People often justify their moral opinions by referring to larger moral concerns (e. g., “It is unfair if homosexuals are not allowed to marry!” vs. “Letting homosexuals marry is against our traditions!”). Is there a general agreement about what concerns apply to different moral opinions? We used surveys in the United States and the United Kingdom to measure the perceived applicability of eight concerns (harm, violence, fairness, liberty, authority, ingroup, purity, and governmental overreach) to a wide range of moral opinions. Within countries, argument applicability scores were largely similar whether they were calculated among women or men, among young or old, among liberals or conservatives, or among people with or without higher education. Thus, the applicability of a given moral concern to a specific opinion can be viewed as an objective quality of the opinion, largely independent of the population in which it is measured. Finally, we used similar surveys in Israel and Brazil to establish that this independence of populations also extended to populations in different countries. However, the extent to which this holds across cultures beyond those included in the current study is still an open question.

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We propose a model of moral policy opinion formation that integrates both ideology and cognitive ability. The link from people’s ideology to their opinions is assumed to go via a semantic processing of moral arguments that relies on the individual’s cognitive ability. An implication of this model is that the relative quality of arguments that justify supporting vs. opposing a moral policy - the policy’s “argument advantage” - is key to how opinions will be distributed in the population and develop over time. To test this implication, we combine polling data with measures of the argument advantage for 35 moral policies. Consistent with the opinion formation model, the argument advantage of a moral policy accounts for how public opinion moves over time, and how support for the policy ideologies varies across different ideological groups and levels of cognitive ability, including a strong interaction between ideology and cognitive ability.

Hygiene norms in Sweden are generally loose compared to most other countries. Does this looseness affect the hygiene norms among people who immigrate to Sweden from other countries? In a study of hygiene norms among immigrants to Sweden, the change in the physical environment and material living conditions, acculturation to Swedish culture and norms, and selection effects were all expected to lead immigrant hygiene norms to be closer to Swedish looseness. However, in a sample of 447 immigrants from 12 different countries, immigrants reported hygiene norms that were even stricter than those found in their countries of origin. We propose an explanation based on a combination of uncertainty about prevailing hygiene norms and the social risk and stigma associated with being perceived as unhygienic. We conclude that acculturation processes may rely on mechanisms that are domain specific.