Morality

By Jonathan Haidt. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2008

1,177 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Moral psychology is a rapidly growing field with two principle lineages. The main line began with Jean Piaget and includes developmental psychologists who have studied the acquisition of moral concepts and reasoning. The alternative line began in the 1990s with a new synthesis of evolutionary, neurological, and social-psychological research in which the central phenomena are moral emotions and intuitions. In this essay, I show how both of these lines have been shaped by an older debate between two 19th century narratives about modernity: one celebrating the liberation of individuals, the other mourning the loss of community and moral authority. I suggest that both lines of moral psychology have limited themselves to the moral domain prescribed by the liberation narrative, and so one future step for moral psychology should be to study alternative moral perspectives, particularly religious and politically conservative ones in which morality is, in part, about protecting groups, institutions, and souls.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b04d6007d5e2f42b64bade9f7d0f0cd15f53bcef

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Citations in the corpus

Regional variation in pathogen prevalence predicts endorsement of group-focused moral concerns (2012, background): “According to Moral Foundations Theory (Haidt & Graham, 2007; Haidt & Joseph, 2007), these five concerns correspond to distinct psychological systems— rooted in evolved psychological mechanisms—that individuals and societies employ to suppress selfishness (Haidt & Kesebir, 2010).”
Beyond Beliefs: Religions Bind Individuals Into Moral Communities (2010, positive): “Haidt (2008) recently offered a definition of moral systems as “interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible” (p. 70).”
Morality and behavioural regulation in groups: A social identity approach (2013, background): “The notion that shared moral values may function to define a distinct social identity thus fundamentally differs from approaches that consider morality as a generic guideline that helps to suppress selfish or aggressive behaviour (Haidt, 2008).”
Consumer response to corporate irresponsible behavior: Moral emotions and virtues (2013, positive): “To more directly address the motivation for acting in negative ways to corporate irresponsibility, the current study drew upon basic research in moral psychology (Haidt and Kesebir, 2010; Tangney et al., 2007).”
Developing Moral Agency through Narrative (2010, methodology): “Further, Haidt has proposed [e.g., Haidt, 2008] that this process is most likely to unfold in social settings, via dialogue with others.”
Seeing green: Mere exposure to money triggers a business decision frame and unethical outcomes (2013, background): “That is, as social animals our notion of morality involves standards of conduct within the embedded social context which function to coordinate and facilitate survival (de Waal, 2006; Haidt, 2008).”
Who's with Me? False Consensus, Brokerage, and Ethical Decision Making in Organizations (2010, background): “Theories of moral reasoning emphasize the notion of consensus (Haidt, 2008), which Kohlberg (1969) described as the conventional approach to ethical decision making.”
Guilt Proneness and Moral Character (2012, background): “The majority of research on morality and ethics has focused on people’s judgments and reasoning in difficult hypothetical dilemmas (see Haidt & Kesebir, 2010, for a review).”
TEACHING MORAL CHARACTER: TWO ALTERNATIVES FOR TEACHER EDUCATION (2008, background): “The second and third steps, discussed together, are rooted in an expansion of Rest’s Four Component Model (Narvaez & Rest, 1995; Rest, 1983) and expertise development.”
Tracing the threads: How five moral concerns (especially Purity) help explain culture war attitudes (2012, background): “…judgments are separate from other moral domains (Horbert, Oveis, Keltner, & Cohen, 2009) and that conservatives are more susceptible to the emotion of disgust (Inbar et al., 2009), which in turn may underlie the evolutionary development of purity-based morality (Haidt & Kesebir, 2010).”
Deciding what's right: The role of external sanctions and embarrassment in shaping moral judgments in the workplace (2008, background): “Kohlberg’s work has been refined and advanced by many, most notably by Rest (1983) who moved beyond the reasoning process to advance a broader model that links moral reasoning to moral behavior.”
The evolution of religion and morality: a synthesis of ethnographic and experimental evidence from eight societies (2017, background): “…and “virtue” as a domain of explicit information consisting of interpersonal social phenomena that entail or imply a cost or benefit to others (Cronk, 1994; Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012; Greene, 2013; Haidt, 2008; McKay & Whitehouse, 2014; Purzycki, 2013; Rossano, 2008; Smetana, 2006; Turiel, 1983).”
Morality shifting in the context of intergroup violence (2012, background): “For instance, they can suppress extreme selfishness (Haidt, 2008).”
The Universal Declaration of Ethical Principles for Psychologists: A Culture-Sensitive Model for Creating and Reviewing a Code of Ethics (2010, neutral): “Several models of ethical decision making are available in the literature (e.g., Canadian Psychological Association, 2000; Canter, Bennett, Jones, & Nagy, 1994; Fisher, 2003; Kitchener, 1984; Koocher & Keith-Spiegel, 1998; Newman, Gray, & Fuqua, 1996; Rest, 1983; Staal & King, 2000).”
Conservatives are happier than liberals, but why? Political ideology, personality, and life satisfaction (2012, background): “…having integrity, being moral, standing up for one’s beliefs), and National Strength and Order (e.g., values of the rule of law, national economic development, national security), which can be considered in the binding moral value category (Haidt, 2008b); a = .70 for the four-measure composite.”
The motivation and inhibition of breaking the rules: : Personal values structures predict unethicality (2015, background): “This is not a trivial finding considering that morality and ethicality have long been considered to be culturally bound (Haidt, 2001, 2008).”
GROUPS AND MORALITY (2014, background): “Perhaps because social psychology defines moral thought, feeling, and behavior as that which individuals subjectively consider right or wrong, the focus has been on individuals in general (for reviews, see Haidt & Kesebir, 2010; Monin & Jordan, 2009; Pagliaro, 2012).”