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).