Exposure to moral relativism compromises moral behavior

Signaling (in)tolerance: Social evaluation and metaethical relativism and objectivism

Prior work has established that laypeople do not consistently treat moral questions as being objectively true or as merely true relative to different perspectives. Rather, these metaethical judgments vary dramatically across moral issues and in response to different social influences. We offer a potential explanation by examining how objectivists and relativists are evaluated in different contexts. We provide evidence for a novel account of metaethical judgments as signaling tolerance or intolerance of disagreement. The social implications of signaling tolerance or intolerance in different contexts may motivate different metaethical judgments. Study 1 finds that relativists are perceived as more tolerant, empathic, having superior moral character, and as more desirable as social partners than objectivists. Study 2 replicates these findings with a within-participants design and also shows that objectivists are perceived as more morally serious than relativists. Study 3 examines evaluations of objectivists and relativists regarding concrete moral issues, finding these results vary across situations of moral agreement and disagreement. Study 4 finds that participants' metaethical stances likewise vary when responding in the way they think would make a person who agrees or disagrees with them evaluate them more positively. However, in Study 5, we find no effect on metaethical judgment of telling participants they will be evaluated by a person who agrees or disagrees with them, which suggests either a failure to induce reputational concerns or a more limited influence of reputational considerations on metaethical judgments, despite strong effects on social evaluation.

Moral Believer or Moral Problem-Solver? Moral Pragmatism Fosters Tolerance Without Impeding Moral Behavior

Many previous studies in moral psychology have described people as moral believers, who treat morality as universal sacred beliefs and show moral outrage and social exclusion toward people with different opinions. At the same time, moral relativism tends to make people more tolerant but also makes them question their own beliefs and leads to more immoral behavior. We propose moral pragmatism as an alternative, which treats morality as a tool for solving specific problems, thus making morality situational instead of universal, practical instead of sacred, and tolerant instead of exclusive. Through four empirical studies, we demonstrate that when moral issues are presented as practical problems rather than abstract beliefs, people consider morality to be less universal, treat dissidents with more tolerance and less outrage, and do not perform more immoral behavior at the same time. These findings highlight moral pragmatism as a flexible and culturally sensitive moral approach, promoting diverse moral perspectives and constructive cross-cultural discourses.

To Know all is to Forgive all: The Effect of Foreign Experiences on Forgiveness

By going abroad, individuals get the opportunity to explore a new country and to immerse themselves in a new culture. Despite being personally and professionally rewarding, little is known about interpersonal attitudes and behavior change that accompany living abroad experiences. The current research examines whether foreign experiences influence forgiveness. Drawing on the Structure-Appraisal Model of Multicultural Experiences and literature examining the positive effect of foreign experiences on self-control related to the suppression of impulsive retaliation, we propose that international experiences lead to a greater tendency to forgive. As predicted, we found that foreign experiences correlated positively with forgiving motivations toward transgressors across different measures of forgiveness and diverse samples (Studies 1-2). Study three compared forgiveness of individuals who had lived abroad with forgiveness of individuals who had plans to live abroad but had not done so yet. We found consistent support for the hypothesis that living abroad has an impact on forgiveness. By employing an experimental design, Study four established the causal effect of international experiences on forgiveness. Taken together, these findings suggest that when individuals experience foreign cultures, they learn to understand interpersonal conflicts from different perspectives and show greater leniency and forgiveness toward transgressions.

Specificity in the Study of Mixed Emotions: A Theoretical Framework

Research on mixed emotions is yet to consider emotion-specificity, the idea that same-valenced emotions have distinctive characteristics and functions. We review two decades of research on mixed emotions, focusing on evidence for the occurrence of mixed emotions and the effects of mixed emotions on downstream outcomes. We then propose a novel theoretical framework of mixed-emotion-specificity with three foundational tenets: (a) Mixed emotions are distinguishable from single-valenced emotions and other mixed emotions based on their emotion-appraisal relationships; (b) Mixed emotions can further be characterized by four patterns that describe relationships between simultaneous appraisals or appraisals that are unique to mixed emotions; and (c) Carryover effects occur only on outcomes that are associated with the appraisal characteristics of mixed emotion. We outline how mixed-emotion-specific effects can be predicted based on the appraisal tendency framework. Temporal dynamics, the application of mixed-emotion-specificity to individual difference research, methodological issues, and future directions are also discussed.

Moral Psychology as a Necessary Bridge Between Social Cognition and Law

Coordinating competing interests can be difficult. Because law regulates human behavior, it is a candidate mechanism for creating coordination in the face of societal disagreement. We argue that findings from moral psychology are necessary to understand why law can effectively resolve co-occurring conflicts related to punishment and group membership. First, we discuss heterogeneity in punitive thought, focusing on punishment within the United States legal system. Though the law exerts a weak influence on punitive ideologies before punishment occurs, we argue that it effectively coordinates perceptions of individuals who have already been punished. Next, we discuss intergroup conflict, which often co-occurs with disagreements related to punishment and represents a related domain where coordination can be difficult to achieve. Here, we underscore how insights from moral psychology can promote equality via the law. These examples demonstrate how contributions from moral psychology are necessary to understand the connection between social cognition and law.

Personal infidelity and professional conduct in 4 settings

We study the connection between personal and professional behavior by introducing usage of a marital infidelity website as a measure of personal conduct. Police officers and financial advisors who use the infidelity website are significantly more likely to engage in professional misconduct. Results are similar for US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) defendants accused of white-collar crimes, and companies with chief executive officers (CEOs) or chief financial officers (CFOs) who use the website are more than twice as likely to engage in corporate misconduct. The relation is not explained by a wide range of regional, firm, executive, and cultural variables. These findings suggest that personal and workplace behavior are closely related.

Empirical research on folk moral objectivism

Lay persons may have intuitions about morality's objectivity. What do these intuitions look like? And what are their causes and consequences? In recent years, an increasing number of scholars have begun to investigate these questions empirically. This article presents and assesses the resulting area of research as well as its potential philosophical implications. First, we introduce the methods of empirical research on folk moral objectivism. Second, we provide an overview of the findings that have so far been made. Third, we raise a number of methodological worries that cast doubt upon these findings. And fourth, we discuss ways in which lay persons' intuitions about moral objectivity may bear on philosophical claims.

Ethical Predispositions to Violate or Obey Traffic Rules and the Mediating Role of Driving Styles

Traffic law violations are the most important determinants of traffic accidents. This study examined the influence of drivers' ethical perspective on their traffic violations and the mediating role of driving styles in these relationships. A sample of 313 drivers participated in the study. Contrary to expectations, high ethical relativism was found to be associated with fewer aggressive traffic violations. This suggests that the informal normative system that parallels the official traffic regulations is the more salient reference against which drivers usually assess the adequacy of their behaviors, highly relativistic drivers being more willing to also take into consideration the official traffic code in these appraisals. We also found significant interactions between idealism and relativism on both ordinary and aggressive violations. Idealism emerged as a predictor of these violations only in drivers low in relativism. In this group, one's concern about the harm that he/she might cause to other traffic participants induces higher traffic law abidingness. These influences of idealism were mediated by certain driving styles. Drivers' general ethical perspective fosters a specific pattern of driving styles and, consequently, the tendency to commit or to refrain from traffic violations.

Meta-ethics and the mortality: Mortality salience leads people to adopt a less subjectivist morality

Although lay notions in normative ethics have previously been investigated within the framework of the dual-process interpretation of the terror management theory (TMT), meta-ethical beliefs (subjective vs. objective morality) have not been previously investigated within the same framework. In the present research, we primed mortality salience, shown to impair reasoning performance in previous studies, to see whether it inhibits subjectivist moral judgments in three separate experiments. In Experiment 3, we also investigated whether impaired reasoning performance indeed mediates the effect of mortality salience on subjectivism. The results of the three experiments consistently showed that people in the mortality salience group reported significantly less subjectivist responses than the control group, and impaired reasoning performance partially mediates it. Overall, the results are consistent with the dual-process interpretation of TMT and suggest that not only normative but also meta-ethical judgments can be explained by this model.

An expanded model of the moral self: Beyond care and justice

Most research on moral identities conceptualizes morality exclusively in terms of care and justice, but work from across the social sciences indicates that these represent only a corner of the moral landscape. Emphasizing care and justice alone severely restricts the scope of moral identity models, and risks under-estimating the influence of moral self-processes. To address this, we develop and validate measures of moral identity focused on group loyalty, authority, and purity, three additional facets of morality highlighted in Moral Foundations Theory. Although the loyalty identity is remarkably similar to the care/justice identity, the authority and purity identities are distinct, and demonstrate adequate convergent, divergent, and nomological validity. These identities also predict a wide range of behaviors that traditional care/justice focused moral identities miss. Taken together, our work indicates that the moral self is more complex - and has a much wider scope of influence - than previously supposed.

The Influence of Social Interaction on Intuitions of Objectivity and Subjectivity

We present experimental evidence that people's modes of social interaction influence their construal of truth. Participants who engaged in cooperative interactions were less inclined to agree that there was an objective truth about that topic than were those who engaged in a competitive interaction. Follow-up experiments ruled out alternative explanations and indicated that the changes in objectivity are explained by argumentative mindsets: When people are in cooperative arguments, they see the truth as more subjective. These findings can help inform research on moral objectivism and, more broadly, on the distinctive cognitive consequences of different types of social interaction.

Free Will and Punishment: A Mechanistic View of Human Nature Reduces Retribution

If free-will beliefs support attributions of moral responsibility, then reducing these beliefs should make people less retributive in their attitudes about punishment. Four studies tested this prediction using both measured and manipulated free-will beliefs. Study 1 found that people with weaker free-will beliefs endorsed less retributive, but not consequentialist, attitudes regarding punishment of criminals. Subsequent studies showed that learning about the neural bases of human behavior, through either lab-based manipulations or attendance at an undergraduate neuroscience course, reduced people’s support for retributive punishment (Studies 2–4). These results illustrate that exposure to debates about free will and to scientific research on the neural basis of behavior may have consequences for attributions of moral responsibility.