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).
