Moral foundations theory, political identity, and the depiction of morality in children's movies.

Children's movies often provide messages about morally appropriate and inappropriate conduct. In two studies, we draw on Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) to derive predictions about actual depictions of morality, and people's preferences for different moral depictions, within children's movies. According to MFT, people's moral concerns include individualizing foundations of care and fairness and binding foundations of loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Prior work reveals that although there are political differences in the endorsement of these two broad categories-whereby stronger political conservatism predicts stronger binding concerns and weaker individualizing concerns-there nonetheless is broad agreement across political identity in the importance of individualizing concerns. We therefore predicted that heroes would value individualizing foundations more than villains, and that despite political differences in preferences for moral messages, there would be more agreement in the importance of messages promoting individualizing concerns. In Study 1, we coded heroes and villains from popular children's movies for their valuation of moral foundations. Heroes valued individualizing concerns more, and binding concerns less, than villains did. Participants in Study 2 considered moral dilemmas faced by children's movie characters, and rated their preferences for resolutions that promoted either individualizing or binding foundations. Although liberals preferred individualizing-promoting resolutions and conservatives preferred binding-promoting resolutions, there was stronger agreement across political identity in the importance of individualizing concerns. Despite political differences in moral preferences, popular depictions of children's movie characters and people's self-reported moral endorsement suggest a shared belief in the importance of the individualizing moral virtues of care and fairness. Movies are often infused with moral messages. From their exploration of overarching themes, their ascription of particular traits to heroic and villainous characters, and their resolution of pivotal moral dilemmas, movies provide viewers with depictions of morally virtuous (and morally suspect) behavior. Moral messaging in children's movies is of particular importance, since it is targeted at an audience for which morality is actively developing. What moral messages do filmmakers (and consumers, including parents) want children's movies to depict? Are these preferences related to people's political identity? And what are the actual moral depictions presented in movies? In the present two studies, we draw on an influential theory of moral judgment-Moral Foundations Theory-to develop and test predictions about the depiction of morality in children's movies.

Asymmetric morality: Blame is more differentiated and more extreme than praise.

Despite extensive recent investigations of moral judgments, little is known about how negative judgments like blame might differ from positive judgments like praise. Drawing on theory from both social and moral cognition, the present studies identify and test potential asymmetries in the extremity and differentiatedness of blame as compared to praise. The amplified blame hypothesis predicts that people will assign greater blame for negative behaviors than praise for positive behaviors. The differentiated blame hypothesis predicts that, as compared to praise judgments, blame judgments will more finely differentiate among distinct mental states that precede action, such as thoughts, desires, and intentions. A series of studies-using varied stimulus sets and samples-together provide robust support for the differentiated blame hypothesis and somewhat weaker support for the amplified blame hypotheses. These results illustrate systematic asymmetries between blame and praise, generally revealing that blame is more extreme and differentiated than praise. Together, the findings reflect the social costs and social regulatory function of moral judgments, suggesting that blame and praise are not mirror images and that blame might be more complex.

Unfounded dumbfounding: How harm and purity undermine evidence for moral dumbfounding.

Two paradigm-shifting ideas have gained widespread influence in current accounts of moral cognition: (a) that moral judgments are pluralistic, extending beyond domains of harm and fairness, and (b) that people's judgments are driven primarily by intuition, such that people are "morally dumbfounded" about the reasons behind their own judgments. An ongoing debate has emerged regarding the former claim of moral pluralism, with opposing sides in disagreement about whether moral judgments are best understood as reflecting multiple moral domains vs. a single moral domain. The current analysis demonstrates that however this debate concerning pluralism is resolved, evidence of moral dumbfounding is undermined. This evidentiary basis for intuitive moral judgment is therefore not well supported, and additional evidence indicates that moral judgments are more reasoned and malleable than the dumbfounding account would allow.

Information-Acquisition Processes in Moral Judgments of Blame.

When people make moral judgments, what information do they look for? Despite its theoretical and practical implications, this question has largely been neglected by prior literature. The recent Path Model of Blame predicts a canonical order in which people acquire information when judging blame. Upon discovering a negative event, perceivers consider information about causality, then intentionality, then (if the event is intentional) reasons or (if the event is unintentional) preventability. Three studies, using two novel paradigms, assessed and found support for these predictions: In constrained (Study 1) and open-ended (Study 2) information-acquisition contexts, participants were most likely, and fastest, to seek information in the canonical order, even when under time pressure (Study 3). These findings indicate that blame relies on a set of information components that are processed in a systematic order. Implications for moral judgment models are discussed, as are potential roles of emotion and motivated reasoning in information acquisition.

Moral judgment as information processing: an integrative review.

How do humans make moral judgments about others' behavior? This article reviews dominant models of moral judgment, organizing them within an overarching framework of information processing. This framework poses two distinct questions: (1) What input information guides moral judgments? and (2) What psychological processes generate these judgments? Information Models address the first question, identifying critical information elements (including causality, intentionality, and mental states) that shape moral judgments. A subclass of Biased Information Models holds that perceptions of these information elements are themselves driven by prior moral judgments. Processing Models address the second question, and existing models have focused on the relative contribution of intuitive versus deliberative processes. This review organizes existing moral judgment models within this framework and critically evaluates them on empirical and theoretical grounds; it then outlines a general integrative model grounded in information processing, and concludes with conceptual and methodological suggestions for future research. The information-processing framework provides a useful theoretical lens through which to organize extant and future work in the rapidly growing field of moral judgment.

Can unintended side effects be intentional? Resolving a controversy over intentionality and morality.

Can an event's blameworthiness distort whether people see it as intentional? In controversial recent studies, people judged a behavior's negative side effect intentional even though the agent allegedly had no desire for it to occur. Such a judgment contradicts the standard assumption that desire is a necessary condition of intentionality, and it raises concerns about assessments of intentionality in legal settings. Six studies examined whether blameworthy events distort intentionality judgments. Studies 1 through 4 show that, counter to recent claims, intentionality judgments are systematically guided by variations in the agent's desire, for moral and nonmoral actions alike. Studies 5 and 6 show that a behavior's negative side effects are rarely seen as intentional once people are allowed to choose from multiple descriptions of the behavior. Specifically, people distinguish between "knowingly" and "intentionally" bringing about a side effect, even for immoral actions. These studies suggest that intentionality judgments are unaffected by a behavior's blameworthiness.

Enough skill to kill: intentionality judgments and the moral valence of action.

Extant models of moral judgment assume that an action's intentionality precedes assignments of blame. Knobe (2003b) challenged this fundamental order and proposed instead that the badness or blameworthiness of an action directs (and thus unduly biases) people's intentionality judgments. His and other researchers' studies suggested that blameworthy actions are considered intentional even when the agent lacks skill (e.g., killing somebody with a lucky shot) whereas equivalent neutral actions are not (e.g., luckily hitting a bull's-eye). The present five studies offer an alternative account of these provocative findings. We suggest that people see the morally significant action examined in previous studies (killing) as accomplished by a basic action (pressing the trigger) for which an unskilled agent still has sufficient skill. Studies 1 through 3 show that when this basic action is performed unskillfully or is absent, people are far less likely to view the killing as intentional, demonstrating that intentionality judgments, even about immoral actions, are guided by skill information. Studies 4 and 5 further show that a neutral action such as hitting the bull's-eye is more difficult than killing and that difficult actions are less often judged intentional. When difficulty is held constant, people's intentionality judgments are fully responsive to skill information regardless of moral valence. The present studies thus speak against the hypothesis of a moral evaluation bias in intentionality judgments and instead document people's sensitivity to subtle features of human action.

Perceiving others' personalities: examining the dimensionality, assumed similarity to the self, and stability of perceiver effects.

In interpersonal perception, "perceiver effects" are tendencies of perceivers to see other people in a particular way. Two studies of naturalistic interactions examined perceiver effects for personality traits: seeing a typical other as sympathetic or quarrelsome, responsible or careless, and so forth. Several basic questions were addressed. First, are perceiver effects organized as a global evaluative halo, or do perceptions of different traits vary in distinct ways? Second, does assumed similarity (as evidenced by self-perceiver correlations) reflect broad evaluative consistency or trait-specific content? Third, are perceiver effects a manifestation of stable beliefs about the generalized other, or do they form in specific contexts as group-specific stereotypes? Findings indicated that perceiver effects were better described by a differentiated, multidimensional structure with both trait-specific content and a higher order global evaluation factor. Assumed similarity was at least partially attributable to trait-specific content, not just to broad evaluative similarity between self and others. Perceiver effects were correlated with gender and attachment style, but in newly formed groups, they became more stable over time, suggesting that they grew dynamically as group stereotypes. Implications for the interpretation of perceiver effects and for research on personality assessment and psychopathology are discussed.