Social context during moral decision-making impacts males more than females

Pilcher, J. J., & Smith, P. D. (2024).

Frontiers in Psychology, 15.

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1397069

Abstract

Moral judgments are often viewed as the outcome of affective and deliberative processes that could be impacted by social factors and individual characteristics. The purpose of this study was to examine the interaction between gender and social context on moral judgment. Participants included 315 undergraduate students (67.3% female). The participants completed the Moral Decision-Making Task while seated at row tables facing the front of the room or round tables facing other participants. The results indicated that males responded in a more utilitarian manner (harm one to save five) than females for moral impersonal (MI) and moral personal (MP) dilemmas regardless of seating arrangements. When seated at round tables, all participants were more likely to respond deontologically (cause no harm) to the moral impersonal dilemmas. In addition, we calculated a moral reasoning difference score for each participant as the difference between the MI and MP scores to represent additional reactivity due to the idea of taking direct action. The moral reasoning difference score was consistent for females but indicated a more deontological response from males at round tables and a more utilitarian response from males at row tables. These results suggest that males are more utilitarian than females and are more likely to be influenced by social context when responding to moral dilemmas. More broadly, the current results indicate that moral judgments are affected by social context particularly in males in ways that have not been incorporated in many models of moral decision making.

Here are some thoughts:

This research examined how social context and gender influence moral decision-making. They found that males tend to respond more utilitarian manner (choosing to harm one to save five) than females in moral dilemmas.  Additionally, social context affected moral judgments, with participants in a face-to-face setting more likely to respond in a more deontological way (choosing not to harm) in moral impersonal dilemmas.    

For practicing psychologists, this research highlights the importance of considering social context and gender when assessing and interpreting moral judgments. It suggests that these factors can significantly influence how individuals respond to moral dilemmas, which has implications for understanding behavior in various social settings.  

Relational morality in psychology and philosophy: past, present, and future

Earp, B D., Calcott, R., et al. (in press).

In S. Laham (ed.), Handbook of

Ethics and Social Psychology. 

Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

Abstract

Moral psychology research often frames participant judgments in terms of adherence to abstract principles, such as utilitarianism or Kant's categorical imperative, and focuses on hypothetical interactions between strangers. However, real-world moral judgments typically involve concrete evaluations of known individuals within specific social relationships. Acknowledging this, a growing number of moral psychologists are shifting their focus to the study of moral judgment in social-relational contexts. This chapter provides an overview of recent work in this area, highlighting strengths and weaknesses, and describes a new 'relational norms' model of moral judgment developed by the authors and colleagues. The

discussion is situated within influential philosophical theories of human morality that emphasize relational context, and suggests that these theories should receive more attention from moral psychologists. The chapter concludes by exploring future applications of relational-moral frameworks, such as modeling and predicting norms and judgments related to human-AI cooperation.

A pre-print is here.

It's a great chapter. Here are some thoughts:

The field of moral psychology is undergoing a significant shift, known as the "relational turn." This movement recognizes that real-world morality is deeply embedded in social relationships, rather than being based solely on impartial principles and abstract dilemmas. Researchers are now focusing on the intricate web of social roles, group memberships, and interpersonal dynamics that shape our everyday moral experiences.

Traditional Western philosophical traditions, such as utilitarianism and Kantian deontology, have emphasized impartiality as a cornerstone of moral reasoning. However, empirical evidence suggests that moral judgments are influenced by factors like group membership, relationship type, and social context. This challenges the idea that moral principles should be applied uniformly, regardless of the individuals involved.

The relational context of a situation greatly impacts our moral judgments. For example, helping a stranger move might be seen as kind, but missing work for it seems excessive. Similarly, expecting payment for helping a family member feels at odds with the implicit rules of familial relationships. Philosophical perspectives such as Confucianism, African moral traditions, and feminist care ethics support the importance of relationships in shaping moral norms and obligations.

Evolutionary theory provides a compelling explanation for why relationships matter in moral decision-making. Our moral instincts likely evolved to solve coordination problems and reduce conflict within social groups, primarily consisting of family, kin, and close allies. This "friends-and-family cooperation bias" has led to the development of specific moral norms tailored to different relationship categories.

Research in relational morality highlights the importance of understanding the structure and dynamics of interpersonal relationships. Various relational models, such as Fiske's Relationship Regulation Theory, propose that different relationships are associated with specific moral motives. However, real-life relationships are complex and multifaceted, drawing on multiple models simultaneously.

The developmental trajectory of relational morality suggests that even young children display a preference for friends and family in resource allocation tasks. However, the ability to make nuanced moral judgments based on social roles and relationship types emerges gradually with age.

Emerging research areas within relational morality include impartial beneficence, moral obligations to future generations, and the psychological underpinnings of extending moral concern to strangers and future generations. By shifting focus from abstract principles to social relationships, researchers can develop more nuanced and ecologically valid models of moral judgment and behavior.

This relational turn promises to deepen our understanding of the social and evolutionary roots of human morality, shedding light on the complex interplay between personal connections and our sense of right and wrong. By recognizing the importance of relationships in moral decision-making, researchers can develop more effective strategies for promoting moral growth, cooperation, and well-being.

Deluded, with reason

Huw Green

aeon.co

Originally published 31 Aug 20

Here is an excerpt:

Of course, beliefs don’t exist only in a private mental context, but can also be held in place by our relationships and social commitments. Consider how political identities often involve a cluster of commitments to various beliefs, even where there is no logical connection between them – for instance, how a person who advocates for say, trans rights, is also more likely to endorse Left-wing economic policies. As the British clinical psychologist Vaughan Bell and his colleagues note in their preprint, ‘De-rationalising Delusions’ (2019), beliefs facilitate affiliation and intragroup trust. They cite earlier philosophical work by others that suggests ‘reasoning is not for the refinement of personal knowledge … but for argumentation, social communication and persuasion’. Indeed, our relationships usually ground our beliefs in a beneficial way, preventing us from developing ideas too disparate from those of our peers, and helping us to maintain a set of ‘healthy’ beliefs that promote our basic wellbeing and continuity in our sense of self.

Given the social function of beliefs, it’s little surprise that delusions usually contain social themes. Might delusion then be a problem of social affiliation, rather than a purely cognitive issue? Bell’s team make just this claim, proposing that there is a broader dysfunction to what they call ‘coalitional cognition’ (important for handling social relationships) involved in the generation of delusions. Harmful social relationships and experiences could play a role here. It is now widely acknowledged that there is a connection between traumatic experiences and symptoms of psychosis. It’s easy to see how trauma could have a pervasive impact on a person’s sense of how safe and trustworthy the world feels, in turn affecting their belief systems.

The British philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe and his colleagues made this point in their 2014 paper, observing how ‘traumatic events are often said to “shatter” a way of experiencing the world and other people that was previously taken for granted’. They add that a ‘loss of trust in the world involves a pronounced and widespread sense of unpredictability’ that could make people liable to delusions because the ideas we entertain are likely to be shaped by what feels plausible in the context of our subjective experience. Loss of trust is not the same as the absence of a grounding belief, but I would argue that it bears an important similarity. When we lose trust in something, we might say that we find it hard to believe in it. Perhaps loss of certain forms of ordinary belief, especially around close social relationships, makes it possible to acquire beliefs of a different sort altogether.

The info is here.

The Influence of War on Moral Judgments about Harm

Hanne M Watkins and Simon M Laham
Preprint

Abstract

How does war influence moral judgments about harm? While the general rule is “thou shalt not kill,” war appears to provide an unfortunately common exception to the moral prohibition on intentional harm. In three studies (N = 263, N = 557, N = 793), we quantify the difference in moral judgments across peace and war contexts, and explore two possible explanations for the difference. Taken together, the findings of the present studies have implications for moral psychology researchers who use war based scenarios to study broader cognitive or affective processes. If the war context changes judgments of moral scenarios by triggering group-based reasoning or altering the perceived structure of the moral event, using such scenarios to make “decontextualized” claims about moral judgment may not be warranted.

Here is part of the discussion.

A number of researchers have begun to investigate how social contexts may influence moral judgment, whether those social contexts are grounded in groups (Carnes et al, 2015; Ellemers & van den Bos, 2009) or relationships (Fiske & Rai, 2014; Simpson, Laham, & Fiske, 2015). The war context is another specific context which influences moral judgments: in the present study we found that the intergroup nature of war influenced people’s moral judgments about harm in war – even if they belonged to neither of the two groups actually at war – and that the usually robust difference between switch and footbridge scenarios was attenuated in the war context. One implication of these findings is that some caution may be warranted when using war-based scenarios for studying morality in general. As mentioned in the introduction, scenarios set in war are often used in the study of broad domains or general processes of judgment (e.g. Graham et al., 2009; Phillips & Young, 2011; Piazza et al., 2013). Given the interaction of war context with intergroup considerations and with the construed structure of the moral event in the present studies, researchers are well advised to avoid making generalizations to morality writ large on the basis of war-related scenarios (see also Bauman, McGraw, Bartels, & Warren, 2014; Bloom, 2011).

The preprint is here.

The neuroscience of moral cognition: from dual processes to dynamic systems

Jay J Van Bavel, Oriel FeldmanHall, Peter Mende-Siedlecki
Current Opinion in Psychology
Volume 6, December 2015, Pages 167–172

Prominent theories of morality have integrated philosophy with psychology and biology. Although this approach has been highly generative, we argue that it does not fully capture the rich and dynamic nature of moral cognition. We review research from the dual-process tradition, in which moral intuitions are automatically elicited and reasoning is subsequently deployed to correct these initial intuitions. We then describe how the computations underlying moral cognition are diverse and widely distributed throughout the brain. Finally, we illustrate how social context modulates these computations, recruiting different systems for real (vs. hypothetical) moral judgments, examining the dynamic process by which moral judgments are updated. In sum, we advocate for a shift from dual-process to dynamic system models of moral cognition.

The entire article is here.