The Visual Guide to Morality: Vision as an Integrative Analogy for Moral Experience, Variability and Mechanism

The Moral Psychology of Raceless, Genderless Strangers

Moral psychology uses tightly controlled scenarios in which the identities of the characters are either unspecified or vague. Studies with raceless, genderless strangers help to highlight the important structural elements of moral acts (e.g., intention, causation, harm) but may not generalize to real-world judgments. As researchers have long shown, social judgments hinge on the identities (e.g., race, gender, age, religion, group affiliation) of both target and perceiver. Asking whether people generally condemn “shooting someone” is very different from asking whether liberals as opposed to conservatives condemn “a White police officer shooting a Black suspect.” We argue for the importance of incorporating identity into moral psychology. We briefly outline the central role of identity in social judgments before reviewing current theories in moral psychology. We then advocate an expanded person-centered morality—synthesizing moral psychology with social cognition—to better capture everyday moral judgments.

How to think about emotion and morality: circles, not arrows

Emotion and morality are powerful conscious experiences. There are two ways to think about their psychological basis: arrows and circles. Arrows ground each experience in its own specialized mechanism (mechanism x causes phenomenon x; mechanism y causes phenomenon y). Examples of arrows include when feelings of disgust are attributed to a specialized 'disgust circuit' and when judgments of impurity are attributed to a specialized 'purity foundation.' In contrast, circles - Venn diagrams - describe experiences as emerging from the overlap of more fundamental domain-general processes (different combinations of processes a, b, c cause both phenomena x and y). Circles are used by constructionist theories of emotion and morality, including the Theory of Dyadic Morality, which grounds moral judgment in the combination of norm violations, negative affect, and perceived harm. Despite the intuitive popularity of arrows, we show that scientific evidence is more consistent with circles.

The Theory of Dyadic Morality: Reinventing Moral Judgment by Redefining Harm

The nature of harm—and therefore moral judgment—may be misunderstood. Rather than an objective matter of reason, we argue that harm should be redefined as an intuitively perceived continuum. This redefinition provides a new understanding of moral content and mechanism—the constructionist Theory of Dyadic Morality (TDM). TDM suggests that acts are condemned proportional to three elements: norm violations, negative affect, and—importantly—perceived harm. This harm is dyadic, involving an intentional agent causing damage to a vulnerable patient (A→P). TDM predicts causal links both from harm to immorality (dyadic comparison) and from immorality to harm (dyadic completion). Together, these two processes make the “dyadic loop,” explaining moral acquisition and polarization. TDM argues against intuitive harmless wrongs and modular “foundations,” but embraces moral pluralism through varieties of values and the flexibility of perceived harm. Dyadic morality impacts understandings of moral character, moral emotion, and political/cultural differences, and provides research guidelines for moral psychology.