Tracing the threads: How five moral concerns (especially Purity) help explain culture war attitudes

Koleva, Spassena; Graham, Jesse; Iyer, Ravi; Ditto, Peter H.; Haidt, Jonathan

doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2012.01.006

Cited by 545 publications

(577 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Group consciousness as a skeptic or a believer could be expected to have different political and moral foundations such that U.S. believers would tend to have political preferences for the Democratic Party and endorse liberal moral values (acting with fairness and avoiding harm) and U.S. skeptics would tend to have Republican political preferences and endorse conservative moral values of purity, ingroup loyalty and respect for authority 25 . Specific moral foundations have been shown to underpin individuals' positions towards a range of issues including immigration, abortion, and same-sex marriage 26 as well as religious orientations 27 .…”

Section: Public Division About Climate Change Rooted In Conflicting Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Public division about climate change rooted in conflicting socio-political identities

et al. 2015

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Section: Public Division About Climate Change Rooted In Conflicting Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Public division about climate change rooted in conflicting socio-political identities

et al. 2015

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“…This foundation has been shown to have pervasive effects on political disagreements over topics as diverse as flag-burning, abortion, and same-sex marriage (Koleva et al, 2012). Whenever utilitarian judgments diverge from a feeling that something pure or sacred must be protected, the sanctity foundation may be at work.…”

Section: Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral elevation reduces prejudice against gay men

Lai

Haidt

Nosek

2013

Cognition and Emotion

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Disgust is linked to social evaluation. People with higher disgust sensitivity exhibit more sexual prejudice (Inbar, Pizarro, Knobe, & Bloom, 2009), and inducing disgust increases sexual prejudice (Dasgupta, DeSteno, Williams, & Hunsinger, 2009). We tested whether inducing moral elevation, the theoretical opposite of disgust, would reduce sexual prejudice. In four studies (N = 3,622), we induced elevation with inspiring videos and then measured sexual prejudice with implicit and explicit measures. Compared to control videos that elicited no particular affective state, we found that elevation reduced implicit and explicit sexual prejudice, albeit very slightly.No effect was observed when the target of social evaluation was changed to race (Black-White).Inducing amusement, another positive emotion, did not significantly affect sexual prejudice. We conclude that elevation weakly but reliably reduces prejudice toward gay men.Word count = 131 Keywords = attitudes, prejudice, sexual orientation, elevation, Implicit Association Test ELEVATION REDUCES PREJUDICE 3 Moral Elevation Reduces Prejudice Against Gay Men Emotions alter evaluations of outgroups. Disgust, in particular, is associated with physical and social repulsion from people with physical deformities or disease (Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 2008). Disgust is best understood as an emotion that evolved to protect human beings from pathogens ingested via the mouth. However, in all cultures studied, the elicitors of disgust have expanded to include social elicitors, such as certain classes of people or behaviors (Rozin et al., 2008). Most generally, disgust leads to repulsion from people who engage in behaviors perceived to be morally degrading or inhuman (Schaller & Park, 2011). One class of people commonly treated as disgusting is gay men. Sensitivity to disgust is related to greater sexual prejudice (i.e., negative attitudes toward gay people; Herek, 2009;Inbar, Pizarro, Knobe, & Bloom, 2009). Experimentally induced disgust from unrelated sources leads to increased sexual prejudice (Dasgupta, DeSteno, Williams, & Hunsinger, 2009). Conversely, priming thoughts of gay men leads to greater disgust toward unrelated stimuli (Tapias, Glaser, Keltner, Vasquez, & Wickens, 2007). If inducing disgust can increase sexual prejudice, then inducing the opposite of disgust could decrease sexual prejudice.What is the opposite of disgust? Haidt ( , 2006 suggested that it is moral elevation, an emotion that is elicited by witnessing acts of moral beauty such as charity, gratitude, generosity, or loyalty (Algoe & Haidt, 2009;Haidt, , 2004Keltner & Haidt, 2003). Disgust, including moral disgust, leads people to feel degraded and leads them to close themselves off to others (Rozin et al., 2008). Experiences of elevation, in contrast, lead people to report feeling uplifted, inspired, more open to others, and more motivated to engage in prosocial behavior themselves (Algoe & Haidt, 2009;Schnall, Roper, & Fessler, 2010).While emotion inductions have been used to increase social ...

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“…Specific to the political world, moral foundations have been shown to correspond to ideological preferences ), turnout (Johnson et al, 2014), and attitudes on highly polarized issues including stem-cell research (Clifford and Jerit, 2013), the environment (Feinberg and Willer, 2013), and various "culture war" issues (Koleva et al, 2012). However, while the aforementioned research makes it clear that moral foundations and behavior are correlated, the extent to which moral foundations cause people to adopt certain political attitudes remains an open question.…”

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confidence: 99%

Assessing the contextual stability of moral foundations: Evidence from a survey experiment

Ciuk

2018

Research & Politics

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Moral foundations theory (MFT) claims that individuals use their intuitions on five "virtues" as guidelines for moral judgment, and recent research makes the case that these intuitions cause people to adopt important political attitudes, including partisanship and ideology. New work in political science, however, demonstrates not only that the causal effect of moral foundations on these political predispositions is weaker than once thought, but it also opens the door to the possibility that causality runs in the opposite direction-from political predispositions to moral foundations. In this manuscript, I build on this new work and test the extent to which partisan and ideological considerations cause individuals' moral foundations to shift in predictable ways. The results show that while these group-based cues do exert some influence on moral foundations, the effects of outgroup cues are particularly strong. I conclude that small shifts in political context do cause MFT measures to move, and, to close, I discuss the need for continued theoretical development in MFT as well as an increased attention to measurement.

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Tracing the threads: How five moral concerns (especially Purity) help explain culture war attitudes

Cited by 545 publications

References 23 publications

Public division about climate change rooted in conflicting socio-political identities

Public division about climate change rooted in conflicting socio-political identities

Moral elevation reduces prejudice against gay men

Assessing the contextual stability of moral foundations: Evidence from a survey experiment

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