these individuals would elaborate messages attributed to a stigmatized message author, but the lack of significant correlations with the IMS and EMS was puzzling.

It could be that high EMS participants may include individuals that would fall into Legault and colleagues’ last category, amotivated individuals. Amotivated individuals “cannot perceive a relationship between their behavior and that behavior’s subsequent outcome.” Measures include:

• I don’t know; it’s not a priority.
• I don’t know; I don’t really bother trying to avoid it. 
• I don’t know why; I think it’s pointless.
• I don’t know, it’s not very important to me.

This significantly positively correlates with explicit and implicit prejudice. It does not significantly correlate with either the IMS or the EMS, but it does show a marginal positive correlation with the EMS and a marginal negative correlation with the IMS.  

Both individuals solely high in EMS and high in both EMS and IMS are less able to regulate their implicit prejudices.  When asked to suppress their stereotypes, high EMS individuals exhibit a rebound effect and subsequent depletion of their ability to suppress stereotypes that is not experienced by high IMS individuals (Butz and Plant, 2009).   This suggests that even individuals that are high in either external or both internal and external motivation to respond without prejudice may lack the ability to do so.  

Empathy and Biased Helping

The greater a person’s empathy with an individual, the more likely he is to help that individual unfairly:

•  “In one study, participants who were encouraged to feel more empathy towards a fictitious child with a fatal illness were more likely to assign the child to receive immediate help, at the expense of other children who had been waiting for a longer time, were more needy, or had more to gain from the help (Batson et al., 1995)” (Haidt & Kesibir, 2009).

• “On a larger scale, charitable giving follows sympathy, not the number of people in need. One child who falls down a well, or who needs an unusual surgery, triggers an outpouring of donations if the case is covered on the national news (see Loewenstein and Small, 2007 for a review). Lab studies confirm the relative power of sympathy over numbers: Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic (2007) found that a charitable appeal with a single identifiable victim became less powerful when statistical information was added to the appeal. Even more surprising, Vastfjall, Peters, and Slovic (in prep) found that a charitable appeal with one identifiable victim became less effective when a second identifiable victim was added” (Haidt & Kesibir, 2009).

Stereotype-Consistent Information Increase Thought-Confidence and Leads to More Extreme Judgments

Clark et al. demonstrated one mechanism by which their participants came to have more confidence in stereotype-consistent thoughts.  Participants with greater confidence in these thoughts were more likely to use them when making judgments.  Specifically, Clark et al. examined the association of higher socioeconomic status with higher standardized test performance and lower socioeconomic status with lower performance in elementary school.  In two experiments, Clark et al. first randomly assigned participants to view the-in fact fictitious-test results of a child getting either 90% or 20% of the answers correct.   In both experiments, they then randomly assigned participants a biography indicating the child’s either higher or lower socioeconomic status.  In both experiments, Clark et al. asked participants to rate their confidence in their thoughts about the child and to recommend that the child be placed in either a gifted or a remedial program. 

Participants in the first experiment, which followed the procedure described above, tended to have more confidence in their thoughts when they learned that the higher performing child was also from a family with higher socioeconomic status or when they learned that the lower performing child was from a family with lower socioeconomic status.  Those participants also tended to makes stronger recommendations for the child’s academic future than participants who were presented with a high-performing student from a lower socioeconomic status family or vice-versa.  Clark et al.’s participants’ degree of thought confidence mediated the relationship between the stereotype consistency of the information and the extremity of their judgments.  A mediating variable is a variable that helps, in statistical analysis, to account for the relationship between two other variables.  In other words, participants with greater thought confidence because they were presented with stereotype consistent information also tended to make more extreme recommendations. 

In the second experiment, some participants were randomly assigned a distraction condition.  In this condition, they were forced to carry out an additional task while reading and evaluating information about the-in fact fictitious-child.  When participants were distracted, participants were less accurate when recalling the child’s test scores.  They tended to recall the scores of a low-performing higher socioeconomic status child as being better than that child’s actual scores and they tended to recall the scores of a high-performing lower socioeconomic status child as being worst than that child’s actual scores.  Participants under the distraction condition reported less confidence in their thoughts about the child than did participants who were not distracted. Participants that were distracted by an additional task also made weaker recommendations regarding the child’s academic future as well.  However, they were more biased by socioeconomic status.  This relationship was mediated by their biased recall of the child’s test scores.  In other words, participants under distraction conditions tended to believe that children from lower socioeconomic status families or higher socioeconomic status families scored poorly or well respectively and this belief helps, in statistical analysis, to explain the fact that participants tended to recommend lower socioeconomic status students for remedial programs and higher socioeconomic status students for gifted programs.  

What Biases Judgements of the Self?

According to Gilbert and Malone there are four main factors that can lead to inaccurate beliefs about others and oneself: low levels of awareness of situational forces, unrealistic expectations, inflated categorizations and incomplete corrections for perceived errors (1995, p. 8).  Low levels of awareness may be due to the invisibility of those causal influences on human behavior that are temporally and spatially distant (1995, p. 10).  Even if the causal influences are proximal, the observer must have a theory of influences on human behavior in order to interpret these influences.  Here, Gilbert and Malone’s first and second factors interact.  In their account, individuals regularly underestimate incentives, basic social pressures, and egocentric biases (1995, p. 11-12).  Egocentric biases occur when individuals do not fully understand why they perceive a certain situation in a specific way.  Unable to fully comprehend the reasons for their evaluations, individuals may either fall back on a naïve realism in which their impressions of objects are qualities of the objects themselves.  Alternatively, they may simply be unable, through introspection, to understand the origin of their own reactions and thus may actively apply a theoretical perspective that they believe to be accurate but are unable to test (1995, p. 11-12). 

Individual self-understandings tend to be highly biased.  In 1993, Sedikides demonstrated that, for his participants, self-enhancement and consistency motives were more influential than diagnosticity motives (cited in Baumeister, 2010, 149). Acknowledging situational influences could undermine both positive accomplishments and the consistency with which one believes that one can achieve these accomplishments.   

At the same time, it is not clear how these biases in self-judgment would bias judgments of other people.  Judgments of others are typically more realistic.  For example, in 1988 Taylor and Brown demonstrated that “people overestimate their successes and good traits . . . underestimate their failures and bad traits) . . . overestimate how much control they have over their lives and their fate . . . [and are] unrealistically optimistic, believing that they are more likely than other people to experience good outcomes and less likely to experience bad ones” (cited in Baumeister, 2010, p. 150).  Further, as Zuckerman demonstrated in 1979, people tend to look to situation causes to explain their own failures (cited in Baumeister, 2010, 150) but do not extend the same courtesy to others (Gilbert and Malone, 1995).  When individuals do admit to having negative traits they “persuade themselves that their good traits are unusual whereas their bad traits are widely shared” (Baumeister, 2010, 150).  

It is possible that judgments of self influence lay theories that are applied to both the self and the other.  However, Gilbert and Malone point out other cognitive reasons for unrealistic expectations-the availability bias leads to inaccurate judgments of the typicality of certain behaviors (1995, p. 13) and lay theories of situational influence can lead individuals to underestimate even their own dispositions (1995, p. 14).  Inflated categorization of behavior occurs because individuals seek to resolve ambiguity and thus see behavior as more strongly conforming to expectation than it actually does (1995, pg. 14).  Last, individuals tend to make either situational or dispositional attributions based on the motives of the moment, and correcting for these attributions can be difficult (1995, p. 15-16).  

What Moderates Attitude-Behavior Consistency?

Attitude structure, as mapped through different measures of attitude strength, influences attitude-behavior consistency. For example, the accessibility of an attitude, the ease with which it comes to mind, has been positively correlated to voting behavior, consumer product choices, puzzle completion, and the choice to donate to charity (Fabrigar and Wegener, 2010, p. 187-188.)  To take another example, just believing that you’ve thought about something can lead to greater certainty and with that certainty, greater attitude-behavior consistency (Petty & Brinol, 2010, p. 241).  Other, more general features of attitude structure, such as the content of knowledge structures and the valence of evaluations, have been respectively correlated to influence on instrumental and consummatory behaviors (2010, p. 188).  In both cases there is a match between the content of knowledge structures linked to the attitude and the motivations in that particular situation.    

Ambivalence is usually negatively correlated to attitude-behavior consistency (2010, p. 188-189).  This is the case even for complex attitudes, which can include multiple evaluations of different valences.  Normally, these attitudes may be considered “informative guides even when the goal of the behavior has little direct relevance to any of the dimensions of knowledge (2010, p. 195), perhaps because they have been tested across a variety of situations and are considered generally relevant.  However, ambivalence decreases confidence in these attitudes, their perceived situational relevance, and, in some cases, willingness to act.   Less-complex attitudes may be even more affected (2010, p. 195).  

According to Petty et al.’s Meta-Cognitive Model, the MCM, individual evaluations and knowledge structures may be “tagged” with meta-evaluations of their likelihood, the confidence with which they should be held, accuracy, and certainty (Petty & Brinol, 2010, p. 218-219).  Ambivalence can cause clashes between attitudes which may be experienced as discomfort and prompt an adjustment of these tags (2010, p. 219).  Attitudes with meta-cognitive tags indicating certainty and confidence should be better correlated to behaviors both deliberative and automatic.  Attitudes with tags indicating their weakness and personal lack of confidence in them should, eventually, cease to affect behavior.  However, they may persist as implicit attitudes that affect automatic reactions (2010, p. 219). 

Because attitudes can form by many routes, including evaluative conditioning, heuristic, and elaborative processing (2010), it is possible for behaviors to change attitudes.  For example, “[a]ttitude self-reports filled out in front of a mirror . . . better predict subsequent behavior,” (Baumeister, 2010, p. 143) presumably biases attention toward the reflexive self.  Further, participants who have recalled “extraverted versus introverted tendencies” (2010, p. 146) typically begin to think of themselves as introverted or extroverted which can lead to the expression of introverted and extroverted behaviors (2010, p. 146).  Role playing can also induce attitude change (Petty & Brinol, 2010, p. 221). 

Moral Behavior

Posts tagged with the “Moral Behavior” label examine the relationship between moral attitudes and moral behavior. Some posts may explore attitude theory in general. 

Distinct Moral Convictions Increase Social Distancing, Reduce Cooperation

When people report that attitudes are an important part of their personal moral perspective, they are more likely to:

·  physically distance themselves from people with different moral attitudes

·  have difficulty resolving conflicts with people who don’t share their moral convictions.

These actions are independent of the content of the moral conviction—an individual who has a moral conviction that supports abortion rights will be as likely to withdraw from someone who disagrees with him as an individual who has a moral conviction that opposes abortion rights (Bauman & Skitka, 2009, p. 344).

Moral Others

Entries tagged with the “Moral Others” label look at moral judgments of other people. What is judged? Behavior is judged yes, but also the morality of the members of different social categories. These entries will deal with both observed and assumed moral differences between the self and the other. 

Tag: Moral Others

The Private and Public Moral Self

According to Baumeister, the heart of the self is reflexive consciousness (Baumeister 2010, p. 142).  The object of this reflection, however, is somewhat mysterious.  Who we are and what we will do is not a given. We learn about ourselves by observing past and current behaviors and making predictions  (Baumeister 2010, p. 142). However, only a few of these beliefs about the self “are active in focal awareness at any given time” (Baumeister 2010, p. 145).  The presence of specific beliefs in focal awareness is moderated both by internal processes such as self-regulation (Baumeister, 2010, p. 143) and the extent to which awareness is focused on the self to the exclusion of other objects of awareness (Baumeister, 2010, p. 143).  For example, as Duval and Wicklund found in 1972 attitude “self-reports filled out in front of a mirror are more accurate (in the sense that they better predict subsequent behavior) than those filled out with no mirror present” (as cited in Baumeister, 2010, p. 143).

Self-awareness can bring ongoing mental processes into the forefront of consciousness, intensifying, as Scheier and Carver found in 1977, either awareness of emotional reactions or emotional reactions themselves (as cited in Baumeister, 2010, p. 143).  Increased self-awareness is also positively correlated to successful self-regulation (Baumeister, 2010, p.  143).  However, if individuals are engaged in behaviors that are at odds with their self-concept, self-awareness may be avoided (Baumeister, 2010, p. 144) often through effortful and biased self-justification and selective recall.   

The self, then, is, can be acted upon.  Rather than being a given, it is a flexible store of self-knowledge of varying degrees of accuracy and subject to revision or minimization in a variety of situations, social and non-social.  For humans, at least, social situations predominate, and, Baumeister writes, “[t]he first job of the self is to garner social acceptance” (as cited in Baumeister & Finkel 2010, p. 140).  Social acceptance requires “self-understanding on things that connect [the self] to other people, including family, groups, country, and other relationships” (Baumeister, 2010, p. 140).  When the self identifies with each of these categories, relationships and roles are made salient (Baumeister, 2010, p. 140). At another level of identification, the individual may look to the group in order to learn about herself.  Not only must an individual seeking greater status or seeking to maintain status within the group understand the standards against which she is being judged but she must further internalize these standards so that self-monitoring proceeds automatically (Baumeister, 2010, p. 140).  

People effortfully defend their private moral self-concept. As Haidt and Kesbir (2009) argue, "[w]hen people behave selfishly, they judge their own behavior to be more virtuous than when they watch the same behavior performed by another person." However, this pattern is not exhibited when participants are under cognitive load, suggesting that individual reappraisal of selfish action as virtuous is effortful and deliberate. 

The presence of an audience, however, does increase prosocial behavior (Baumeister, 1982). Even the presence of security cameras, acting, perhaps, like the mirror in Duval and Wicklund (1972), increased helping behaviors (Van Rompay, Vonk, & Fransen, in press, cited in Haidt & Kesebir, 2009). Indeed, if participants play a dictator game on a computer that has been given "stylized eyespots on the desktop background" they will give more generously (Haidt & Kesebir, 2009). 

Curiously, when the audience can be deceived, individuals will often fall back on behaviors that are selfish, not prosocial, and dishonest. For example, Batson, Thompson, Seuferling, Whitney, &  Strongman (1999) "asked participants to decide how to assign two tasks to themselves and another participant. One of the tasks was much more desirable than the other, and participants were given a coin to flip, in a sealed plastic bag, as an optional decision aid. Those who did not open the bag assigned themselves the more desirable task 80-90% of the time. But the same was true of participants who opened the bag and (presumably) flipped the coin. Those who flipped may well have believed, before the coin landed, that they were honest people who would honor the coin’s decision: A self-report measure of moral responsibility, filled out weeks earlier, correlated with the decision to open the bag, yet it did not correlate with the decision about task assignment" (Haidt & Kesebir, 2009).

Privacy, then, can reduce the incidence of prosocial behaviors, even when these behaviors are supported by strong cultural mandates. In Japan, for example, "when participants are placed in lab situations that lack the constant informal monitoring and sanctioning systems of real life, cooperation rates in small groups are low, even lower than those of Americans (Yamagishi, 2003)" (Haidt & Kesebir, 2009). It could be argued, however, that the social context of the laboratory would predictably be differently marked in context-sensitive collectivist cultures. 

Moral Selves

Posts tagged with the "Moral Selves" label discuss the private and public moral self.

Defining Morality as an Object of Study

All entries tagged with this title examine different scholars and their approaches to studying morality.  

Moral Convictions

According to Skika and colleagues, people who have identified moral convictions will, likely, believe that these convictions apply to others and will, likely, be intolerant of those who do not share these convictions. They operationalize moral conviction by asking participants whether their “feelings about X are a reflection of my core moral beliefs and convictions” or asking them “to what extent is your attitude about X a reflection of your core moral beliefs and convictions.” Moral convictions, then, are defined by the participant and not by the experimenter’s own moral or scientific theories. While I would imagine that those beliefs that participants label moral convictions may vary in their structure, function, and origins, Skitka and colleagues have established that, at least for their samples, when participants identify beliefs as being central to their core moral beliefs and convictions, they are identifying beliefs that have similar effects on social perceptions, similar strengths, and similar effects on behavior.  

According to Bauman and Skitka’s 2009 chapter, moral convictions tend automatically inform an individual’s perception of their environment (physical and social) and themselves. Stimuli that are relevant to moral convictions will be considered salient and these stimuli will be judged to have a moral significance that is objective, independent of the mind of the perceiver. Some individuals may challenge this automatic assumption, but the objectivity of this moral salience is an implicit, automatic and perhaps unexamined, belief, and overcoming it can require more deliberate thought or the activation of another, contradictory, automatic goal (Moskowitz & Li, 2010).

Without the interference of any, what we can quickly term moral subjectivity goals, individuals will consider any motivations, behaviors, and justifications for these behaviors to be both natural and normative responses. They will believe that all people should naturally share these motivations, behaviors, and justifications for these behaviors. As Bauman and Skitka (2009, p. 342) argue “[P]eople experience morals as if they were readily observable, objective properties of situations, or as facts about the world . . . Unlike facts, however, morals carry prescriptive force . . . moral judgments both motivate and justify consequent behaviors.”

Moral convictions, Skitka and colleagues argue, are a special type of attitude that is imperfectly captured by previous attitude strength research. Correlations in Sktika and Bauman (2008) between attitude extremity and moral conviction, for example, were high enough that they could be tapping the same construct, but not so high as to make this likely. The behavioral implications of attitude and extremity and moral conviction were also different, with the latter, unlike the former, being associated with social distancing from people who do not share the same attitude (Skitka et al., 2005).

Bauman and Skitka (2009) distinguish their research from other moral psychology research by arguing that those other experiments require that participants judge whether a person’s behavior, or the participant’s own decision, is moral or immoral or right or wrong. These experiments themselves, then, are unable to say whether their participants would have spontaneously made moral judgments. Those participants who spontaneously made moral judgments may behave differently from those who require experimenter-prompting. If this is the case, the experiment may have limited application outside of the laboratory. Many experiments, for example, involve trolley problems. Bauman (2008) confirmed that “there is considerable variability in the extent that people perceive the dilemma to be a situation that involves a moral choice” (Bauman & Skitka, 2009, p. 347). 

Belief in a Just World: Blame or Help a Victim?

Some women may be more likely to view other women as having acted irresponsibly when these women are the victims of violence that is due, in part, to their being women, rather than when they are the victims of violence in general. This could bolster their personal sense of agency and help them to believe that they will be able to avoid violence themselves. In another set of experiments, less economically successful members of an ethnic in-group were blamed for being irresponsible or personally derogated as lacking the competence or social skills necessary to achieve success.

Alternatively, victim-blaming and victim-derogation may occur when an out-group member is demanding that you or your in-group take action. Out-groups used in experimental manipulations have included the third world poor, people with AIDS, the handicapped, those who have suffered from tragic accidents, rape victims, and cancer patients (Furnham, 2003).

Belief in a Just World can be associated with pro-social behaviors. Bierhoff et al. (1991) compared two matched samples of individuals who offered first aid or did not offer first aid upon witnessing an accident. An accident would emphasize random, unjustified harm and it was hypothesized that those who were higher in Belief in a Just World would offer first aid in order to restore justice. They did so, at least when they were high in an internal locus of control and emphasized social responsibility and empathy.

A personal sense of being able to create justice or mitigate injustice may bolster one’s ability to recognize and respond to injustice. However, where personal ability to effect change is demonstrably low, individuals tend to actively minimize their attributions of injustice, blaming and derogating victims. How do people who are high in personal efficacy respond to situations where they have little power to restore or create justice? Would there be an interaction effect of justice centrality? Justice centrality could increase emotional distress, leading to more forceful denial. Alternatively, seeking justice in another domain, one in which the individual feels more able to achieve justice, may alleviate distress. Choice of strategy could depend on individual experience with seeking justice. Different strategies may be employed at different times, with attitudes to a particular injustice changing upon personal reflection.

Both justice-seeking and victim blaming and derogation may be independent of belief in a just world. For example, a person can believe that the world is both just and unjust, or even believe that their own actions are just and injustice, but still seek to accomplish some good, just as a person can believe that they have little power to achieve their goal but still try. Someone who is high in justice centrality and values justice highly may seek justice more frequently and more generally if they are lower in Belief in a Just World. Victim blaming and derogation can depend on one’s need for control, prejudice, and more basic self-interest.