Empathy for the group versus indifference toward the victim: Effects of anxious and avoidant attachment on moral judgment

Effects of Materialism on Adolescents' Prosocial and Aggressive Behaviors: The Mediating Role of Empathy

Materialism plays a critical role in adolescent behavioral development, yet whether it affects prosocial and aggressive behaviors and the internal mechanism remains unknown. Therefore, this longitudinal research examined the relationships between adolescent materialism and prosocial and aggressive behaviors, and tested the mediating effect of empathy. In 2015, we recruited 543 adolescents from four junior high schools in Beijing, China (284 girls, 259 boys; M = 11.27 years, SD = 0.51). The participants completed the measures of materialism and demographic information at the initial time point, completed the measure of empathy about one year later, and completed the measures of prosocial and aggressive behaviors after about another year. The hypotheses were tested using a structural model using maximum likelihood estimation. The mediating effects were estimated by taking 1000 bias-corrected bootstraps. The results revealed that materialism was associated with aggressive behavior directly and positively, but had no significant correlation with prosocial behavior. Materialism had an indirect and negative correlation with prosocial behavior via empathy, while no indirect effect of materialism on aggressive behavior was found. The findings add to our knowledge of the dehumanizing nature of materialism by revealing its effect on adolescent behavioral development, as well as the underlying mechanism.

Parenting Styles and Moral Disengagement in Young Adults: The Mediating Role of Attachment Experiences

Research on parenting styles and attachment experiences has paid little attention to the dimensions of moral development. It is, therefore, interesting to explore the relationship between parenting styles, internal working models of attachment, and the development of moral skills, in terms of moral disengagement. The study involved 307 young people (aged 19-25 years), and the dimensions examined were: parental styles (measured by the PSDQ: Tagliabue et al., 2014); attachment styles (ECR: Picardi et al., 2002); moral disengagement (MDS: Caprara et al., 2006). Results showed that the authoritative parenting style is negatively correlated with the two measures of attachment styles (anxiety and avoidance) and moral disengagement. The authoritarian and permissive styles are positively correlated with the two measures of attachment styles (anxiety and avoidance) and moral disengagement. Results also revealed a significant indirect effect of the authoritative style (b = -0.433, 95% BCa, CI [-0.882, -0.090]) and authoritarian style (b = -0.661, 95% BCa, CI [.230, 1.21]) on moral disengagement through anxiety. A serial mediation of anxiety and avoidance on the relationship between permissive style and moral disengagement (b = .077, 95% BCa, CI [.0006, .206]) is significant.

The Consequentialist Scale: Translation and empirical investigation in a Greek sample

The Consequentialist Scale (Robinson, 2012) [89] assesses the endorsement of consequentialist and deontological moral beliefs. This study empirically investigated the application of the Greek translation of the Consequentialist Scale in a sample of native Greek speakers. Specifically, 415 native Greek speakers completed the questionnaire. To uncover the underlying structure of the 10 items in the Consequentialist Scale, an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was conducted. The results revealed a three-factor solution, where the deontology factor exhibited the same structure as the original work by Robinson (2012) [89], while the original consequentialism factor split into two separate factors. Significant Pearson's r correlations were observed between age and responses to the Consequentialist Scale. Separate EFAs were conducted for two age groups based on a medial split: younger (36 years old or less) and older (more than 36 years old). Interestingly, the younger group exhibited a two-factor solution with the same structure as the original work, while the older group showed a three-factor solution. A hierarchical k-means cluster analysis revealed that the cluster of participants who scored higher in deontology compared to consequentialism primarily consisted of older participants, whereas the two other clusters comprised of younger participants exhibited the reverse pattern. Neither gender nor previous experience with philosophy significantly affected scores on the Consequentialist Scale. Overall, our study provides evidence that the Consequentialist Scale is suitable for use in the Greek population.

Thinking About Reasons for One's Choices Increases Sensitivity to Moral Norms in Moral-Dilemma Judgments

Whereas norm-conforming (deontological) judgments have been claimed to be rooted in automatic emotional responses, outcome-maximizing (utilitarian) judgments are assumed to require reflective reasoning. Using the CNI model to disentangle factors underlying moral-dilemma judgments, the current research investigated effects of thinking about reasons on sensitivity to consequences, sensitivity to moral norms, and general action preferences. Three experiments (two preregistered) found that thinking about reasons (vs. responding intuitively or thinking about intuitions) reliably increased sensitivity to moral norms independent of processing time. Thinking about reasons had no reproducible effects on sensitivity to consequences and general action preferences. The results suggest that norm-conforming responses in moral dilemmas can arise from reflective thoughts about reasons, challenging the modal view on the role of cognitive reflection in moral-dilemma judgment. The findings highlight the importance of distinguishing between degree (high vs. low elaboration) and content (intuitions vs. reasons) as distinct aspects of cognitive reflection.

When Less is better: Messages that Present Dietary Carbon Emissions Data at the individual (vs. Aggregate) Level Increase Commitment to Sustainable Beef Consumption

The environmental footprint embedded in the human diet is massive. To convey the enormity of the problem, persuasive environmental messages often report large-scale, aggregate data (such as the billions of tons of greenhouse gases released to the atmosphere annually by the beef industry.) Is this strategy effective? In five studies (total N = 1237), the environmental footprint of beef was presented to participants with either aggregate, nation-level numeric data, or with the same data scaled to the individual level. Across the studies, a clear pattern emerged: Participants who received aggregate-level (versus individual-level) data perceived less of a connection between their behavior and the environment and expressed less intention to curb their meat consumption. These data suggest that aggregate environmental figures, rather than raising urgency, may instead demotivate many message recipients.

Psychological Science in the Wake of COVID-19: Social, Methodological, and Metascientific Considerations

The COVID-19 pandemic has extensively changed the state of psychological science from what research questions psychologists can ask to which methodologies psychologists can use to investigate them. In this article, we offer a perspective on how to optimize new research in the pandemic's wake. Because this pandemic is inherently a social phenomenon-an event that hinges on human-to-human contact-we focus on socially relevant subfields of psychology. We highlight specific psychological phenomena that have likely shifted as a result of the pandemic and discuss theoretical, methodological, and practical considerations of conducting research on these phenomena. After this discussion, we evaluate metascientific issues that have been amplified by the pandemic. We aim to demonstrate how theoretically grounded views on the COVID-19 pandemic can help make psychological science stronger-not weaker-in its wake.

Empathy regulation, prosociality, and moral judgment

In this review, we examine relationships between empathy, prosocial behavior, and moral judgment. We focus on recent evidence for these relationships, with a focus on motivated empathy regulation as an important process that shapes empathic and moral outcomes. In particular, we highlight tradeoffs in contexts that involve competing victims with different needs, such as in large-scale suffering situations and sacrificial moral dilemmas, as well as on effects on punishment and recursive effects of morality on empathy. Our aim is to integrate motivation frameworks in empathy regulation and social cognition with prosocial and moral judgments.

Moral responses to the COVID-19 crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised complex moral dilemmas that have been the subject of extensive public debate. Here, we study how people judge a set of controversial actions related to the crisis: relaxing data privacy standards to allow public control of the pandemic, forbidding public gatherings, denouncing a friend who violated COVID-19 protocols, prioritizing younger over older patients when medical resources are scarce, and reducing animal rights to accelerate vaccine development. We collected acceptability judgements in an initial large-scale study with participants from 10 Latin American countries (N = 15 420). A formal analysis of the intrinsic correlations between responses to different dilemmas revealed that judgements were organized in two dimensions: one that reflects a focus on human life expectancy and one that cares about the health of all sentient lives in an equitable manner. These stereotyped patterns of responses were stronger in people who endorsed utilitarian decisions in a standardized scale. A second pre-registered study performed in the USA (N = 1300) confirmed the replicability of these findings. Finally, we show how the prioritization of public health correlated with several contextual, personality and demographic factors. Overall, this research sheds light on the relationship between utilitarian decision-making and moral responses to the COVID-19 crisis.

Sensitivity to Moral Principles Predicts Both Deontological and Utilitarian Response Tendencies in Sacrificial Dilemmas

When facing sacrificial dilemmas in which harm maximizes outcomes, people appear sensitive to three moral principles: They are more averse to actively causing harm than passively allowing it ( action principle), causing harm directly than indirectly ( contact principle), and causing harm as a means than as a by-product of helping others ( intention principle). Across five studies and a meta-analysis ( N = 1,218), we examined whether individual differences in people’s sensitivity to these principles were related to participants’ moral preferences on sacrificial dilemmas. Interestingly, sensitivity to each of these principles was related to both elevated harm-rejection (i.e., deontological) as well as elevated outcome-maximization (i.e., utilitarian) response tendencies. Rather than increasing responses consistent with only one philosophical position, people sensitive to moral principles balanced moral concerns about causing harm and maximizing outcomes similar to people high in other measures of moral concern.

Using conflict negativity to index psychological tension between impartiality and status-upholding principles

People often endorse the moral principle that all human lives are equally valuable. At the same time, people often privilege high-status individuals over low-status individuals. These two inclinations come into conflict in a scenario involving the potential killing of a high-status person to save the lives of multiple low-status people. In the present study, participants viewed a series of sacrificial dilemmas in which the social status of the victims and beneficiaries was varied. We measured participants' choice (sacrifice vs. don't sacrifice), response time, and electroencephalographic activity, with an emphasis on conflict negativity (CN). Overall, we found no effects of victim/beneficiaries status on choice and response time. However, participants displayed a more pronounced CN effect when contemplating a high-status victim/low-status beneficiaries tradeoff than a low-status-victim/high-status beneficiaries tradeoff. Further analyses revealed that this effect was primarily driven by participants who endorsed deontological principles (e.g., "Some rules must never be broken, no matter the consequences"). In contrast, those who endorsed utilitarian principles displayed equivalent levels of conflict negativity, regardless of the social status of victims and beneficiaries. These findings shed light on the role of conflict in the phenomenology of moral decision making.

Anger and Sadness as Moral Signals

Three studies examined the relationship between emotions and moral judgment from an interpersonal perspective. In Studies 1 and 2, participants justified their decisions in sacrificial dilemmas to an imagined interlocutor. Linguistic analyses revealed that Don’t Sacrifice justifications contained more anger-related language than sadness-related language, whereas Sacrifice justifications contained roughly equal proportions of anger and sadness language. In Study 3, participants made character inferences about an actor who chose to/refused to sacrifice one person to save multiple people. We manipulated the actor’s ratio of anger to sadness. Participants rated the Don’t Sacrifice actor more negatively when they displayed high anger relative to sadness but rated the Sacrifice actor negatively whenever they exhibited high anger (independent of sadness). These data highlight novel ways in which actors and observers use emotions to complement the substance of a moral argument.

Deontological and Altruistic Guilt Feelings: A Dualistic Thesis

In this paper we argue in favor of the existence of two different guilt feelings: altruistic guilt (AG) and deontological guilt (DG). AG arises from having harmed, through one's own action or omission, an innocent victim, while DG arises from the transgression of an internalized norm. In most daily experiences of guilt feelings both types are present, but we argue that they are not traceable to each other and that each can be present without the other. We show that the two guilt feelings can be distinguished with reference to behavioral, cognitive, and neurophysiological aspects. Moreover, we demonstrate that they are differently related to other processes and emotions. AG is connected with pain, empathy and ToM. DG is strongly related to disgust. We briefly illustrate some implications for moral psychology and clinical psychology.

The Interplay Between Absolute Language and Moral Reasoning on Endorsement of Moral Foundations

Morality – the subjective sense that humans discern between right and wrong – plays a ubiquitous role in everyday life. Deontological reasoning conceptualizes moral decision-making as rigid, such that many moral choices are forbidden or required. Not surprisingly, the language used in measures of deontological reasoning tends to be rigid, including phrases such as “always” and “never.” Two studies (N = 553) drawn from two different populations used commonly used measures of moral reasoning and measures of morality to examine the link between individual differences in deontological reasoning and language on the endorsement of moral foundations. Participants low on deontological reasoning generally showed less endorsement for moral principles when extreme language was used in the measures (relative to less extreme language).

Turning off the empathy switch: Lower empathic concern for the victim leads to utilitarian choices of action

Empathy enables people to vicariously experience the other’s pain. At the same time, the focus of empathy can be narrow and reserved for a limited number of people. In sacrificial dilemmas, non-empathic people are more likely to sacrifice one person for greater good. However, no study has investigated the role of diminished empathic concern for the victim in utilitarian choices of action. In two studies, we investigated how empathy actually experienced in sacrificial dilemmas affects a decision to perform a harmful action onto the victim. In Study 1 (N = 275), participants were asked to rate the extent to which they were feeling two divergent tropes of affective empathy: other-oriented empathy (empathic concern) and self-oriented empathy (personal distress). Results showed that lower levels of other-focused empathy for the victim predicted utilitarian choices of action. In Study 2 (N = 170), participants were asked to rate the extent to which they empathized with the victim and the saved. We also assessed dispositional empathy and psychopathy to test a hypothesis that psychopathy mediates the relationship between lower empathy for the victim and utilitarian choices of action. Results supported this hypothesis, whereas dispositional empathy was not significantly correlated with utilitarian choices of action. Overall, lower empathy experienced in the dilemma situation was associated with utilitarian choices of action, and this was specific to reduced empathic concern for the victim. People choose to pursue the utilitarian end that accompanies harm onto the other as a mean when the victim is out of their empathic focus.

Sacrificial utilitarian judgments do reflect concern for the greater good: Clarification via process dissociation and the judgments of philosophers

Researchers have used "sacrificial" trolley-type dilemmas (where harmful actions promote the greater good) to model competing influences on moral judgment: affective reactions to causing harm that motivate characteristically deontological judgments ("the ends don't justify the means") and deliberate cost-benefit reasoning that motivates characteristically utilitarian judgments ("better to save more lives"). Recently, Kahane, Everett, Earp, Farias, and Savulescu (2015) argued that sacrificial judgments reflect antisociality rather than "genuine utilitarianism," but this work employs a different definition of "utilitarian judgment." We introduce a five-level taxonomy of "utilitarian judgment" and clarify our longstanding usage, according to which judgments are "utilitarian" simply because they favor the greater good, regardless of judges' motivations or philosophical commitments. Moreover, we present seven studies revisiting Kahane and colleagues' empirical claims. Studies 1a-1b demonstrate that dilemma judgments indeed relate to utilitarian philosophy, as philosophers identifying as utilitarian/consequentialist were especially likely to endorse utilitarian sacrifices. Studies 2-6 replicate, clarify, and extend Kahane and colleagues' findings using process dissociation to independently assess deontological and utilitarian response tendencies in lay people. Using conventional analyses that treat deontological and utilitarian responses as diametric opposites, we replicate many of Kahane and colleagues' key findings. However, process dissociation reveals that antisociality predicts reduced deontological inclinations, not increased utilitarian inclinations. Critically, we provide evidence that lay people's sacrificial utilitarian judgments also reflect moral concerns about minimizing harm. This work clarifies the conceptual and empirical links between moral philosophy and moral psychology and indicates that sacrificial utilitarian judgments reflect genuine moral concern, in both philosophers and ordinary people.

Pathological Personality Traits and Utilitarian Moral Judgments

Recent research has highlighted important individual differences in moral judgment. The present study extends these findings by examining the associations between pathological personality traits and utilitarian moral judgments. This was accomplished by asking 2,121 Israeli community members to complete self-report measures concerning their pathological personality traits and evaluate the acceptability of utilitarian moral judgments in various sacrificial dilemmas (is it acceptable to intentionally kill one person in order to save several other people?). The results showed that the pathological personality traits of antagonism and disinhibition were positively associated with the endorsement of personal utilitarian moral judgments (i.e., those decisions requiring the individual to directly inflict harm on the would-be sacrificed individual), whereas negative affectivity was negatively associated with personal utilitarian moral judgments. Antagonism was the only pathological personality trait associated with impersonal utilitarian moral judgments (i.e., those decisions that did not require the individual to directly inflict harm on the would-be sacrificed individual). Discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for understanding the associations between pathological personality traits and moral judgments.

Disgust and Deontology: Trait Sensitivity to Contamination Promotes a Preference for Order, Hierarchy, and Rule-Based Moral Judgment

Models of moral judgment have linked generalized emotionality with deontological moral judgment. The evidence, however, is mixed. Other research has linked the specific emotion of disgust with generalized moral condemnation. Here too, the evidence is mixed. We suggest that a synthesis of these two literatures points to one specific emotion (disgust) that reliably predicts one specific type of moral judgment (deontological). In all three studies, we found that trait disgust sensitivity predicted more extreme deontological judgment. In Study 3, with deontological endorsement and consequentialist endorsement operationalized as independent constructs, we found that disgust was positively associated with deontological endorsement but was unrelated to consequentialist endorsement. Across studies, the disgust–deontology link was mediated by individual difference variables related to preference for order (right-wing authoritarianism and intolerance for ambiguity). These data suggest a more precise model of emotion and moral judgment that identifies specific emotions, specific types of moral judgment, and specific motivational pathways.

Proximal and Distal Intent: Toward a New Folk Theory of Intentional Action

Inferences regarding actors’ intentions play an important role in social and moral cognition. Numerous studies have operationalized intentionality in a binary fashion (i.e., an act is either “intentional” or “unintentional”). The authors suggest, however, that when determining the degree to which an act was intentional, lay observers consider two independent dimensions: proximal intent (the actor's focus on the means) and distal intent (the actor's focus on the end). They describe how the proximal intent/distal intent (PIDI) approach allows researchers to understand observers’ intent-related judgments with greater precision. The authors review studies highlighting a range of variables that lead perceivers to prioritize either proximal intent or distal intent in their social and moral judgment. They describe how previous findings in the literature may be reinterpreted in light of the PIDI framework. Finally, they suggest ways in which the PIDI framework implies novel directions for future research on moral cognition.

The CAG polymorphism in androgen receptor (AR) gene impacts the moral permissibility of harmful behavior in females

The moral permissibility of harm is strikingly varied among individuals. In light of the connection between testosterone levels and utilitarian moral judgment, this study examined to what extent a CAG polymorphism in the androgen receptor gene, a genetic polymorphism with the ability to regulate testosterone function, contributes to individual differences in moral judgment. Four hundred and thirty-nine Chinese Han participants completed permissibility ratings of harm in moral dilemmas and moral transgression scenarios. Results showed a significant association between the CAG polymorphism and moral permissibility of harm in females. Females with more copies of the S allele, which is associated with higher availability of testosterone, were more likely to judge harmful utilitarian acts and unintentionally harmful acts as permissible, while these effects were absent in males. The findings provide the first evidence for a link between the androgen receptor gene and moral judgment and highlight the role of androgens in moral foundations.

Divergent roles of autistic and alexithymic traits in utilitarian moral judgments in adults with autism

This study investigated hypothetical moral choices in adults with high-functioning autism and the role of empathy and alexithymia in such choices. We used a highly emotionally salient moral dilemma task to investigate autistics' hypothetical moral evaluations about personally carrying out harmful utilitarian behaviours aimed at maximizing welfare. Results showed that they exhibited a normal pattern of moral judgments despite the deficits in social cognition and emotional processing. Further analyses revealed that this was due to mutually conflicting biases associated with autistic and alexithymic traits after accounting for shared variance: (a) autistic traits were associated with reduced utilitarian bias due to elevated personal distress of demanding social situations, while (b) alexithymic traits were associated with increased utilitarian bias on account of reduced empathic concern for the victim. Additionally, autistics relied on their non-verbal reasoning skills to rigidly abide by harm-norms. Thus, utilitarian moral judgments in autism were spared due to opposite influences of autistic and alexithymic traits and compensatory intellectual strategies. These findings demonstrate the importance of empathy and alexithymia in autistic moral cognition and have methodological implications for studying moral judgments in several other clinical populations.