Who did it? Moral wrongness for us and them in the UK, US, and Brazil

Paulo Sérgio Boggio, et al. (2023) 

Philosophical Psychology

DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2023.2278637

Abstract

Morality has traditionally been described in terms of an impartial and objective “moral law”, and moral psychological research has largely followed in this vein, focusing on abstract moral judgments. But might our moral judgments be shaped not just by what the action is, but who is doing it? We looked at ratings of moral wrongness, manipulating whether the person doing the action was a friend, a refugee, or a stranger. We looked at these ratings across various moral foundations, and conducted the study in Brazil, US, and UK samples. Our most robust and consistent findings are that purity violations were judged more harshly when committed by ingroup members and less harshly when committed by the refugees in comparison to the unspecified agents, the difference between refugee and unspecified agents decays from liberals to conservatives, i.e., conservatives judge them more harshly than liberals do, and Brazilians participants are harsher than the US and UK participants. Our results suggest that purity violations are judged differently according to who committed them and according to the political ideology of the judges. We discuss the findings in light of various theories of groups dynamics, such as moral hypocrisy, moral disengagement, and the black sheep effect.

The study is here.

Here is my summary:

The study explores how moral judgments vary depending on both the agent committing the act and the nationality of the person making the judgment. The study's findings challenge the notion that moral judgments are universal and instead suggest that they are influenced by cultural and national factors.

The researchers investigated how participants from the UK, US, and Brazil judged moral violations committed by different agents: friends, strangers, refugees, and unspecified individuals. They found that participants from all three countries generally judged violations committed by friends more harshly than violations committed by other agents. However, there were also significant cultural differences in the severity of judgments. Brazilians tended to judge violations of purity as less wrong than Americans, but judged violations of care, liberty, and fairness as more wrong than Americans.

The study's findings suggest that moral judgments are not simply based on the severity of the act itself, but also on factors such as the relationship between the agent and the victim, and the cultural background of the person making the judgment. These findings have implications for understanding cross-cultural moral conflicts and for developing more effective moral education programs.

Neural and Cognitive Signatures of Guilt Predict Hypocritical Blame

Yu, H., Contreras-Huerta, L. S., et al. (2022).

Psychological Science, 0(0).

Abstract

A common form of moral hypocrisy occurs when people blame others for moral violations that they themselves commit. It is assumed that hypocritical blamers act in this manner to falsely signal that they hold moral standards that they do not really accept. We tested this assumption by investigating the neurocognitive processes of hypocritical blamers during moral decision-making. Participants (62 adult UK residents; 27 males) underwent functional MRI scanning while deciding whether to profit by inflicting pain on others and then judged the blameworthiness of others’ identical decisions. Observers (188 adult U.S. residents; 125 males) judged participants who blamed others for making the same harmful choice to be hypocritical, immoral, and untrustworthy. However, analyzing hypocritical blamers’ behaviors and neural responses shows that hypocritical blame was positively correlated with conflicted feelings, neural responses to moral standards, and guilt-related neural responses. These findings demonstrate that hypocritical blamers may hold the moral standards that they apply to others.

Statement of Relevance

Hypocrites blame other people for moral violations they themselves have committed. Common perceptions of hypocrites assume they are disingenuous and insincere. However, the mental states and neurocognitive processes underlying hypocritical blamers’ behaviors are not well understood. We showed that people who hypocritically blamed others reported stronger feelings of moral conflict during moral decision-making, had stronger neural responses to moral standards in lateral prefrontal cortex, and exhibited more guilt-related neurocognitive processes associated with harming others. These findings suggest that some hypocritical blamers do care about the moral standards they use to condemn other people but sometimes fail to live up to those standards themselves, contrary to the common philosophical and folk perception.

Discussion

In this study, we developed a laboratory paradigm to precisely quantify hypocritical blame, in which people blame others for committing the same transgressions they committed themselves (Todd, 2019). At the core of this operationalization of hypocrisy is a discrepancy between participants’ moral judgments and their behaviors in a moral decision-making task. Therefore, we measured participants’ choices in an incentivized moral decision-making task that they believed had real impact on their own monetary payoff and painful electric shocks delivered to a receiver. We then compared those choices with moral judgments they made a week later of other people in the same choice context. By comparing participants’ judgments with their own behaviors, we were able to quantify the degree to which they judge other people more harshly for making the same choices they themselves made previously (i.e., hypocritical blame).

A pdf of this research can be found here.