Moral Vitalism: Seeing Good and Evil as Real, Agentic Forces

The Problem of Purity in Moral Psychology

Academic AbstractThe idea of "purity" transformed moral psychology. Here, we provide the first systematic review of this concept. Although often discussed as one construct, we reveal ~9 understandings of purity, ranging from respecting God to not eating gross things. This striking heterogeneity arises because purity-unlike other moral constructs-is not understood by what it is but what it isn't: obvious interpersonal harm. This poses many problems for moral psychology and explains why purity lacks convergent and divergent validity and why purity is confounded with politics, religion, weirdness, and perceived harm. Because purity is not a coherent construct, it cannot be a distinct basis of moral judgment or specially tied to disgust. Rather than a specific moral domain, purity is best understood as a loose set of themes in moral rhetoric. These themes are scaffolded on cultural understandings of harm-the broad, pluralistic harm outlined by the Theory of Dyadic Morality.

"They're Not True Humans:" Beliefs about Moral Character Drive Denials of Humanity

A puzzling feature of paradigmatic cases of dehumanization is that the perpetrators often attribute uniquely human traits to their victims. This has become known as the "paradox of dehumanization." I address the paradox by arguing that the perpetrators think about their victims as human in one sense, while denying that they are human in another sense. I do so by providing evidence that people harbor a dual character concept of humanity. Research has found that dual character concepts have two independent sets of criteria for their application, one of which is descriptive and one of which is normative. Four experiments provided evidence that people deploy a descriptive criterion according to which being human is a matter of being a Homo sapiens; as well as a normative criterion according to which being human is a matter of possessing a deep-seated commitment to do the morally right thing. Importantly, I found that people are willing to affirm that someone is human in the descriptive sense, while denying that they are human in the normative sense, and vice versa. In addition to providing a solution to the paradox of dehumanization, these findings suggest that perceptions of moral character have a central role to play in driving dehumanization.

Infection threat shapes our social instincts

We social animals must balance the need to avoid infections with the need to interact with conspecifics. To that end we have evolved, alongside our physiological immune system, a suite of behaviors devised to deal with potentially contagious individuals. Focusing mostly on humans, the current review describes the design and biological innards of this behavioral immune system, laying out how infection threat shapes sociality and sociality shapes infection threat. The paper shows how the danger of contagion is detected and posted to the brain; how it affects individuals’ mate choice and sex life; why it strengthens ties within groups but severs those between them, leading to hostility toward anyone who looks, smells, or behaves unusually; and how it permeates the foundation of our moral and political views. This system was already in place when agriculture and animal domestication set off a massive increase in our population density, personal connections, and interaction with other species, amplifying enormously the spread of disease. Alas, pandemics such as COVID-19 not only are a disaster for public health, but, by rousing millions of behavioral immune systems, could prove a threat to harmonious cohabitation too.

Measurement invariance of the moral vitalism scale across 28 cultural groups

Moral vitalism refers to a tendency to view good and evil as actual forces that can influence people and events. The Moral Vitalism Scale had been designed to assess moral vitalism in a brief survey form. Previous studies established the reliability and validity of the scale in US-American and Australian samples. In this study, the cross-cultural comparability of the scale was tested across 28 different cultural groups worldwide through measurement invariance tests. A series of exact invariance tests marginally supported partial metric invariance, however, an approximate invariance approach provided evidence of partial scalar invariance for a 5-item measure. The established level of measurement invariance allows for comparisons of latent means across cultures. We conclude that the brief measure of moral vitalism is invariant across 28 cultures and can be used to estimate levels of moral vitalism with the same precision across very different cultural settings.

Explaining illness with evil: pathogen prevalence fosters moral vitalism

Pathogens represent a significant threat to human health leading to the emergence of strategies designed to help manage their negative impact. We examined how spiritual beliefs developed to explain and predict the devastating effects of pathogens and spread of infectious disease. Analysis of existing data in studies 1 and 2 suggests that moral vitalism (beliefs about spiritual forces of evil) is higher in geographical regions characterized by historical higher levels of pathogens. Furthermore, drawing on a sample of 3140 participants from 28 countries in study 3, we found that historical higher levels of pathogens were associated with stronger endorsement of moral vitalistic beliefs. Furthermore, endorsement of moral vitalistic beliefs statistically mediated the previously reported relationship between pathogen prevalence and conservative ideologies, suggesting these beliefs reinforce behavioural strategies which function to prevent infection. We conclude that moral vitalism may be adaptive: by emphasizing concerns over contagion, it provided an explanatory model that enabled human groups to reduce rates of contagious disease.

Paradoxical Knowing

Abstract. To avoid uncertainty, people may take a shortcut to knowledge. They recognize something as unknowable, but claim to know it nonetheless (e.g., whether I will find true love is unknowable, but I know I will). In Study-set 1, such paradoxical knowledge was common and spanned across valence and content. Study-set 2 revealed an antecedent of paradoxical knowing. High (vs. low) goal-incentives incited paradoxical knowledge – participants felt certain about attaining important future life goals despite acknowledging such goal attainment as unknowable. As a shortcut to knowledge, however, paradoxical knowing may have its costs. In Study-set 3, paradoxical knowing related to aggression (fight), determined ignorance (flight), and a willingness to join and adhere to extreme groups (befriend).

A free will needs a free mind: Belief in substance dualism and reductive physicalism differentially predict belief in free will and determinism

In this article, we show that lay people's beliefs about how minds relate to bodies are more complex than past research suggests, and that treating them as a multidimensional construct helps explain inconclusive findings from the literature regarding their relation to beliefs about whether humans possess a free will. In two studies, we found that items previously used to assess a unidimensional belief in how minds relate to bodies indeed capture two distinguishable constructs (belief in substance dualism and reductive physicalism) that differently predict belief in free will and two types of determinism (Studies 1 and 2). Additionally, we found that two fundamental personality traits pertaining to people's preference for experiential versus rational information processing predict those metaphysical beliefs that were theorized to be based on subjective phenomenological experience and rational deliberation, respectively (Study 2). In sum, beliefs about mind-body relations are a multidimensional construct with unique predictive abilities.

The essence of crime: Contagious transmission from those who have committed moral transgressions

Across four studies, we investigated the relationship between moral contagion and disgust. Study 1 established that the contamination effect is unique to transgressions that fall within the moral domain. Study 2 replicated this effect and further showed that the underlying mechanism is intimately related to disgust, as disgust was found to uniquely mediate the relationship between moral transgressions and contamination responses. In Study 3, disgust was again found to mediate this relationship. In addition, the results of Study 3 show that the moral contagion effect was not dependent upon the presence of a core disgust cue within the transgression. In Study 4, we investigated whether or not moral contagion leads to behavioural avoidance. Results show that behavioural avoidance only occurred when the moral transgression contained a core disgust cue. Taken together, the results of our studies show that disgust plays a key role in moral contagion processes. However, the difference in findings between the thought experiments (Studies 1-3) and the behavioural experiment (Study 4) identifies a need for further research to examine the conditions under which moral contagion leads to behavioural avoidance.