Linking Judging Moral to Acting Moral: A Relational Motivations Approach to Judging and Practicing Covid-19 Behaviors.

Building on the Relational Motivation Theory, the present research argues that relational motivations (RM) underlie both the regulation and the moral judgment of socially (un)responsive Covid-19 behaviors (e.g., physical distancing) and links these two via moral identity. We hypothesize that different types of socially unresponsive behaviors are judged morally wrong through perceptions of RM violations and that a stronger concern for unity predicts the extent to which individuals self-report to perform socially responsive Covid-19 behaviors. Additionally, the role of moral identity as an individual-level moderator variable linking perceptions about RM violation to the practice of Covid-19 responsible behaviors is explored. The results support the predictions with data collected from participants living in Turkey and the USA. In both cultures, socially unresponsive Covid-19 behaviors of others were judged morally wrong through RMs, plus individuals' general concern for unity predicted their self-reported socially responsive Covid-19 behaviors. Additionally, for the sample from Turkey, results revealed that the general concern for unity was positively associated with self-reported tendencies to perform Covid-19 socially responsive behaviors only among individuals with a low or moderate moral identity, but not when moral identity was high.

Cognitive processes in imaginative moral shifts: How judgments of morally unacceptable actions change.

How do people come to consider a morally unacceptable action, such as "a passenger in an airplane does not want to sit next to a Muslim passenger and so he tells the stewardess the passenger must be moved to another seat", to be less unacceptable? We propose they tend to imagine counterfactual alternatives about how things could have been different that transform the unacceptable action to be less unacceptable. Five experiments identify the cognitive processes underlying this imaginative moral shift: an action is judged less unacceptable when people imagine circumstances in which it would have been moral. The effect occurs for immediate counterfactuals and reflective ones, but is greater when participants create an immediate counterfactual first, and diminished when they create a reflective one first. The effect also occurs for unreasonable actions. We discuss the implications for alternative theories of the mental representations and cognitive processes underlying moral judgments.

People respond with different moral emotions to violations in different relational models: A cross-cultural comparison.

Consonant with a functional view of moral emotions, we argue that morality is best analyzed within relationships rather than in individuals, and use Fiske's (1992) theory of relational models (RMs: communal sharing [CS], authority ranking [AR], equality matching [EM], and market pricing [MP]) to predict that violations in different RMs will arouse different intensities of other-blaming emotions (anger, contempt and disgust) in both observers and victims, together with different intensities of self-blaming emotions (shame and guilt) in perpetrators, and to predict that these patterns of emotion will show similarity across both individuals and cultures. Three studies, using vignettes portraying moral violations in all RMs in different experimental designs, supported these expectations, while also producing some unexpected results. The intensity of shame and guilt varied markedly across RMs, but with little difference between the two emotions. The intensity of all 3 other-blaming emotions also varied across RMs. Anger was the most intense emotional response to violation in all RMs, whereas disgust and contempt were stronger in CS than in other RMs. Disgust and shame were linked more strongly in CS than in other RMs, and anger and guilt were more strongly linked than other emotion pairs in EM. Moral emotions in RMs involving hierarchy (AR and MP) differed widely depending on the perpetrator's dominant or subordinate status. Both Turkish (TR) and English-speaking (EN) samples showed similar patterns of all moral emotions across RMs. Understanding the functions of moral emotions in relationships using relational models can help to clarify multiple aspects of moral psychology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Beyond harmfulness and impurity: Moral wrongness as a violation of relational motivations.

Building on Rai and Fiske's (2011) Relationship Regulation Theory, we argue that violation of relational motives will predict the perception of the moral wrongness of moral transgressions better than violation of harmlessness or purity. We also argue that "metarelational threat" plays an important role in determining the degree of moral wrongness of a particular act. To test our propositions, we conducted 6 studies, 3 with Turkish and American respondents. Scenarios where a relational component was present were perceived as more morally relevant (Study 1, N = 199). We found that relational motive violations predicted perceived moral wrongness better than violations of harmlessness or purity (Study 2, N = 261) and that metarelational threat partially mediated this relationship (Study 3, N = 357). Turkish participants generally based their judgments on the principle of unity, whereas the Americans tended to base theirs on the principle of equality. Study 4 (N = 138) confirmed the key findings and indicated that harmfulness was not related to moral wrongness when relational motive violation was low, but it did predict perceptions of moral wrongness when relational motivation was high. Study 5 (N = 152), by contrast, showed that harmfulness and impurity were superior to violations of relational motives in predicting the perceived moral wrongness of severe harmful and impure behaviors. Study 6 (N = 134) addressed this inconsistency and confirmed that relational motivations matter for perceptions of moral wrongness. Implications of the current research for understanding morality are discussed, and avenues for future research are recommended. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).