current directions in psychological sciencejessegra/papers/gmb.2012.streams.cdps.pdf ·...

Integrating the Streams of Morality Research 1

Running Head: INTEGRATING THE STREAMS OF MORALITY RESEARCH

Integrating the streams of morality research: The case of political ideology

Jesse Graham, Peter Meindl, and Erica Beall

University of Southern California

In press, Current Directions in Psychological Science

May 6, 2012

Words in text: 2,660

Address correspondence to:

Jesse Graham

Department of Psychology

University of Southern California

3620 S. McClintock Ave., SGM 501

Los Angeles, CA 90089

[email protected]

Author note. We thank Sena Koleva, Brian Nosek, and Azim Shariff for helpful comments. This

work was supported by Templeton Foundation Grant 53-4873-5200.


Abstract

The scientific study of morality has blossomed in the last decade, yielding key insights into the

psychological processes underlying moral judgments. This blossoming has generally taken place

along two streams of research: one on cultural and individual differences in these processes, and

one on their situational determinants. Although these two streams often examine the same factors

(e.g., the role of contamination in moral judgment), they have not systematically built on one

another’s findings, and their empirical approaches remain distinct. This article describes how

these streams are beginning to converge in current empirical work, highlighting the example of

political ideology. We then discuss the benefits an integrated research approach can have for

moral psychology, especially for 1. delineating the links between moral judgment and moral

behavior, and 2. expanding the range of moral behaviors studied, in order to more fully represent

everyday moral life.

Keywords: morality, political ideology, individual differences, situation, values


Integrating the streams of morality research: The case of political ideology

What is morality? Are we born with it, or do we acquire it? Why are moral judgments so

deeply held, and yet so inconsistent across individuals and societies? Do these judgments predict

(im)moral behavior? These questions have been asked for millennia, but empirical answers have

only recently begun to emerge thanks to a flourishing interdisciplinary science of human

morality (Haidt, 2007). Even as the content focus has shifted (e.g., moral development, moral

cognition, moral emotion), morality research has generally proceeded along two distinct streams

reflecting Cronbach’s (1957) “correlational/experimental” distinction: 1. Individual/cultural

differences in moral values, judgments, and attitudes, and 2. situational determinants of

individual moral decisions and behaviors.

This division characterizes several subfields within psychology (Tracy, Robins, &

Sherman, 2009), but it is particularly stark and limiting in the case of moral psychology. What’s

special about morality? Much of the academic and popular interest in morality comes from the

conflict between feeling moral convictions as objective certainty on one hand (Skitka, 2010), yet

seeing widespread cultural and political variation in those convictions on the other. Part of the

research-stream division unique to morality consists in the situational determinants line treating

morality as if it were a completely agreed-upon construct, rather than taking into account the

wide variation in how people construe the moral domain. At the same time, the moral beliefs and

values studied in the individual differences stream are fundamentally concerned with behavior,

which has primarily been studied in the situational determinants stream.

In this paper we briefly characterize the current state of both streams, highlighting the

lack in each. We then review recent work on political ideology as a point at which these research

streams are beginning to converge. Finally, we outline the benefits such an integration can have


for understanding the links between situational constraints, moral judgments, and moral

behavior.

Individual Differences in Morality

Individuals and cultures often disagree about how moral decisions should be made, what

types of considerations are morally relevant, and what “morality” even means. Although not

specific to morality, there is much variation in how people prioritize their values, from hedonism

and achievement to benevolence and tradition (see Feldman, 2003 and Schwartz, 1992 for

reviews). Building on this and the anthropological work of Richard Shweder, Moral Foundations

Theory (Haidt & Graham, 2007) posits intuitive concerns about care/harm, fairness/cheating,

loyalty/betrayal, respect/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. Stable individual differences in

these concerns have been found in investigations of culture (Easterners morally care about

loyalty and respect more than Westerners), political ideology (liberals care more about care-

fairness and less about loyalty-respect-sanctity than conservatives), and gender (women care

more about care, fairness, and sanctity than men; Graham, Nosek, Haidt, Iyer, Koleva, & Ditto,

2011). Given such variation in what terrain “morality” covers, investigations of moral behavior

have an added layer of complexity to account for in determining the moral status of a given

behavior for the individuals being observed.

Individuals also vary in moral identity – that is, how much morally-relevant concerns

define one’s self-concept. People with stronger moral identity have been shown to act more

morally (e.g., giving more money to charity), in part because they are more immune to

rationalizations justifying immoral behavior (see Aquino & Freeman, 2009, for review).

Scientists have learned much about moral decision-making using philosophical puzzles like the

famous trolley dilemma, which pit an action’s consequences (e.g., kill one person to save five


others) against moral rules (e.g., never use a person as a means to an end). Although responses to

these dilemmas have been offered as evidence of a “universal” moral grammar (Mikhail, 2007),

individual differences have been found in these decision-making propensities; for example, men

and liberals are more consequentialist on average than women and conservatives (Fumagalli et

al., 2010; Graham, Sherman, et al., 2011).

Unfortunately, this research stream has largely failed to empirically consider the

relationships between individual differences and moral behaviors (be they observed discrete

actions in the lab or self/peer-assessments of real-world behaviors; see discussion of two notable

exceptions below). We do not know, for instance, whether differences in decision-making about

hypothetical dilemmas predict behavioral outcomes in the real world, nor whether people who

make harsher judgments about sanctity/degradation act in any more “sanctified” ways than

anyone else.

Situational Effects on Morality

A recent explosion of experimental research has revealed subtle situational effects on the

severity of moral judgments. Disgust cues such as fart smells and tissue-laden desks can increase

the severity of moral judgments (Schnall, Haidt, Clore, & Jordan, 2008), even when disgust is

primed under hypnotic suggestion (Wheatley & Haidt, 2005). In contrast, positive mood

inductions can decrease the severity of moral judgments, making people more likely to deem a

harmful action morally appropriate (Valdesolo & Desteno, 2006). Physical cleansing can also

diminish moral judgments, via the embodied metaphor linking physical and moral purity

(Schnall, Benton, & Harvey, 2008).

While relatively little is known about the relationship between moral behavior and

morally-relevant individual differences, the effects of situational variables on moral behavior are


better understood. In fact, one of the classics of the situationist perspective was an attack on the

idea that individual differences in moral behavior are consistent across situational contexts

(Hartshorne & May, 1928). Although there is now evidence of more behavioral consistency than

earlier suggested (e.g., Fleeson & Noftle, 2008), recent work in social psychology, experimental

philosophy, and behavioral economics has provided an extensive list of situational effects on

moral behavior, from the peripheral (low levels of light in a room reduce honesty; Zhong, Bohns,

& Gino, 2010) to the emotional (feelings of elevation increase helping behavior; Schnall, Roper,

& Fessler, 2010) to the social (people cheat more after they see others cheat; Gino, Ayal, &

Ariely, 2009). Even very subtle situational changes can affect the likelihood of prosocial

behaviors like helping and giving, and antisocial behaviors like lying and cheating (see Hirsch,

Galinsky, & Zhong, 2011, for review).

To date, however, our understanding of situational effects on moral behavior is limited to

a constrained set of discrete behaviors performed in artificial settings that may not generalize to

real-world behavior (Levitt & List, 2007). Despite claims for the universality of some of these

effects, most of them have been demonstrated solely with Western student samples, and so it

remains unknown whether situational effects are robust across cultural and individual variation

(Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). This knowledge gap is particularly problematic in the

moral domain because much of moral thought and behavior consists precisely in disagreements

between people about what is right, what is wrong, and what even “counts” as a moral issue. By

limiting the study of morality to discrete decisions and actions made by college students in the

lab, the situational effects stream has left out much of moral life, from shared moral narratives to

religious rituals to everyday moral gossip.


Political Ideology: A Recent Confluence

Fortunately, the two streams of morality research summarized above have begun to

converge. Here we describe one point of convergence: research linking morality and political

ideology.

Along with morality, ideology has also undergone a resurgence of interest in the last

decade, and has emerged as an important moderator for a host of individual differences and

situational effects (see Jost, Federico, & Napier, 2009, for review). It is a powerful unique

predictor of both the kinds of moral concerns people have (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009) and

the processes by which people make moral decisions (Graham, Sherman, et al., 2011). Ideology

has been shown to predict individual differences in emotional responses, with conservatives

more sensitive to physical disgust than liberals (Inbar, Pizarro, & Bloom, 2009); concurrently,

manipulations of disgust can increase the severity of moral judgments (Schnall et al., 2008). This

has led to the finding that conservatives’ moral judgments are more impacted by physical disgust

than are the moral judgments of liberals (Eskine, Kacinik, & Prinz, 2011).

In their convergence, these two research streams went beyond the main effects of disgust

manipulations and political ideology to reveal a theoretically-relevant person/situation

interaction. However, Cronbach’s (1957) distinction covered not only person/situation focus, but

a wide range of differences, including research designs, assessment measures/methods, data

analytic strategies, and validity emphases (external vs. internal). Considering these factors makes

it clear that a complete convergence is still yet to come in moral psychology. For instance,

although several studies have examined individual-difference moderators of experimental effects

on moral judgment (e.g., Moore, Clark, & Kane, 2008), evidence is lacking as to how individual

differences and situations interact to affect moral behavior. Similarly, real-world moral behaviors


can be predicted by individual differences in moral judgments – values predict voting behavior

(Caprara, Schwartz, Capanna, & Vecchione, 2006) and moral identity centrality predicts

charitable giving (Aquino & Freeman, 2009) – but little is known about how such relationships

vary by situation.

Interactions like that of ideology and disgust can address such gaps in knowledge by

opening up new empirical questions about the processes of moral judgment. For example, future

work on the role of political ideology in morality will need to treat ideology not only as a

moderator, but as a factor to be experimentally manipulated, as well as a dependent variable for

manipulations of moral salience, behavior, and context. Finding more such interactions and

pursuing the mechanisms behind them through integrated research can help psychologists predict

what situational factors will have the greatest impact on the moral judgments of different

individuals, groups, nations, and cultures. Moreover, this can help psychologists understand

exactly how and why moral judgments can shift in response to these factors. Simultaneously

exploring situational factors and individual characteristics like political attitudes thus allows for a

more complete picture of moral psychological processes to emerge.

However, unearthing moral person-situation interactions is just one of the potential

benefits of a more complete convergence of the research streams. In the next section we describe

what else an integrated moral psychology could do – namely, delineate the relationships between

moral judgment and moral behavior, and expand the range of moral behaviors studied.

Future Directions

A great deal is known about moral values, and a great deal is known about what

influences discrete behaviors in lab situations, but very little is known about how moral thought

and moral behavior relate, interact, or come into conflict in the real world. Thus an integrated


approach may be most useful for meeting two major challenges: 1. predicting when (and for

whom) moral judgments will relate to behavior; and 2. predicting a more complete set of

morally-relevant behaviors.

1. Predicting gaps between moral judgment and behavior. Moral hypocrisy – usually

operationalized as engaging in behaviors that one judges to be morally wrong – has been a

primary topic of interest since the beginnings of psychology (Blasi, 1980). But research on

situational determinants has tended to use moral judgment and moral behavior only as dependent

variables, neglecting the relations between the two, and research on individual differences

usually disregards behavior altogether. The simultaneous consideration of situational effects and

individual differences can illuminate moral hypocrisy by mapping out variations – across people,

cultures, and situations – in the gaps between moral judgments and behaviors. For example, we

don’t know in which areas of their lives people most struggle to adhere to their moral values.

This leaves open the question of whether some moral values are more likely to be upheld than

others, as well as what psychological factors contribute to people’s success or failure in living up

to those values.

Why can’t this be accomplished by additional research along the two separate streams?

Because understanding the variations in the judgment-behavior gap requires consideration of

variations in both moral judgment and behavior simultaneously. When considering moral

behavior, the situational determinants stream has tended to treat moral judgment as held

constant, for instance by focusing on behaviors that everyone would likely judge as immoral

(lying, cheating). But as the case of political ideology shows, much of what elicits deeply-held

moral conviction plays out exactly where we cannot assume that people agree about what they

ought to do. The ever-shifting ground of individuals’ perceptions of the moral domain


differentiates morality from other psychological phenomena. For example, if an investigator

wishes to measure a subject’s “behavior toward a female experimenter,” the gender of the

experimenter is a matter of objective fact, and so the definition of the behavioral context need

not be questioned. When it comes to a subject’s “moral behavior,” however, no such objective

criteria exist by which it can be assumed that every individual will experience a particular

behavior as equally morally relevant. Knowing whether someone’s behaviors conflict with their

moral judgments thus cannot rely on universalist assumptions about those judgments. This is

why integrating Cronbach’s streams is of particular importance (and particular difficulty) in the

case of morality. For a complete picture of when and where people’s behavior conflicts with

their moral principles and judgments, individual, cultural, and situational effects on judgments

and behaviors will need to be examined in a more integrated way.

2. Predicting a more comprehensive array of morally-relevant behaviors. In part because

of the aforementioned need to hold moral judgment constant, the situational determinants stream

has studied a narrow range of (im)moral behaviors, usually limited to discrete instances of lying

or cheating in a laboratory context. Research on individual differences, in contrast, has included

judgments about a much wider set of behaviors, but rarely measures those behaviors themselves.

The central insight from the latter research stream is that much of moral life consists precisely in

arguments about the moral status of behaviors, whether they should be judged as good, bad, or

morally irrelevant. For instance, is telling a joke based on outgroup stereotypes a morally

relevant behavior? What about attending a protest rally, physically disciplining your child,

flirting with a coworker, or attending religious services? What about omissions – that is, what is

the moral status of not attending a protest rally, never physically disciplining your child,

avoiding office flirtation, or skipping religious services? The moral status of these acts and


omissions is likely to depend on the moral judgments of the individuals involved, the moral

norms of the culture, and the situational context in which these decisions are made. Fortunately,

recent methodological advancements such as ecological momentary assessment and the

electronically-activated recorder (see Mehl & Conner, 2012) are making it more feasible to

observe behavior outside the lab, in naturally-occurring social contexts. Combining the strengths

of the individual differences and situational determinants approaches can allow for measurement

of a much wider range of behaviors considered moral or immoral by different people in different

contexts.

Conclusion

Scientific understanding of moral thought and behavior is growing at a rapid rate. This

progress stems from two streams of research in psychology and related fields, one on

individual/cultural differences in moral concerns and one on situational determinants of moral

judgments and behavior. These streams have begun to converge, as work on political ideology

demonstrates. If they can be more fully integrated, their confluence will allow for a more

complete picture of the links between moral judgment and moral behavior, and a more complete

picture of moral life overall.


Recommended Readings:

Jost, J. T., Federico, C. M., & Napier, J. L. (2009). (See References). A comprehensive overview

of psychological research on political ideology.

Haidt, J., & Kesebir, S. (2010). Morality. In S. Fiske, & D. Gilbert (Eds.) Handbook of Social

Psychology, 5th Edition. A review of social psychological research on morality, and an

argument for broadening the operationalization of morality in empirical research.

Tracy, J. L., Robins, R. W., & Sherman, J. W. (2009). (See References). An exploration of

Cronbach’s two research streams – correlational and experimental – in social-personality

psychology, and the methodological and philosophical divisions remaining between them.


References

Aquino, K. & Freeman, D. (2009). Moral identity in business situations: A social-cognitive

framework for understanding moral functioning, pp. 375-395. In Narvaez, D., & Lapsley, D.

(Eds.) Moral personality, identity and character: Prospects for a field of study. New York:

Cambridge University Press.

Blasi, A. (1980). Bridging moral cognition and moral action: A critical review of the literature.

Psychological Bulletin, 88, 1-45.

Caprara, G. V., Schwartz, S., Capanna, C., & Vecchione, M. (2006). Personality and politics:

Values, traits, and political choice. Political Psychology, 27, 1-28.

Cronbach, L. J. (1957). The two disciplines of scientific psychology. American Psychologist, 12,

671-684.

Eskine, K. J., Kacinik, N. A., & Prinz, J. J. (2011). A Bad Taste in the Mouth: Gustatory Disgust

Influences Moral Judgments. Psychological Science, 22, 295-99.

Feldman, S. (2003) Values, ideology, and the structure of political attitudes. pp. 477-508. In

Sears, David O., Huddy, Leonie, & Jervis, R. (Eds). Oxford handbook of political

psychology. New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press.

Fleeson, W., & Noftle, E. (2008). The end of the person-situation debate: An emerging synthesis

in the answer to the consistency question. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2,

1667-1684.

Fumagalli, M., Ferrucci, R., Mameli, F., Marceglia, S., Mrakic-Sposta, S., Zago, S., Lucchiari,

C., et al. (2010). Gender-related differences in moral judgments. Cognitive Processes, 11,

219-226.


Gino, F., Ayal, S., & Ariely, D. (2009). Contagion and differentiation in unethical behavior: The

effect of one bad apple on the barrel. Psychological Science, 20(3), 393-398.

Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B.A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of

moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 1029-1046.

Graham, J., Nosek, B. A., Haidt, J., Iyer, R., Koleva, S., & Ditto, P. H. (2011). Mapping the

moral domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101, 366-385.

Graham, J., Sherman, G. D., Iyer, R., Hawkins, C. B., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2011). Political

ideology moderates nonpolitical moral decision-making processes. Manuscript submitted for

publication.

Haidt, J. (2007). The new synthesis in moral psychology. Science, 316, 998-1002.

Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral

intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20, 98-116.

Hartshorne, H. & May, M. (1928). Studies in the nature of character, vol. I: Studies in deceit.

New York: MacMillan.

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world?

Behavioral and Brain Sciences., 33, 61-135.

Hirsh, J. B., Galinsky, A. D., & Zhong, C. B. (2011). Drunk, powerful, and in the dark: how

general processes of disinhibition produce both prosocial and antisocial behavior.

Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 415-427.

Inbar, Y., Pizarro, D.A., & Bloom, P. (2009). Conservatives are more easily disgusted than

liberals. Cognition and Emotion, 23, 714-725.


Jost, J. T., Federico, C. M. & Napier, J. L. (2009). Political ideology: Its structure, functions, and

elective affinities. Annual Review of Psychology, 60, 307-333.

Levitt, S. D. and List, J. A. (2007). What do laboratory experiments measuring social preferences

reveal about the real world? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 21, 153-74.

Mehl, M. R. & Conner, T. S., eds. (2012). Handbook of Research Methods for Studying Daily

Life. New York: Guilford Press.

Mikhail, J. (2007). Universal moral grammar: Theory, evidence, and the future. Trends in

Cognitive Sciences, 11, 143-152.

Moore, A. B., Clark, B. A., & Kane, M. J. (2008). Who shalt not kill? Individual differences in

working memory capacity, executive control, and moral judgment. Psychological Science,

19, 549-557.

Schnall, S., Benton, J., & Harvey, S. (2008). With a clean conscience: Cleanliness reduces the

severity of moral judgments. Psychological Science, 19, 1219-1222.

Schnall, S., Haidt, J., Clore, G. L., & Jordan, A. H. (2008). Disgust as embodied moral judgment.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 1096-1109.

Schnall, S., Roper, J., & Fessler, D. M. T. (2010). Elevation leads to altruistic behavior.

Psychological Science, 21, 315-320.

Schwartz, S. H. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theory and empirical

tests in 20 countries (pp. 1–65). In M. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social

psychology. New York: Academic Press.

Skitka, L. J. (2010). The psychology of moral conviction. Social and Personality Psychology

Compass, 4, 267 - 281.


Tracy, J. L., Robins, R. W., & Sherman, J. W. (2009). The practice of psychological science:

Searching for Cronbach’s two streams in Social-Personality Psychology. Journal of

Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 1206-1225.

Valdesolo, P. & DeSteno, D. A. (2006). Manipulations of emotional context shape moral

decision making. Psychological Science, 17, 476-477.

Wheatley, T. & Haidt, J. (2005). Hypnotic disgust makes moral judgments more severe.

Psychological Science, 16, 780-784.

Zhong, C. B., Bohns, V. K., & Gino, F. (2010). A good lamp is the best police: darkness

increases dishonesty and self-interested behavior. Psychological Science, 21, 311-314.

current directions in psychological sciencejessegra/papers/gmb.2012.streams.cdps.pdf ·...

Documents