Moral Judgments Impact Perceived Risks From COVID-19 Exposure

The COVID-19 pandemic created enormously difficult decisions for individuals trying to navigate both the risks of the pandemic and the demands of everyday life. Good decision making in such scenarios can have life and death consequences. For this reason, it is important to understand what drives risk assessments during a pandemic, and to investigate the ways that these assessments might deviate from ideal risk assessments. In a preregistered online study of U.S. residents (N = 841) using two blocks of vignettes about potential COVID exposure scenarios, we investigated the effects of moral judgment, importance, and intentionality on COVID infection risk assessments. Results demonstrate that risk judgments are sensitive to factors unrelated to the objective risks of infection. Specifically, activities that are morally justified are perceived as safer while those that might subject people to blame or culpability, are seen as riskier, even when holding objective risk fixed. Similarly, unintentional COVID exposures are judged as safer than intentional COVID exposures. While the effect sizes are small, these findings may have implications for public health and risk communications, particularly if public health officials are themselves subject to these biases.

Understanding Stay-at-home Attitudes through Framing Analysis of Tweets

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of public policy measures have been developed to curb the spread of the virus. However, little is known about the attitudes towards stay-at-home orders expressed on social media despite the fact that social media are central platforms for expressing and debating personal attitudes. To address this gap, we analyze the prevalence and framing of attitudes towards stay-at-home policies, as expressed on Twitter in the early months of the pandemic. We focus on three aspects of tweets: whether they contain an attitude towards stay-at-home measures, whether the attitude was for or against, and the moral justification for the attitude, if any. We collect and annotate a dataset of stay-at-home tweets and create classifiers that enable large-scale analysis of the relationship between moral frames and stay-at-home attitudes and their temporal evolution. Our findings suggest that frames of care are correlated with a supportive stance, whereas freedom and oppression signify an attitude against stay-at-home directives. There was widespread support for stay-at-home orders in the early weeks of lockdowns, followed by increased resistance toward the end of May and the beginning of June 2020. The resistance was associated with moral judgment that mapped to political divisions. © 2022 IEEE.

Mental fatigue increases utilitarian moral judgments during COVID-19

This research investigated how mental fatigue is associated with moral judgments during the COVID-19 pandemic and studied the moderating effect of social support. We used self-report questionnaires to collect data from 4,042 people. We assessed peoples mental fatigue and social support during the pandemic, and designed nine moral dilemmas based on the background of COVID-19 to measure peoples moral judgments. The results showed that during the COVID-19 pandemic mental fatigue had a significant impact on moral judgments. Individuals with higher mental fatigue were more likely to make more utilitarian choices, while social support moderated the relationship between mental fatigue and moral judgments. When experiencing mental fatigue, individuals with low, compared to high, social support are more likely to rely on utilitarianism to make moral judgments.

El rol de los intelectuales en tiempos de pandemia: comprendiendo el activismo político de Noam Chomsky

Este artículo busca analizar el rol de algunos intelectuales durante los primeros meses de la pandemia de la covid-19, entendiendo en qué sentido su discurso se asume como un contrapeso a la hegemonía de los expertos en el tema de la salud. Tomamos como objeto de estudio varios enunciados ejemplares de Noam Chomsky, lingüista y activista político estadounidense, que se produjeron desde principios de marzo hasta mayo de 2020 en relación con la covid-19. Intentamos comprender los puntos principales que marcan el discurso de Chomsky relacionándolos con el ethos discursivo (Maingueneau, 2020) de un "compromiso intelectual" (Bourdieu, 2003). Queremos entender cómo se construye la trayectoria de la imagen pública de Chomsky como activista político, a partir de su definición como uno de los mayores intelectuales vivos del mundo, y cómo él y ciertos medios de comunicación utilizan ese tipo de credencial para erigirse en una figura poderosa, siempre demandada para hablar de cualquier tema de actualidad, incluso una pandemia. Nos sustentamos sobre la hipótesis de que, para Chomsky, la explicación de los hechos históricos se hace siempre con una visión holística, conectando la pandemia de la covid-19 con otros problemas mayores y otras amenazas para la humanidad. En otras palabras, Chomsky se asume a sí mismo como portavoz de la humanidad, preocupado por problemas mayores: una pandemia no puede ser subestimada, pero el calentamiento global y la crisis económica creada por la debacle del neoliberalismo, así como las posibilidades de guerra nuclear, son amenazas mucho mayores para la supervivencia de la especie humana y el mantenimiento del planeta.También aportamos una visión general de tres importantes intelectuales que igualmente actuaron y contribuyeron con sus reflexiones sobre la pandemia de la covid-19 durante sus meses iniciales: se trata de Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben y Byung-Chul Han. El propósito de traer estas distintas visiones es, en una primera instancia, comparar hasta qué punto pueden asemejarse al discurso chomskyano, pero sobre todo cómo se construye el discurso intelectual en tiempos de pandemia global frente a los discursos de los expertos o especialistas en salud que ocupan los espacios de autoridad discursivos en los medios de comunicación durante una crisis sanitaria.Alternate abstract:This article aims to analyze the role of intellectuals in times of a global pandemic, whereby their discourse is assumed as a counterbalance to the hegemony of experts. It takes as a case study several exemplar speeches by Noam Chomsky, linguist and political activist, which were produced since the beginning of March 2020 regarding Covid-l9.We w'll try to show that what marks Chomsky's discourse is related to the ethos (Maingueneau 2020) of an "intellectual engagement" (Bourdieu 2003).Within the universe of possibilities for choosing intellectuals' speeches, who are not necessarily convergent on topics affecting the world, and who, in general, don't talk about the same things, we chose to circumscribe our research on a specific intellectual: Noam Chomsky. In our view, he is an actual example of "intellectual action", representing properly "the relations between intellectuals and power" (Bobbio l997).Therefore, it is necessary to understand the statements of intellectuals like Chomsky in moments of global uncertainty, and as a discourse of a different nature that stands against the experts' power in major media corporations or in government technocracy. Thus, far from wanting to exhaust the possibilities of interpreting the role of the wider category of intellectuals during the pandemic, our proposal is to outline the main points of how an intellectual like Chomsky has been developing and taking the same political positions since the beginning of his activism, in the 1960s, which refers to a type of intellectual engagement similar to that taken since the Dreyfus Affair. In the Dreyfus Affair we have an "inaugural archetype" of the concept of an "engaged intellectual" (Bourdieu 2003, p. 73-74), from which the one who has social capital as an erudite, a scientist or a writer, comes out publicly criticizing the established powers and denounces crimes committed by "the reasons of State" (Chomsky 1973). Therefore, we understand that Chomsky comes from a lineage whose representatives are inserted into a form of intellectual activism;a lineage that became known as "the century of intellectuals" (Winock 2000), the intellectual conceived as the one who "tells the truth", as Chomsky (1996, p. 55) himself define the "intellectual's responsibility": "At one level, the answer is too easy: the intellectual responsibility of the writer, or any decent person, is to tell the truth." On the one hand, there is a patent argument of authority behind the experts, based on a "scientific discourse", but, on the other hand, there is a kind of "moral commitment to the truth" behind the intellectuals' discourse that becomes a "deeper criticism". That is, a holistic view to ponder, in the case of Covid-19, the humanitarian problems created due to the pandemic, but also to think about relating this crisis to previous and further geopolitical reasons, from a freer position, not committed to companies and States. This position of the intellectual engagement is idealized in opposition to the "normal science discourse": the genre of the scientific discourse is produced under official means;it is plastered, blunted, does not allow the spokespeople of science to speak beyond what their research allows. In other words, the scientific experts are inscribed in discursive structures of "scenes of enunciation" (Maingueneau, 2006) that don't permit them to surpass the barriers of "objectiveness" and enter the field of moral judgment. Seeking to understand how Chomsky acts as an engaged intellectual during the pandemic, we searched his political network and the media in which he is involved. From that, we chose our corpus of analysis, selected from Noam Chomsky's innumerous speeches to a left-wing or clearly progressive press during the first months of Covid-19 pandemic in the form of interviews from March to June: an interview to Michael Brooks (2020), at the Jacobin Magazine (Brooks, M. 2020);an interview with his longtime interviewer, David Barsamian (2020), an Armenian-American journalist and political activist, published on the website Literary Hub;an interview with the British socialist newspaper Morning Star (2020);two interviews he gave to Amy Goodman (2020a, 2020b) for the American journal Democracy Now;an interview with the Croatian philosopher Srecko Horvat (2020), from which we will use only the parts of the transcript that we found published by Al Jazeera and not the video;an interview to the writer Chris Brooks to the magazine Labor Notes, channel for the proletarian movement;an interview to Cristina Magdaleno (2020) for the Euroactiv, a non-profit organization for democracy in European Union, as well as an interview Chomsky and Robert Pollin gave to C. J. Polychroniou (2020).We believe that through this corpus it is possible to cover the vast majority of Chomsky's speeches on the Covid-19 pandemic, centered on media where Chomsky usually features and that name themselves as having a more progressive bias.We assume that what gives Chomsky's speech authority to talk about the pandemic, to be invited multiple times to do so, is not his expertise in the subject;it is not his background in epidemiology studies, which he lacks, neither his linguistics theories, that do not relate to the topic, but his image as a great surviving intellectual. It's to say, what authorizes Chomsky to speak and, therefore, to make his contribution to the studies of this pandemic situation, is not what interests the State, or what would lead the actions of government officials, as they are in general centered on the discourse of experts. Instead, it is his trajectory as a critic without corporate scruples, engaged in telling another kind of "truth", as one that can discuss and propose a different future for humanity. So, with this article we intended to p oduce a discussion about the following problem: the type of discourse raised by Chomsky is not that of government experts, men of science who must anchor themselves in statistical studies on disease proliferation curves, researchers who need to give prevention guidelines or economists who provide "get out of the crisis" scenarios. In other words, differently from a biologist, a disease proliferation specialist or a market administrator, Chomsky conceives the pandemic beyond Covid-19, as a long-term crisis, which will cover economic, social and environmental aspects of much greater proportions. In short, with this article we seek to understand how Chomsky assumes himself as a spokesman for all of humanity and how he constructs this position discursively. He is concerned with "bigger problems", not diminishing the dangers of the Covid-19 pandemic, but insisting on the fact that global warming and the economic crisis created by the debacle of neoliberalism, as well as nuclear war menaces, are much greater threats to human species survival and the maintenance of the planet. We also bring an overview of three important intellectuals who also acted and contributed their reflections on the Covid-19 pandemic during its inception. They are Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, and Byung-Chul Han. The purpose of incorporating these distinct views is, in the first instance, to compare to what extent they may resemble the Chomskyan discourse, but also to show how intellectual discourse is constructed in times of a global pandemic in the face of the discourses of health experts orspecialists who occupy the spaces of intellectual speech authority.

Critical Thinking in Times of Crisis : An Analysis of Zygmunt Bauman’s Theoretical Frame

We are living in times of crisis, at cultural, political, and moral levels. This state of crisis remains among our societies for at least three decades. In this article, we approach the concept of crisis from a review of some works of the Polish sociologist and philosopher, Zygmunt Bauman. As he insisted frequently, also before coining the metaphor of the “liquid modernity,” the changes in the state of things lead to an increasing sense of insecurity. His thesis is that such instability is not necessarily bad. It can be also an opportunity to build a better society. In order to accomplish this goal, it is necessary, first, to identify the root of the crisis, which Bauman finds in the lack of critical sense or ability to question oneself. Second, overcoming the crisis requires reflection upon the issues at stake. According to Bauman, the main issue is the lack of justice in the form of inequity, which needs to be balanced with individual and institutional forms of solidarity. These define the moral priorities to rethink the world we are living in. These principles locate the core of crisis in the moral issue of decision-making and of values, which is the essence of Bauman’s project.

An unsupervised framework for tracing textual sources of moral change

Morality plays an important role in social wellbeing, but people's moral perception is not stable and changes over time. Recent advances in natural language processing have shown that text is an effective medium for informing moral change, but no attempt has been made to quantify the origins of these changes. We present a novel unsupervised framework for tracing textual sources of moral change toward entities through time. We characterize moral change with probabilistic topical distributions and infer the source text that exerts prominent influence on the moral time course. We evaluate our framework on a diverse set of data ranging from social media to news articles. We show that our framework not only captures fine-grained human moral judgments, but also identifies coherent source topics of moral change triggered by historical events. We apply our methodology to analyze the news in the COVID-19 pandemic and demonstrate its utility in identifying sources of moral change in high-impact and real-time social events. © 2021 Association for Computational Linguistics.

Differences in moral judgment predict behavior in a Covid triage game scenario.

Moral beliefs influence decisions across many contexts, but researchers typically test how these beliefs translate into moral judgments in hypothetical dilemmas. While this is important, in this study (N = 248), we sought to extend these findings by exploring whether moral judgment (specifically utilitarian or deontological processing) predicted behavior in a commons dilemma game against other players (programmed bots) across multiple rounds in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Importantly, participants had to weigh short-term needs against long-term dangers of exhausting the community pool (i.e., a tragedy of the commons). As hypothesized, increased utilitarian processing predicted reduced resource extraction from the community pool. In addition to showing that differences in moral judgment predict behavior in a game situation that simulates a somewhat ecologically valid dilemma, these results also replicate previous research connecting morality to opinions about Covid-19 vaccine requirements.

How power affects moral judgments: The role of intuitive thinking

Power affects how people think about moral issues, and has been found to elicit deontological moral judgments. We hypothesized that powerholders' propensity to rely on intuitive thinking would trigger deontological moral choices. In two studies, power was induced by role simulation tasks and participants then made a judgment on a moral dilemma that did not involve bodily harm. In Study 1 memory cognitive load was manipulated to induce an intuitive processing style, and in Study 2 deliberation was induced by asking participants to deliver strong arguments. Results of Study 1 show that high power led to deontological judgments regardless of cognitive load, and cognitive load enhanced deontological preferences among powerless individuals. In Study 2 we found that deliberation shifted the judgments of powerholders toward utilitarianism. These results extend prior findings and reinforce the links between power and deontology. The findings suggest that powerholders' preference for deontological moral judgments is driven by their reliance on intuitive thinking.

Individual differences in moral judgment predict attitudes towards mandatory vaccinations.

Skepticism about the efficacy and risks related to Covid-19 vaccinations has become a politicized issue. In response, some politicians have proposed policies (such as imposing vaccine passports) aimed at increasing public vaccination rates. The response has been mixed. In the current study (N = 266), we examined the role of conservatism and moral judgments in accounting for these differences. Results from data collected between January and March 2021 showed that increased levels of conservatism and deontological processing (i.e., having a stronger D-process) were associated with less agreement to a government-imposed Covid-19 vaccine mandate. However, participants who made utilitarian responses to traditional switch and footbridge dilemmas reported greater agreement towards the same mandate. These results are consistent with prior findings showing political divides surrounding Covid-19 and indicate that individual differences in moral judgment predict opinion about a significant and current real-world issue.

Trolleys, triage and Covid-19: the role of psychological realism in sacrificial dilemmas.

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, frontline medical professionals at intensive care units around the world faced gruesome decisions about how to ration life-saving medical resources. These events provided a unique lens through which to understand how the public reasons about real-world dilemmas involving trade-offs between human lives. In three studies (total N = 2298), we examined people's moral attitudes toward the triage of acute coronavirus patients, and found elevated support for utilitarian triage policies. These utilitarian tendencies did not stem from period change in moral attitudes relative to pre-pandemic levels-but rather, from the heightened realism of triage dilemmas. Participants favoured utilitarian resolutions of critical care dilemmas when compared to structurally analogous, non-medical dilemmas-and such support was rooted in prosocial dispositions, including empathy and impartial beneficence. Finally, despite abundant evidence of political polarisation surrounding Covid-19, moral views about critical care triage differed modestly, if at all, between liberals and conservatives. Taken together, our findings highlight people's robust support for utilitarian measures in the face of a global public health threat, and illustrate how the dominant methods in moral psychology (e.g. trolley cases) may deliver insights that do not generalise to real-world moral dilemmas.

Disease and Disapproval: COVID-19 Concern is Related to Greater Moral Condemnation.

Prior research has indicated that disease threat and disgust are associated with harsher moral condemnation. We investigated the role of a specific, highly salient health concern, namely the spread of the coronavirus, and associated COVID-19 disease, on moral disapproval. We hypothesized that individuals who report greater subjective worry about COVID-19 would be more sensitive to moral transgressions. Across three studies (N = 913), conducted March-May 2020 as the pandemic started to unfold in the United States, we found that individuals who were worried about contracting the infectious disease made harsher moral judgments than those who were relatively less worried. This effect was not restricted to transgressions involving purity, but extended to transgressions involving harm, fairness, authority, and loyalty, and remained when controlling for political orientation. Furthermore, for Studies 1 and 2 the effect also was robust when taking into account the contamination subscale of the Disgust Scale-Revised. These findings add to the growing literature that concrete threats to health can play a role in abstract moral considerations, supporting the notion that judgments of wrongdoing are not based on rational thought alone.