1 / 19

Moral Disengagement and Morality Shifting

This study delves into how moral outrage can lead to shifts in morality, impacting intergroup relations. Strategies like euphemistic labeling and dehumanization play a role in preventing outrage. From moral disengagement to shifting morality, the narrative of events can change to justify actions. The complex interplay of harm, fairness, loyalty, and authority shapes moral decision-making. Learn about the Moral Foundation Questionnaire and Morality Shifting Hypothesis, and explore how reminders of ingroup atrocities can shift moral principles. Through two studies, explicit and implicit morality shifting is examined. The findings provide deep insights but also raise questions about addressing moral challenges.

irwina
Download Presentation

Moral Disengagement and Morality Shifting

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. How not to Feel Outraged:Moral Disengagement and Morality Shifting Emanuele Castano & Bernhard Leidner New School for Social Research, New York

  2. “Moral outrage for ingroup-committed atrocities fosters restorative and retributive justice, and it is thus beneficial to intergroup relations” Questionable: • Acknowledging ingroup misconduct may fuel resentment • The ingroup takes priority over “justice”

  3. Moral Outrage is Prevented by Moral Disengagement Strategies • Euphemistic labeling (e.g., collateral damage) • Advantageous comparisons (e.g., Srebrenica) • Moral justification (e.g., battle against evil) • Dehumanization (moral exclusion; deligitimization)

  4. Dehumanization of One’s Victims (Castano & Giner-Sorolla, 2006) • British and the Australian Aborigines • White Americans and the Native Americans • Humans and Aliens • DV: Infra-humanization

  5. Collective guilt and reparations

  6. From Moral Disengagement to Morality Shifting

  7. Moral Disengagement changes the meaning of the events so that the morality principle does not apply • They are justified, explained, etc. • Morality Shifting changes the morality principle at work • Is abortion about women’s right or about the value of life?

  8. Morality / Moralities (Haidt and Graham, 2007) • Harm – do not do harm • Fairness – treat others fairly and justly • Loyalty – make sure your people benefit • Authority – obedience and conformity (to ingroup authorities)

  9. Harm & Fairness • Default; intuitive; most important; most frequently applied (Haidt and Graham, 2007; Kohlberg, 1969, 1971; Miller, 2006, 2007; Shweder, 1982; Turiel, 1983; Smetana et al., 1984)

  10. Moral Foundation Questionnaire • the extent to which various considerations (e.g., whether or not someone was harmed) are generally relevant to one’s decision of whether something is right or wrong. • moral statements (e.g., It can never be right to kill a human being), with which one agrees or disagrees to a different extent.

  11. Morality Shifting Hypothesis • Reminders of ingroup atrocities prompt a shift from the default morality principles of harm & fairness to loyalty & authority • Relative importance of these principles • Relative accessibility of words related to these principles

  12. Study 1 - Explicit Morality Shifting • Participants (N=140) are U.S. born citizens • Manipulation: U.S. or Australian military personnel perpetrating atrocities in Iraq • Summary of the article • DV: Allegedly unrelated questionnaire on personal opinion – the MFQ (factors’ α 65-75)

  13. Study 1 - Explicit Morality Shifting/MFQ scores (standardized)

  14. Study 2 – Implicit Morality Shifting/LDT (standardized) – high scores = low accessibility

  15. So what? • Very sophisticated ways to show how things work. Yet, extremely reticent to engage in a debate about solutions • Exonerating cognition: Ingroup atrocities experiments; moral vs. pragmatic arguments against torture • Recommendations • Incentives (focus of publication process and outlets) • Immodesty.

  16. END

More Related