Interrogating Moral Norms

Abstract

Research in three parts used behavioral methods and fMRI to shed light on the nature of moral norms and situate them within a broader understanding of how people deploy cognition to navigate the social world. Results revealed that moral norms in two clusters: {1} “universal-rights norms” (i.e., values focused on universal rights to be unharmed and treated as an equal); and {2} “group-elevating norms” (i.e., loyalty, reciprocity, obedience to authority, and concern about purity) predicted prosocial and antisocial moral judgments, interpersonal orientations, and behaviors through cognitive mechanisms including representations of causation and theory of mind (ToM). Five studies reported in Part 1 demonstrated that universal-rights norms were positively associated with prosociality (equal allocations and willingness to help); whereas group-elevating norms were robustly positively associated with antisocial interpersonal orientations (Machiavellianism and Social Dominance Orientation). Three studies in Part 2 showed that group-elevating norms predicted antisocial moral judgments including stigmatization and blame of victims. In contrast, universal-rights values were associated with sensitivity to victims’ suffering and blame of perpetrators. Experimentally manipulating moral focus off of victims and onto perpetrators reduced victim-blaming by reducing perceptions of victims as causal and increasing perceptions of victims as forced. Effects of group-elevating norms on victim-blaming were likewise mediated by perceptions of victim causality and forcedness, suggesting that intervening on focus constitutes one way to modulate effects of moral norms on moral judgments. Four studies in Part 3 examined moral diversity within the domain of fairness and revealed that group-elevating and universal-rights norms are differentially reflected in conceptions of fairness as reciprocity, charity, and impartiality. Reciprocity and charity warranted being clustered together as person-based fairness due to their shared motivational basis in consideration of the unique states of individuals and emotion, and their robust, overlapping recruitment of neural activity indicative of ToM in PC, VMPFC and DMPFC. Impartiality, which favored no particular individual, constituted person-blind fairness, due to its reliance on standard procedures rather than the unique states of individuals or emotion, and its failure to recruit PC, VMPFC and DMPFC. In terms of fairness and moral praiseworthiness, these three allocative processes cleaved along a different line. Person-blind impartiality was rated most fair and highly moral, and person-based fairness broke apart into: charity, deemed highly moral and labeled by the most empathic participants as fair; and reciprocity, which was lowest in fairness and moral praiseworthiness ratings and most esteemed by Machiavellian individuals and those who made a greater number of self-interested allocations. Enhanced activity in LTPJ for unfairness generally, and in judgment of reciprocity in particular, pointed to a role for ToM in moral evaluation of these different conceptions of fairness. Findings across Parts 1-3 have meta-ethical implications. Reduced endorsement of universal-rights norms and increased endorsement of group-elevating norms conferred risk for antisocial judgments, interpersonal orientations and behaviors, suggesting that universal-rights norms and group-elevating norms may differ in their capacity to produce moral outcomes. Results demonstrating a role for ToM and representations of causality in the effects of moral norms on moral judgments deserve focus in future research. It will be important to determine how deeply moral values imbed into individuals’ cognitive architecture, and the extent to which effects of moral values can be modulated via interventions on basic cognition.