Rationalization and reflection differentially modulate prior attitudes toward the purity domain

Abstract

Outside Western, predominantly secular-liberal environments, norms restricting bodily and sexual conduct are widespread. Moralization in the socalled purity domain has been treated as evidence that some putative violations are victimless. However, respondents themselves disagree: They often report that private yet indecent acts incur self-harm, or harm to one’s family and the wider community—a result which we replicate in Study 1. We then distinguish two cognitive processes that could generate a link between harmfulness and immorality, and recreate them in Studies 2 and 3: Colombian and British participants were randomly assigned to either reflect (decide whether acts are harmful and reconsider their initial moral judgments) or rationalize (decide whether acts are immoral and reconsider their initial harmfulness beliefs). In both countries, reflection promoted opposition to unjust, but not impure, behavior. Additionally, in both countries, ruminating on the moral status of impure acts elevated beliefs in the acts’ harmfulness. We conclude by suggesting that rationalization aggravates, while reflection mitigates, intergroup disagreement regarding putative violations of purity and decency.

RETRACTED: Beyond moral dilemmas: The role of reasoning in five categories of utilitarian judgment

“…Moreover, this correlation has been confirmed as robust by a recent meta-analysis (Hannikainen et al, 2020). On the manipulation side, Paxton, Ungar, and found that presenting participants with a strong argument in favor of tolerance and giving them time to deliberate leads them to be more tolerant of harmless violation, while Hannikainen and Rosas (2019) found that forcing participants to reflect on whether an action is harmful or not leads them to become more tolerant of harmless violation. Although these results show that reflection can sometimes lead to more utilitarian judgments when participants are nudged towards the utilitarian conclusion by considerations specifically relevant to utilitarian judgment, they do not show that reflection preferentially leads to utilitarian judgment in less specific contexts.…”

Väyrysen ja Kääriäisen korkean profiilin aika 1981‒1991. Keskustan historia 6

“…776 Jossain määrin julkiset palvelut ja sen myötä työpaikat lisääntyivät yhä 1980-luvulla, mutta edelliseen vuosikymmeneen verrattuna vähän. 777 Keskustapuolueen kannalta tilanne oli erityisen haastava. Puolueen kivijalka, aluepolitiikka, oli ongelmissa, ja samaan aikaan pääkaupunkiseudulle tarvittiin ilmiselvästi lisää resursseja.…”