High economic inequality is linked to greater moralization.

Throughout the 21st century, economic inequality is predicted to increase as we face new challenges, from changes in the technological landscape to the growing climate crisis. It is crucial we understand how these changes in inequality may affect how people think and behave. We propose that economic inequality threatens the social fabric of society, in turn increasing moralization-that is, the greater tendency to employ or emphasize morality in everyday life-as an attempt to restore order and control. Using longitudinal data from X, formerly known as Twitter, our first study demonstrates that high economic inequality is associated with greater use of moral language online (e.g. the use of words such as "disgust", "hurt", and "respect'). Study 2 then examined data from 41 regions around the world, generally showing that higher inequality has a small association with harsher moral judgments of people's everyday actions. Together these findings demonstrate that economic inequality is linked to the tendency to see the world through a moral lens.

When You Think of and Identify Yourself as a Nurse, You Will Become More Deontological and Less Utilitarian.

This study aims to examine how the activation of the role of nursee and professional identification as a nurse can influence moral judgments in terms of deontological and utilitarian inclinations. In Study 1, a priming technique was used to assess the impact of activating the nursing concept on moral reasoning. Participants were randomly assigned to either a nursing prime or neutral prime condition. By using a scrambled-sentence task, participants were prompted to think about nursing-related or neutral thoughts. Following the priming task, participants were asked to respond to 20 moral dilemmas. The process dissociation approach was employed to measure the degree of deontological and utilitarian tendencies in their moral reasoning. In Study 2, participants completed the nursing profession identification scale and the moral orientation scale before engaging in moral judgments similar to those in Study 1. The findings revealed that priming the concept of being a nursee resulted in an increase in deontological clinical inclinations while having no significant effect on utilitarian inclinations. Additionally, a positive correlation was observed between identification with the nursing profession and deontological clinical inclinations, whereas a negative correlation was found with utilitarian inclinations. Deliberation orientation acted as a complete mediator in the relationship between nursing professional identification and deontological tendencies and as a partial mediator for utilitarian tendencies.

Effects of Sadness and Fear on Moral Judgments in Public Emergency Events.

With the rapid development of society and the deteriorating natural environment, there has been an increase in public emergencies. This study aimed to explore how sadness and fear in the context of public emergencies influence moral judgments. This research first induced feelings of sadness and fear by using videos about public emergencies and music, and then used moral scenarios from the CNI model (C parameter: sensitivity to consequences; N parameter: sensitivity to norms; I parameter: general preference for inaction) to assess participants' moral thinking. In Study 1, participants were divided into a sadness group and a neutral group, while in Study 2, participants were divided into a fear group and a neutral group. During the experiment, participants were exposed to different videos related to public emergencies to induce the corresponding emotions, and emotional music was continuously played throughout the entire experiment. Participants were then asked to answer questions requiring moral judgments. The results showed that based on the CNI model, sadness induced in the context of public emergencies significantly increased the C parameter, without affecting the N or I parameters. Fear increased the I parameter, without affecting the C or I parameters. That is, sadness and fear induced in the context of a public emergency can influence moral judgments. Specifically, sadness increases individuals' sensitivity to consequences and fear increases the general preference for inaction in moral judgments.

Social context during moral decision-making impacts males more than females.

Moral judgments are often viewed as the outcome of affective and deliberative processes that could be impacted by social factors and individual characteristics. The purpose of this study was to examine the interaction between gender and social context on moral judgment. Participants included 315 undergraduate students (67.3% female). The participants completed the Moral Decision-Making Task while seated at row tables facing the front of the room or round tables facing other participants. The results indicated that males responded in a more utilitarian manner (harm one to save five) than females for moral impersonal (MI) and moral personal (MP) dilemmas regardless of seating arrangements. When seated at round tables, all participants were more likely to respond deontologically (cause no harm) to the moral impersonal dilemmas. In addition, we calculated a moral reasoning difference score for each participant as the difference between the MI and MP scores to represent additional reactivity due to the idea of taking direct action. The moral reasoning difference score was consistent for females but indicated a more deontological response from males at round tables and a more utilitarian response from males at row tables. These results suggest that males are more utilitarian than females and are more likely to be influenced by social context when responding to moral dilemmas. More broadly, the current results indicate that moral judgments are affected by social context particularly in males in ways that have not been incorporated in many models of moral decision making.

Target Happiness Attenuates Perceivers' Moral Condemnation of Prejudiced People.

Five experiments (combined N = 4,915) tested the prediction that the moral boost of happiness would persist for social targets with moral failings. In Studies 1 and 2, White and Black participants, respectively, judged happy (versus unhappy) racist targets more morally good. In Study 3, happy (versus unhappy) racist targets were judged more morally good and less (more) likely to engage in racist (good) behavior. Behavioral expectations explained the link between happiness and moral evaluations. Study 4 replicated Studies 1 to 3 in the context of sexism. In Study 5, happy (versus unhappy) targets who engaged in racially biased behavior were evaluated as more morally good, and this effect was explained by behavioral forecasts. Happiness boosts attributions of moral goodness for prejudiced people and does so via expectations for future behavior. Future directions are discussed.

Does it matter who harmed whom? A cross-cultural study of moral judgments about harm by and to insiders and outsiders.

This cross-cultural study compared judgments of moral wrongness for physical and emotional harm with varying combinations of in-group vs. out-group agents and victims across six countries: the United States of America (N = 937), the United Kingdom (N = 995), Romania (N = 782), Brazil (N = 856), South Korea (N = 1776), and China (N = 1008). Consistent with our hypothesis we found evidence of an insider agent effect, where moral violations committed by outsider agents are generally considered more morally wrong than the same violations done by insider agents. We also found support for an insider victim effect where moral violations that were committed against an insider victim generally were seen as more morally wrong than when the same violations were committed against an outsider, and this effect held across all countries. These findings provide evidence that the insider versus outsider status of agents and victims does affect moral judgments. However, the interactions of these identities with collectivism, psychological closeness, and type of harm (emotional or physical) are more complex than what is suggested by previous literature. Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-023-04986-3.

Blindness of intentions and metacognitive deficits during moral judgements in schizophrenia.

BACKGROUND: Previous research has shown that moral judgments are affected by social cognitive abilities, such as theory of mind (ToM). This study examines how information about an actor's beliefs and the consequences of their actions affect the moral evaluation of the character's behavior in social events. Our research builds upon previous studies, which have shown that these factors contribute differently to moral judgments made by both adults and young children. OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to explore how participants with schizophrenia and healthy controls read stories about social situations in the context of moral judgments. MATERIAL AND METHODS: The study used the research procedure that included 4 variants of 16 scenarios describing social situations, and thus comprising 64 stories. After each story, participants evaluated their confidence level on a 4-point scale. To assess delusional beliefs, the Polish adaptation of the Peters Delusion Inventory (PDI) questionnaire and the Paranoia Checklist (PCh) were used. Respondents completed these questionnaires after completing the scenario test procedure. RESULTS: In social situations, patients with paranoid schizophrenia were found to evaluate actions of protagonists who attempted to harm another person more leniently than when it was an accident. Conversely, healthy individuals judged those actors who expressed intentions to hurt another person significantly more harshly than in an accident situation. Metacognition measures show that paranoid schizophrenia patients make moral judgments with high confidence, despite being based on an incorrect reading of the other person's intentions. CONCLUSIONS: The study indicates that ToM has a significant impact on the moral judgment of others. Decreased moral cognition can result from both positive and negative symptoms. Deficits related to metacognition can also sustain such cognitive distortions.

The deflationary model of harm and moral wrongdoing: A rejoinder to Royzman & Borislow.

With a series of studies, Royzman and Borislow (2022) purport to show that extant models about the conditions under which harmful actions are deemed morally wrong do not have explanatory power-for any proposed condition, various harmful actions meet the condition but are not deemed immoral. And they reach the following conclusion: judgments of moral wrongdoing in the context of harmful actions (or judgments of moral wrongdoing more generally) are not reducible to an explanatory template. However, they did not address the main claim of the deflationary model of harm and moral wrongdoing, which is that intuitions of injustice connect harmful actions to judgments of moral wrongdoing (Sousa & Piazza, 2014). Our first study adjusts Royzman and Borislow' design to include a measure of perceived injustice, while our second elaborates their design to manipulate perceived injustice. The results undermine their conclusion and support the deflationary model, which we further refine here in light of the results of Royzman and Borislow's studies and ours.

Evaluative Deflation, Social Expectations, and the Zone of Moral Indifference.

Acts that are considered undesirable standardly violate our expectations. In contrast, acts that count as morally desirable can either meet our expectations or exceed them. The zone in which an act can be morally desirable yet not exceed our expectations is what we call the zone of moral indifference, and it has so far been neglected. In this paper, we show that people can use positive terms in a deflated manner to refer to actions in the zone of moral indifference, whereas negative terms cannot be so interpreted.

Do Companies Think and Feel? Mind Perception of Organizations.

How do people perceive the minds of organizations? Existing work on organizational mind perception highlights two key debates: whether organizational groups are ascribed more agency than experience, and whether people are really perceiving minds in organizational groups at all. Our current paper and its data weigh in on these debates and suggest that organizations can indeed be ascribed experiential minds. We present a "member and goals" framework for systematically understanding the mind perception of organization. This framework suggests that people can perceive the organizational mind through its elemental building blocks: members (people who form the organization) and goals (its aims). Four studies reveal that people ascribe agency and experience to organizations based on whether the members of organizations and the goals of the organization are characterized by agency or experience. Study 1 finds that past work on mind perception often examines for-profit corporations, which consist of agentic members (corporate professionals) and agentic goals (market competition). Studies 2 and 3 reveal that when an organization with members and goals high (vs. low) in experience, people imbue its mind with perceived experience-equal to that of a person-and that even emotions low in warmth (i.e., anger) can imbue an organization with such perceptions. Study 4 shows the moral consequences of emphasizing experience: after organizational wrongdoing, experiential organizations are seen to deliver more sincere apologies and are more forgiven.

Do Moral Judgments in Moral Dilemmas Make One More Inclined to Choose a Medical Degree?

The role of moral intuitions and moral judgments has become increasingly prominent in educational and academic choices. The present research aims to examine if the moral judgments elicited in sacrificial trolley dilemmas have a distinct pattern for the decisions made by junior medical students, in comparison to those of senior high school students. We work with this sample because it represents the population out of which medical students are recruited in the case of Bucharest, Romania. Our findings show that moral judgments are indeed a significant predictor for a respondent's status as medical students. This result, albeit with limitations, bears multiple practical implications, from developing empirically informed medical ethics courses in medical schools to evidence-based policy designs which consider factors such as morality alongside financial outcomes and incentives.

Ethics 4.0: Ethical Dilemmas in Healthcare Mediated by Social Robots.

This study examined people's moral judgments and trait perception toward a healthcare agent's response to a patient who refuses to take medication. A sample of 524 participants was randomly assigned to one of eight vignettes in which the type of healthcare agent (human vs. robot), the use of a health message framing (emphasizing health-losses for not taking vs. health-gains in taking the medication), and the ethical decision (respect the autonomy vs. beneficence/nonmaleficence) were manipulated to investigate their effects on moral judgments (acceptance and responsibility) and traits perception (warmth, competence, trustworthiness). The results indicated that moral acceptance was higher when the agents respected the patient's autonomy than when the agents prioritized beneficence/nonmaleficence. Moral responsibility and perceived warmth were higher for the human agent than for the robot, and the agent who respected the patient's autonomy was perceived as warmer, but less competent and trustworthy than the agent who decided for the patient's beneficence/nonmaleficence. Agents who prioritized beneficence/nonmaleficence and framed the health gains were also perceived as more trustworthy. Our findings contribute to the understanding of moral judgments in the healthcare domain mediated by both healthcare humans and artificial agents.

Power triggers moral reasoning aligned with active goals and moral flexibility across contexts.

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that power elicits moral judgments in line with active goals, and moral flexibility across different contexts. Power and goals emanating from the mission associated with power were experimentally manipulated: person-centered mission, which benefits from outcome-focus, or regulation-centered mission, which benefits from rule-based focus. Power consistently elicited rule-based (deontological) moral reasoning under regulation-centered goals. However, power triggered outcome-based (utilitarian) moral reasoning under person-centered goals. Power enhanced goal serving morality due to greater goal commitment, with focal goal commitment mediating the interactive effects of power and focal goal on moral judgments. These findings show that the links between power and morality are context sensitive, flexible, and mediated by a greater commitment to active goals.

Adolescents' Expectations for Types of Victim Retaliation Following Direct Bullying.

Little is known about adolescents' expectations around how victims of bullying might retaliate following victimization. These expectations are important as they may inform adolescent's own behaviors, particularly intervention behaviors, in regard to bullying and potential retaliation. This study investigated adolescents' retaliation expectations and expected bystander reactions to retaliation following physical and social bullying. Participants included 6th grade (N = 450, Mage = 11.73 years, SD = 0.84) and 9th grade (N = 446, Mage = 14.82 years) adolescents (50.2% female, 63.3% European American, 22.9% African American, 3.9% Latino/a, 7% Multiracial, 2.9% Other) from middle-to-low-income U.S. public schools. Participants responded to open-ended prompts about victim responses to bullying, rating retaliation acceptability, and likelihood of engaging in bystander behaviors. ANOVAs were conducted to examine differences in retaliation expectation by type of aggression. Further, linear regressions were used to explore what factors were related to participants' expectations regarding bystander intervention. Participants expected victims to retaliate by causing harm and expected the type of retaliation to match the type of bullying. Younger participants were more specific and males were more likely to expect physical harm than females. Finally, acceptability of retaliation predicted bystander interventions. Adolescents expect aggressive retaliation suggesting that intervention might focus on teaching them ways to respond when they are bullied or observe bullying.

The Effect of Mindfulness Training on the Self-Regulation of Socio-Moral Thoughts.

The change in moral attitude due to discrimination of the degree of reality of thought is an unexplored potential effect of mindfulness training. In this article we examine whether the mindfulness training of novices reduces the defensive reaction to normative transgressions when the threatening thought is salient, that is, a thought that stands out regardless of the objective reality that threatens self-survival. To test the study hypotheses, we used a bifactorial design mindfulness training (pre vs. post) x threatened thought salience (low vs high) in a sample of 115 participants. The dependent variable (punishment of social norm transgression) was measured on two different occasions: (1) pre-training (T1), (2) after training (T2). One group receives training in mindfulness in the threatened thought salience low condition (N = 47), and a second group receives the same training in the threatened thought salience high condition (N = 38). A third group did not receive training in threatening thought salience high condition (N = 30). The results show that training mindfulness reduces moral punishment with high threatening thought salience and reduces moral judgment with low threatening thought salience. The shift in reactivity (punishment) is more representative of a MT effect than the shift in moral judgment (seriousness). Implications of the results and limitations of the study are also explored.

Humans first: Why people value animals less than humans.

People routinely give humans moral priority over other animals. Is such moral anthropocentrism based in perceived differences in mental capacity between humans and non-humans or merely because humans favor other members of their own species? We investigated this question in six studies (N = 2217). We found that most participants prioritized humans over animals even when the animals were described as having equal or more advanced mental capacities than the humans. This applied to both mental capacity at the level of specific individuals (Studies 1a-b) and at the level typical for the respective species (Study 2). The key driver behind moral anthropocentrism was thus mere species-membership (speciesism). However, all else equal, participants still gave more moral weight to individuals with higher mental capacities (individual mental capacity principle), suggesting that the belief that humans have higher mental capacities than animals is part of the reason that they give humans moral priority. Notably, participants found mental capacity more important for animals than for humans-a tendency which can itself be regarded as speciesist. We also explored possible sub-factors driving speciesism. We found that many participants judged that all individuals (not only humans) should prioritize members of their own species over members of other species (species-relativism; Studies 3a-b). However, some participants also exhibited a tendency to see humans as having superior value in an absolute sense (pro-human species-absolutism, Studies 3-4). Overall, our work demonstrates that speciesism plays a central role in explaining moral anthropocentrism and may be itself divided into multiple sub-factors.

Artificial Intelligence and Declined Guilt: Retailing Morality Comparison Between Human and AI.

Several technological developments, such as self-service technologies and artificial intelligence (AI), are disrupting the retailing industry by changing consumption and purchase habits and the overall retail experience. Although AI represents extraordinary opportunities for businesses, companies must avoid the dangers and risks associated with the adoption of such systems. Integrating perspectives from emerging research on AI, morality of machines, and norm activation, we examine how individuals morally behave toward AI agents and self-service machines. Across three studies, we demonstrate that consumers' moral concerns and behaviors differ when interacting with technologies versus humans. We show that moral intention (intention to report an error) is less likely to emerge for AI checkout and self-checkout machines compared with human checkout. In addition, moral intention decreases as people consider the machine less humanlike. We further document that the decline in morality is caused by less guilt displayed toward new technologies. The non-human nature of the interaction evokes a decreased feeling of guilt and ultimately reduces moral behavior. These findings offer insights into how technological developments influence consumer behaviors and provide guidance for businesses and retailers in understanding moral intentions related to the different types of interactions in a shopping environment.

Socioeconomic status predicts children's moral judgments of novel resource distributions.

Children's moral judgments of resource distributions as having "fair" or "unfair" origins play an important role in early social cognition. What factors shape these judgments? The present study advances research on this question in two primary ways: First, while prior work has typically assigned children to an advantaged or disadvantaged position in an experimental setting, here we also investigated how relative objective and Subjective Socioeconomic Status (OSS and SSS) predicted children's judgments. Second, while prior work has asked children to judge distributions with known origins, here we presented children with novel and causally ambiguous distributions, thereby simulating children's initial encounter of resource distributions in the social world. We assessed participants' (n = 113, 6- to 9-year-olds) OSS and SSS and then introduced them to a machine that distributed Skittles on an unknown basis. Participants received half as many, twice as many, or the same number of Skittles as a peer in three between-subjects conditions, and then rated the machine's fairness. Results revealed that children who rated their families as wealthier relative to their neighborhoods (higher SSS) rated the machine as more fair. However, children from families that were actually wealthier relative to their neighborhoods (higher OSS) were more likely to rate the disadvantage-giving machine as unfair. Together, results represent the first evidence that OSS and SSS shape children's moral judgments of resource distributions, consistent with evidence that these two forms of socioeconomic status have unique impacts on adults' judgments of inequality. Implications for moral and social development are discussed.

Many heads are more utilitarian than one.

Moral judgments have a very prominent social nature, and in everyday life, they are continually shaped by discussions with others. Psychological investigations of these judgments, however, have rarely addressed the impact of social interactions. To examine the role of social interaction on moral judgments within small groups, we had groups of 4 to 5 participants judge moral dilemmas first individually and privately, then collectively and interactively, and finally individually a second time. We employed both real-life and sacrificial moral dilemmas in which the character's action or inaction violated a moral principle to benefit the greatest number of people. Participants decided if these utilitarian decisions were morally acceptable or not. In Experiment 1, we found that collective judgments in face-to-face interactions were more utilitarian than the statistical aggregate of their members compared to both first and second individual judgments. This observation supported the hypothesis that deliberation and consensus within a group transiently reduce the emotional burden of norm violation. In Experiment 2, we tested this hypothesis more directly: measuring participants' state anxiety in addition to their moral judgments before, during, and after online interactions, we found again that collectives were more utilitarian than those of individuals and that state anxiety level was reduced during and after social interaction. The utilitarian boost in collective moral judgments is probably due to the reduction of stress in the social setting.

Moral Judgment as Categorization (MJAC).

Observed variability and complexity of judgments of "right" and "wrong" cannot be readily accounted for within extant approaches to understanding moral judgment. In response to this challenge, we present a novel perspective on categorization in moral judgment. Moral judgment as categorization (MJAC) incorporates principles of category formation research while addressing key challenges of existing approaches to moral judgment. People develop skills in making context-relevant categorizations. They learn that various objects (events, behaviors, people, etc.) can be categorized as morally right or wrong. Repetition and rehearsal result in reliable, habitualized categorizations. According to this skill-formation account of moral categorization, the learning and the habitualization of the forming of moral categories occur within goal-directed activity that is sensitive to various contextual influences. By allowing for the complexity of moral judgments, MJAC offers greater explanatory power than existing approaches while also providing opportunities for a diverse range of new research questions.