The Dark Side of Morality: Group Polarization and Moral Epistemology

Marcus Arvan

PsyArXiv

Originally published on 12 Dec 19

Abstract

This paper shows that philosophers and laypeople commonly conceptualize moral truths as discoverable through intuition, argument, or some other process. It then argues that three empirically-supported theories of group polarization suggest that this Discovery Model of morality likely plays a substantial role in causing polarization—a phenomenon known to produce a wide variety of disturbing social effects, including increasing prejudice, selfishness, divisiveness, mistrust, and violence. This paper then uses the same three empirical theories to argue that an alternative Negotiation Model of morality—according to which moral truths are instead created by negotiation—promises to not only mitigate polarization but perhaps even foster its opposite: a progressive willingness to “work across the aisle to settle contentious moral issues cooperatively. Finally, I outline avenues for further empirical and philosophical research.

Conclusion

Laypeople  and  philosophers  tend  to  treat  moral  truths  as discoverable  through  intuition, argument,  or  other cognitive  or  affective  process. However,  we  have  seen that  there  are strong theoretical   reasons—based   on   three   empirically-supported   theories   of   group polarization—to believe this Discovery Model of morality is a likely cause of polarization: a social-psychological phenomenon known to have a wide variety of disturbing social effects. We then saw that there are complementary theoretical reasons to believe that an alternative, Negotiation  Model of  morality  might  not  only  mitigate  polarization  but  actually  foster  its opposite: an increasing willingness for to work together to arrive at compromises on moral controversies. While   this   paper   does   not prove   the   existence   of   the   hypothesized relationships   between   the   Discovery   Model,  Negotiation   Model,   and   polarization,   it demonstrates that there are ample theoretical reasons to believe that such relationships are likely and worthy of further empirical and philosophical research.

The Dark Side of Morality: Group Polarization and Moral-Belief Formation

Marcus Arvan
University of Tampa

Most of us are accustomed to thinking of morality in a positive light. Morality, we say, is a matter of “doing good” and treating ourselves and each other “rightly.” However, moral beliefs and discourse also plausibly play a role in group polarization, the tendency of social groups to divide into progressively more extreme factions, each of which regards other groups to be “wrong.” Group polarization often occurs along moral lines, and is known to have many disturbing effects, increasing racial prejudice among the already moderately prejudiced, leading group decisions to be more selfish, competitive, less trusting, and less altruistic than individual decisions, eroding public trust, leading juries to impose more severe punishments in trial, generating more extreme political decisions, and contributing to war, genocide, and other violent behavior.

This paper argues that three empirically-supported theories of group polarization predict that polarization is likely caused in substantial part by a conception of morality that I call the Discovery Model—a model which holds moral truths exist to be discovered through moral intuition, moral reasoning, or some other process.

The paper is here.

Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks

William J. Brady, Julian A. Wills, John T. Jost, Joshua A. Tucker, and Jay J. Van Bavel
PNAS 2017 ; published ahead of print June 26, 2017

Abstract

Political debate concerning moralized issues is increasingly common in online social networks. However, moral psychology has yet to incorporate the study of social networks to investigate processes by which some moral ideas spread more rapidly or broadly than others. Here, we show that the expression of moral emotion is key for the spread of moral and political ideas in online social networks, a process we call “moral contagion.” Using a large sample of social media communications about three polarizing moral/political issues (n = 563,312), we observed that the presence of moral-emotional words in messages increased their diffusion by a factor of 20% for each additional word. Furthermore, we found that moral contagion was bounded by group membership; moral-emotional language increased diffusion more strongly within liberal and conservative networks, and less between them. Our results highlight the importance of emotion in the social transmission of moral ideas and also demonstrate the utility of social network methods for studying morality. These findings offer insights into how people are exposed to moral and political ideas through social networks, thus expanding models of social influence and group polarization as people become increasingly immersed in social media networks.

The research is here.