Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity

How and why do moral judgments vary across the political spectrum? To test moral foundations theory (J. Haidt & J. Graham, 2007; J. Haidt & C. Joseph, 2004), the authors developed several ways to measure people's use of 5 sets of moral intuitions: Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity. Across 4 studies using multiple methods, liberals consistently showed greater endorsement and use of the Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity foundations compared to the other 3 foundations, whereas conservatives endorsed and used the 5 foundations more equally. This difference was observed in abstract assessments of the moral relevance of foundation-related concerns such as violence or loyalty (Study 1), moral judgments of statements and scenarios (Study 2), "sacredness" reactions to taboo trade-offs (Study 3), and use of foundation-related words in the moral texts of religious sermons (Study 4). These findings help to illuminate the nature and intractability of moral disagreements in the American "culture war."

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Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations

Meanwhile, the authors' antidote to the American sicknessa quest for democratic community that draws on our diverse civic and religious traditionshas contributed to a vigorous scholarly and popular debate. Attention has been focused on forms of social organization, be it civil society, democratic communitarianism, or associative democracy, that can humanize the market and the administrative state. In their new Introduction the authors relate the argument of their book both to the current realities of American society and to the growing debate about the country's future. With this new edition one of the most influential books of recent times takes on a new immediacy.\

Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life

The seven articles in this issue, and the accompanying meta-analysis in Health Psychology Review [McEachan, R.R.C., Conner, M., Taylor, N., & Lawton, R.J. (2011). Prospective prediction of health-related behaviors with the theory of planned behavior: A meta-analysis. Health Psychology Review, 5, 97–144], illustrate the wide application of the theory of planned behaviour [Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50, 179–211] in the health domain. In this editorial, Ajzen reflects on some of the issues raised by the different authors. Among the topics addressed are the nature of intentions and the limits of predictive validity; rationality, affect and emotions; past behaviour and habit; the prototype/willingness model; and the role of such background factors as the big five personality traits and social comparison tendency.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08870446.2011.613995

The theory of planned behaviour: reactions and reflections

As reflected in the amount of controversy, few areas in psychology have undergone such dramatic conceptual changes in the past decade as the emerging science of heuristics. Heuristics are efficient cognitive processes, conscious or unconscious, that ignore part of the information. Because using heuristics saves effort, the classical view has been that heuristic decisions imply greater errors than do “rational” decisions as defined by logic or statistical models. However, for many decisions, the assumptions of rational models are not met, and it is an empirical rather than an a priori issue how well cognitive heuristics function in an uncertain world. To answer both the descriptive question (“Which heuristics do people use in which situations?”) and the prescriptive question (“When should people rely on a given heuristic rather than a complex strategy to make better judgments?”), formal models are indispensable. We review research that tests formal models of heuristic inference, including in business organizations, health care, and legal institutions. This research indicates that (a) individuals and organizations often rely on simple heuristics in an adaptive way, and (b) ignoring part of the information can lead to more accurate judgments than weighting and adding all information, for instance for low predictability and small samples. The big future challenge is to develop a systematic theory of the building blocks of heuristics as well as the core capacities and environmental structures these exploit.

/pdf/heuristic-decision-making-4yjobmwu4i.pdf

Heuristic Decision Making

Inferences about moral character may often drive outrage over symbolic acts of racial bigotry. Study 1 demonstrates a theoretically predicted dissociation between moral evaluations of an act and the person who carries out the act. Although Americans regarded the private use of a racial slur as a less blameworthy act than physical assault, use of a slur was perceived as a clearer indicator of poor moral character. Study 2 highlights the dynamic interplay between moral judgments of acts and persons, demonstrating that first making person judgments can bias subsequent act judgments. Privately defacing a picture of Martin Luther King, Jr. led to greater moral condemnation of the agent than of the act itself only when the behavior was evaluated first. When Americans first made character judgments, symbolically defacing a picture of the civil rights leader was significantly more likely to be perceived as an immoral act. These studies support a person-centered account of outrage over bigotry and demonstrate that moral evaluations of acts and persons converge and diverge under theoretically meaningful circumstances.

When actions speak volumes: The role of inferences about moral character in outrage over racial bigotry

Win-win: Female and male athletes from more gender equal nations perform better in international sports competitions

sunstein's review of research on moral heuristics is rich and informative – even without his central claim that individuals often commit moral errors. we question the value of positing such a normative moral framework for the study of moral judgment. we also propose an alternative standard for evaluating moral judgments – that of subjective rationality.

Do normative standards advance our understanding of moral judgment

In the field study reported here (N = 222,924), we found that Germans with noble-sounding surnames, such as Kaiser ("emperor"), Konig ("king"), and Furst ("prince"), more frequently hold managerial positions than Germans with last names that either refer to common everyday occupations, such as Koch ("cook"), Bauer ("farmer"), and Becker/Backer ("baker"), or do not refer to any social role. This phenomenon occurs despite the fact that noble-sounding surnames never indicated that the person actually held a noble title. Because of basic properties of associative cognition, the status linked to a name may spill over to its bearer and influence his or her occupational outcomes.

It Pays to Be Herr Kaiser Germans With Noble-Sounding Surnames More Often Work as Managers Than as Employees

There is a compelling simplicity to the theoretical approach to moral judgment proposed by Gray, Young, and Waytz (this issue; henceforth GYW). On their approach, all that is needed to account for ...

http://socialjudgments.com/docs/Pizarro_Tannenbaum_Uhlmann_2012.pdf

Eric Luis Uhlmann

Papers

When actions speak volumes: The role of inferences about moral character in outrage over racial bigotry

Win-win: Female and male athletes from more gender equal nations perform better in international sports competitions

Do normative standards advance our understanding of moral judgment

It Pays to Be Herr Kaiser Germans With Noble-Sounding Surnames More Often Work as Managers Than as Employees

Mindless, Harmless, and Blameworthy