Moral Grandstanding in Public Discourse: Status-seeking Motives as a Potential Explanatory Mechanism in Predicting Conflict in Daily Life

Grubbs, Joshua, Brandon Warmke, Justin Tosi, and Alicia S. James. 2019. “Moral Grandstanding in Public Discourse: Status-seeking Motives as a Potential Explanatory Mechanism in Predicting Conflict.” PsyArXiv. April 5. doi:10.31234/osf.io/gnaj5

Abstract: Public discourse is often caustic and conflict-filled. This trend seems to be particularly evident when the content of such discourse is around moral issues (broadly defined) and when the discourse occurs on social media. Several explanatory mechanisms for such conflict have been explored in recent psychological and social-science literatures. The present work sought to examine a potentially novel explanatory mechanism defined in philosophical literature: Moral Grandstanding. According to philosophical accounts, Moral Grandstanding is the use of moral talk to seek social status.  For the present work, we conducted five studies, using two undergraduate samples (Study 1, N = 361; Study 2, N = 356); an sample matched to U.S. norms for age, gender, race, income, Census region (Study 3, N = 1,063); a YouGov sample matched to U.S. demographic norms (Study 4, N = 2,000); and a brief, one-month longitudinal study of Mechanical Turk workers in the U.S. (Study 5 , Baseline N = 499, follow-up n = 296). Across studies, we found initial support for the validity of Moral Grandstanding as a construct. Specifically, moral grandstanding was associated with status-seeking personality traits, as well as greater political and moral conflict in daily life.