Moral psychology
[22][23][24] Empirical studies of moral judgment go back at least as far as the 1890s with the work of Frank Chapman Sharp,[25] coinciding with the development of psychology as a discipline separate from philosophy.
[citation needed] Kohlberg proposed six stages broken into three categories of moral reasoning that he believed to be universal to all people in all cultures.
[36] Following the independent publication of a pair of landmark papers in 2001 (respectively led by Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene),[37][38] there was a surge in interest in moral psychology across a broad range of subfields of psychology, with interest shifting away from developmental processes towards a greater emphasis on social, cognitive, affective and neural processes involved in moral judgment.
[42] In 1963, Lawrence Kohlberg presented an approach to studying differences in moral judgment by modeling evaluative diversity as reflecting a series of developmental stages (à la Jean Piaget).
[60][61][62][63] In Unto Others: the Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (1998), Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson demonstrated that diverse moralities could evolve through group selection.
For instance, an adolescent may commit a crime not because of an evil character or a utilitarian calculation but due to following the social heuristic “do what your peers do.” After shifting to a different peer group, the same person's behavior may shift to a more socially desirable outcome – by relying on the very same heuristic.
From this perspective, moral behavior is thus not simply a consequence of inner virtue or traits, but a function of both the mind and the environment, a view based on Simon's scissors analogy.
Psychologist Shalom Schwartz defines individual values as "conceptions of the desirable that guide the way social actors (e.g. organisational leaders, policymakers, individual persons) select actions, evaluate people at events, and explain their actions and evaluations.
Kristiansen and Hotte[82] reviewed many research articles regarding people's values and attitudes and whether they guide behavior.
Lapsley and Narvaez suggest that moral values and actions stem from more than our virtues and are controlled by a set of self-created schemas (cognitive structures that organize related concepts and integrate past events).
[90] The triune ethics meta-theory (TEM) has been proposed by Darcia Narvaez as a metatheory that highlights the relative contributions to moral development of biological inheritance (including human evolutionary adaptations), environmental influences on neurobiology, and the role of culture.
[94] Jean Piaget, in watching children play games, noted how their rationales for cooperation changed with experience and maturation.
[97] According to Kohlberg, an individual is considered more cognitively mature depending on their stage of moral reasoning, which grows as they advance in education and world experience.
The justice perspective draws attention to inequality and oppression, while striving for reciprocal rights and equal respect for all.
[99][100] In fact, in neo-Kohlbergian studies with the Defining Issues Test, females tend to get slightly higher scores than males.
In looking at the relations between moral values, attitudes, and behaviors, previous research asserts that there is less correspondence between these three aspects than one might assume.
Social situations and the different categories of norms can be telling of when people may act in accordance with their values, but this still is not concrete either.
Building on earlier work by Metcalfe and Mischel on delayed gratification,[130] Baumeister, Miller, and Delaney explored the notion of willpower by first defining the self as being made up of three parts: reflexive consciousness, or the person's awareness of their environment and of himself as an individual; interpersonal being, which seeks to mold the self into one that will be accepted by others; and executive function.
[132] The three prevalent theories of willpower describe it as a limited supply of energy, as a cognitive process, and as a skill that is developed over time.
Moral intuitions happen immediately, automatically, and unconsciously, with reasoning largely serving to generate post-hoc rationalizations to justify one's instinctual reactions.
[135][136] Following the publication of a landmark fMRI study in 2001,[38] Joshua Greene separately proposed his dual process theory of moral judgment, according to which intuitive/emotional and deliberative processes respectively give rise to characteristically deontological and consequentialist moral judgments.
A "deontologist" is someone who has rule-based morality that is mainly focused on duties and rights; in contrast, a "consequentialist" is someone who believes that only the best overall consequences ultimately matter.
[140] This development began with a focus on empathy and guilt, but has since moved on to encompass new scholarship on emotions such as anger, shame, disgust, awe, and elevation.
[147] Perceived universality refers to the notion that individuals experience moral mandates as transcending persons and cultures; additionally, they are regarded as matters of fact.
Individuals prefer greater social and physical distance from attitudinally dissimilar others when moral conviction was high.
Skitka, Bauman, and Sargis placed participants in either attitudinally heterogeneous or homogenous groups to discuss procedures regarding two morally mandated issues, abortion and capital punishment.
[155][156][157][158][159] For example Peter Singer, citing Haidt's work on social intuitionism and Greene's dual process theory, presented an "evolutionary debunking argument" suggesting that the normative force of our moral intuitions is undermined by their being the "biological residue of our evolutionary history.
[161][page needed] As a further example, Shaun Nichols (2004) examines how empirical data on psychopathology suggests that moral rationalism is false.
[168] This study points out that compared to the global average, people from WEIRD societies are more inclined toward individualism and impersonal prosocial behaviors while showing less traditionalism and group loyalty.
Contrary to the 1990s dream of an egalitarian internet providing honest and accurate information to all, various tech billionaires and politicians have highly succeeded in leveraging AI for their own purposes of surveillance and control, for tolerating systematic misinformation for profit, and for increasing their individual power to the detriment of a democracy.
