Morality in everyday life

Abstract

The science of morality has drawn heavily on well-controlled but artificial laboratory settings. To study everyday morality, we repeatedly assessed moral or immoral acts and experiences in a large (N = 1252) sample using ecological momentary assessment. Moral experiences were surprisingly frequent and manifold. Liberals and conservatives emphasized somewhat different moral dimensions. Religious and nonreligious participants did not differ in the likelihood or quality of committed moral and immoral acts. Being the target of moral or immoral deeds had the strongest impact on happiness, whereas committing moral or immoral deeds had the strongest impact on sense of purpose. Analyses of daily dynamics revealed evidence for both moral contagion and moral licensing. In sum, morality science may benefit from a closer look at the antecedents, dynamics, and consequences of everyday moral experience.

Religiosity enhances emotion and deontological choice in moral dilemmas

“…We found that emotion presence was positively predicted by religious feelings, but not other dimensions of religiosity, social desirability and mood. This finding is in line with other studies showing that religious individuals have higher emotional reactivity to moral transgressions (Christensen et al, 2014;Hofmann, Wisneski, Brandt, & Skitka, 2014), but do not clarify whether reactivity is specific to moral dilemmas. Future studies might investigate this issue using control dilemmas that do not involve moral transgressions (e.g., Moll, de Oliveira-Souza, Bramati, & Grafman, 2002).…”

“…Although this ''closed world assumption'' may seem artificial and interfere with personal engagement, dilemmas create a conflict between the need to prioritize social welfare and the aversion towards committing a moral transgression, and have been widely used in moral psychology as an insightful approach to studying the involvement of emotion in moral decision. However, a recently developed methodological alternative is based on experience sampling approaches to everyday moral behavior (Hofmann et al, 2014). Therefore, future studies might consider these methodological alternatives to self-reported religiosity and moral dilemmas.…”

Disgust sensitivity is primarily associated with purity-based moral judgments.

“…For example, constructivist perspectives on emotions suggest that emotions are not specifically tied to moral transgressions in any specific domain (Cameron et al, 2015). In a reanalysis of Hofmann and colleagues' (Hofmann, Wisneski, Brandt, & Skitka, 2014) data, Cameron and colleagues (2015) found that people experience as much disgust in response to purity transgressions as in response to harm transgressions. More directly, Chapman and Anderson (2014) have found that disgust sensitivity relates positively to condemnation of care transgressions, one of the individualizing moral domains.…”

Individual differences in the explicit power motive predict “utilitarian” choices in moral dilemmas, especially when this choice is self-beneficial

“…This means making decisions based on "prescriptive judgements […] pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other" (p.3; Turiel, 1983) in certain moral domains (see Graham et al, 2011). In Western societies, the most prevalent of these moral domains is concerned with caring for or harming other people (Hofmann, Wisneski, Brandt, & Skitka, 2014). For example, a judge might have to decide whether or not to keep a murderer imprisoned, despite eligibility for parole.…”