Moral reasoning / In S Thompson-Schill (Ed.), Language & Thought. Volume 3 of Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience

Moral reasoning. Lily Tsoi and Liane Young. In S Thompson-Schill (Ed.), Language & Thought. Volume 3 of Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience (4th ed.). http://moralitylab.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Tsoi_2018_Stevens_moral_reasoning.pdf

Abstract: Understanding people’s minds is essential for effectively navigating our social world. This chapter focuses on the capacity to attribute and reason about minds (theory of mind; ToM) and its role in moral cognition. The section on moral judgment focuses on the circumstances in which people rely on mental states for moral judgments and how ToM may differ depending on the moral domain. We provide a functional explanation for these patterns of mental state reasoning that contrasts the need to regulate interpersonal relations with the need to protect the self. The section on moral behavior focuses on interactions with moral agents (e.g., friends, foes, ingroups, outgroups). We examine how ToM is deployed during two fundamental social contexts (i.e., cooperation and competition) and elaborate on the circumstances in which people fail to consider the minds of others. We end by providing some evidence that ToM can improve interpersonal and intergroup relations.

Key Terms: morality, theory of mind, mentalizing, cooperation, competition, dehumanization, social cognition


Check also: The relevance of moral norms in distinct relational contexts: Purity versus harm norms regulate self-directed actions. James A. Dungan, Alek Chakroff, and Liane Young. PLoS One. 2017; 12(3): e0173405. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5344389/

Abstract: Recent efforts to partition the space of morality have focused on the descriptive content of distinct moral domains (e.g., harm versus purity), or alternatively, the relationship between the perpetrator and victim of moral violations. Across three studies, we demonstrate that harm and purity norms are relevant in distinct relational contexts. Moral judgments of purity violations, compared to harm violations, are relatively more sensitive to the negative impact perpetrators have on themselves versus other victims (Study 1). This pattern replicates across a wide array of harm and purity violations varying in severity (Studies 2 and 3). Moreover, while perceptions of harm predict moral judgment consistently across relational contexts, perceptions of purity predict moral judgment more for self-directed actions, where perpetrators violate themselves, compared to dyadic actions, where perpetrators violate other victims (Study 3). Together, these studies reveal how an action’s content and its relational context interact to influence moral judgment, providing novel insights into the adaptive functions of harm and purity norms.