Topic
Moral psychology research, explained
26 open-access moral psychology studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- Are 'logical' moral choices driven by coldness or calculation?
People who make counterintuitive utilitarian moral choices often do so because of a reduced emotional aversion to harming others, rather than increased logical deliberation.
- What turns moral thinking into helping others?
Students with more mature moral reasoning pledged more time to help, partly because they felt more morally uplifted, and this uplift mattered most for those who saw morality as central to who they are.
- How fast does the brain combine intentions and outcomes in moral judgment?
People weigh intentions heavily when judging harm, and brain responses separate successful from attempted acts in stages within the first second.
- Do brain explanations of addiction make people seem less free?
Showing people a neuroscience explanation or brain image of addiction barely changed how much free will they attributed to people with addiction; their education and neuroscience knowledge mattered more.
- Do disgusted faces change how we judge moral dilemmas?
Briefly seeing disgusted faces changed how acceptable people found sacrificing one person to save others, but whether it made them more or less accepting depended on how easily disgusted they were.
- Does a serotonin gene variant shape moral attitudes and choices?
People carrying two short copies of a serotonin transporter gene variant showed weaker implicit moral attitudes and were less willing to accept harming someone even when that harm was unavoidable.
- Why do students cheat even when they know it's wrong?
Students are less likely to cheat when they view it as a moral issue, but this relationship depends on whether they take personal responsibility and avoid making excuses for their behavior.
- Do trolley-problem judgments hold up in familiar or real situations?
Whether people think a bystander or an involved person should sacrifice one to save several flipped depending on whether the dilemma was about a runaway train, a hypothetical game show, or a real game show played in the lab.
- Do people who struggle to manage emotions judge moral dilemmas differently?
Students who reported more trouble regulating emotions were less willing to endorse harming one person to save many, and this was explained by stronger rule-based (deontological) inclinations rather than weaker cost-benefit reasoning.
- How do perspective and gender affect 'what if' thinking in morals?
When resolving tough personal moral dilemmas from a first-person perspective, people take longer to think of alternatives and often invent unrealistic details to avoid making painful choices, a tendency that is especially strong in women.
- Do liberals and conservatives apply morals to different groups?
Liberals cared more than conservatives about harm and fairness when the questions were about outgroups such as immigrants, while conservatives cared more about loyalty, authority and purity when the questions were about their own group, and these differences helped explain attitudes toward immigrants.
- Can training children to hold back their gut reaction change moral judgment?
Young children judged accidental harm more like adults only after a short training that told them to hold back their automatic reaction to the victim's suffering, not after training that simply told them to focus on intentions.
- Do we tailor our moral choices to the impression we want to make?
Students preparing to interview for a caring job gave more rule-based moral answers, while those preparing for a management job gave more outcome-based answers, apparently to match what they thought the recruiter wanted.
- Does physical coldness make us more utilitarian?
Feeling physically cold makes people more likely to accept sacrificing a single individual to save many, driven by a reduction in empathy rather than increased logical thinking.
- How do we judge colleagues' morals and choose to work with them?
When deciding whether to cooperate with a coworker, people judge the moral acceptability of the coworker's actions first, which then directly guides their willingness to work together.
- Does sitting face-to-face change how we answer trolley problems?
Students seated facing each other gave more harm-avoiding answers to moral dilemmas than students seated in rows, and men's answers shifted with seating more than women's did.
- Does breaking a rule make you 'the cause' even if the rule is irrelevant?
People overwhelmingly blamed the person who broke an unrelated rule as the sole cause of an outcome, and when an outcome was bad and unforeseeable they became more likely to say nobody caused it.
- Problems Measuring Utilitarian and Deontological Moral Thinking
A popular method for measuring individual differences in moral decision-making relies on mathematically flawed formulas and produces highly unreliable scores.
- Does a robot's creepiness change how we judge its moral choices?
When creepy-looking robots made the choice to sacrifice one person to save many, people judged that choice as less moral than when a human or a friendly-looking robot made it, but the pattern reversed for choices not to act.
- Does believing morality can change make people act less morally?
People led to believe that moral character is changeable cheated more and discriminated more than people led to believe it is fixed or given no belief at all.
- Does feeling cold make people's moral choices more utilitarian?
Across four experiments, cooler temperatures did not reliably change how acceptable people found sacrificing one person to save many.
- Is utilitarian morality just reasoning from facts to 'shoulds'?
When people were given reasons to doubt that an action would bring about a good outcome, they judged the outcome-based (utilitarian) choice less morally right, but their judgments of the rule-based (deontological) choice barely changed.
- How Intent Focus and Free Will Beliefs Affect Moral Judgment
People judge a person's moral responsibility differently depending on whether they focus on the immediate physical action or the ultimate goal, a choice influenced by psychological distance and free will beliefs.
- Do we feel more for the pain of the beautiful or the good?
People judged the pain of morally good characters as greater and felt more uncomfortable watching it, whatever their looks, while good looks gave only a tiny boost, mainly for characters described as immoral.
- Do people outside the West also judge acts wrong without reasons?
In Chinese, Indian and mainly Middle Eastern samples, a sizeable minority of people kept saying an act was wrong while admitting they could not say why, so moral dumbfounding is not just a Western quirk.
- Do story details change our moral choices?
Providing background stories for moral dilemmas makes people more likely to choose utilitarian actions, but does not alter their abstract moral judgments.