The motivated use of moral principles

By E. Uhlmann, David A Pizarro, David Tannenbaum, Peter H. Ditto. Judgment and Decision Making, 2009

248 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Five studies demonstrated that people selectively use general moral principles to rationalize preferred moral conclusions. In Studies 1a and 1b, college students and community respondents were presented with variations on a traditional moral scenario that asked whether it was permissible to sacrifice one innocent man in order to save a greater number of people. Political liberals, but not relatively more conservative participants, were more likely to endorse consequentialism when the victim had a stereotypically White American name than when the victim had a stereotypically Black American name. Study 2 found evidence suggesting participants believe that the moral principles they are endorsing are general in nature: when presented sequentially with both versions of the scenario, liberals again showed a bias in their judgments to the initial scenario, but demonstrated consistency thereafter. Study 3 found conservatives were more likely to endorse the unintended killing of innocent civilians when Iraqis civilians were killed than when Americans civilians were killed, while liberals showed no significant effect. In Study 4, participants primed with patriotism were more likely to endorse consequentialism when Iraqi civilians were killed by American forces than were participants primed with multiculturalism. However, this was not the case when American civilians were killed by Iraqi forces. Implications for the role of reason in moral judgment are discussed.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a283a82c59fc9181e3fcf5a96f78cd5ebdb8a813

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Citations in the corpus

No Compromise: Political Consequences of Moralized Attitudes (2017, unknown): “…assumed to be precursors of 3Abundant work in psychology finds people to be adept at rationalizing their intuitions on the fly (e.g. Nisbett and Wilson 1977; Uhlmann et al. 2009). a moral disposition, such as endorsement of certain values (e.g. egalitarianism, individualism) or religious devotion.”
The dynamics of behavior change: Evidence from energy conservation (2016, result): “This is consistent with behavioral economic models of decision-making and morally motivated consumption behavior in markets (Fehr and Schmidt, 2006; Uhlmann et al., 2009).”
Moral psychology is relationship regulation: moral motives for unity, hierarchy, equality, and proportionality. (2011, unknown): “…their judgments in terms of the moral motives or endorse these judgments upon conscious reflection, as they might for explicitly held, ideologically articulated moral principles (Cushman, Young, & Hauser, 2006; Uhlmann, Pizarro, Tannenbaum, & Ditto, 2009; see Levy, 1973, on hypo/ hypercognition).”
Approach, Ability, Aftermath: A Psychological Process Framework of Unethical Behavior at Work (2015, background): “That is, we may apply different frames as a function of how our context encourages us to do so, or by our own motivated reasoning processes, through which we will impose frames on situations that facilitate the choices we want to make (Ditto et al., 2009; Uhlmann et al., 2009).”