The Intergroup Value Protection Model: A Theoretically Integrative and Dynamic Approach to Intergroup Conflict Escalation in Democratic Societies.

SCIENTIFIC ABSTRACT: We review social-psychological evidence for a theoretically integrative and dynamic model of intergroup conflict escalation within democratic societies. Viewing individuals as social regulators who protect their social embeddedness (e.g., in their group or in society), the intergroup value protection model (IVPM) integrates key insights and concepts from moral and group psychology (e.g., group identification, outrage, moralization, protest) into a functional intergroup value protection process. The model assumes that social regulators are continuously looking for information diagnostic of the outgroup's intentions to terminate the relationship with the ingroup, and that their specific cognitive interpretations of an outgroup's action (i.e., as a violation of ingroup or shared values) trigger this process. The visible value-protective responses of one group can trigger the other group's value-protective responses, thus dynamically increasing chances of conflict escalation. We discuss scientific implications of integrating moral and group psychology and practical challenges for managing intergroup conflict within democratic societies. PUBLIC ABSTRACT: The 2021 Capitol Hill attack exemplifies a major "trigger event" for different groups to protect their values within a democratic society. Which specific perceptions generate such a triggering event, which value-protective responses does it trigger, and do such responses escalate intergroup conflict? We offer the intergroup value protection model to analyze the moral and group psychology of intergroup conflict escalation in democratic societies. It predicts that when group members cognitively interpret another group's actions as violating ingroup or shared values, this triggers the intergroup value protection process (e.g., increased ingroup identification, outrage, moralization, social protest). When such value-protective responses are visible to the outgroup, this can in turn constitute a trigger event for them to protect their values, thus increasing chances of intergroup conflict escalation. We discuss scientific implications and practical challenges for managing intergroup value conflict in democratic societies, including fears of societal breakdown and scope for social change.

"I enjoy the good foods, all of which are not good for me." The categorization and moralization of food.

Intuitive eating emphasizes eating in response to physiological cues of hunger and satiety and is associated with multiple positive health outcomes. Unconditional permission to eat (UPE), a domain of intuitive eating, encourages removing food classifications and permission to eat all foods. However, the categorization of food is described as a method to simplify decision making and moralization of foods can help prioritize food items in consumption. Thus, we were interested in understanding how foods are labeled and applied, the moralization of foods, and how individuals with low UPE labeled and moralize foods. Using Prolific Academic, we recruited 49 adults 18 years and older living in the United States to complete an online survey and interview. The survey assessed intuitive eating (IES-2) and the interview explored what and how participants eat and their thoughts and feelings about their body. Participants frequently used multiple labels when talking about foods. Healthy and unhealthy were common and offered a rationale for consumption, emotions were used to label foods, and taste and cost were important to food choice. Participants frequently moralized foods, although three participants explicitly stated they choose not to moralize foods. Individuals reporting low UPE described the importance of restriction and were following strict dietary recommendations. While labeling foods has been proposed to simplify decision-making, the use of labels is highly nuanced and thus understanding the connections between how foods are labeled and behaviors may be highly complex. We suggest future research explore how the categorization and moralization of food are associated with health behaviors and outcomes, how differing definitions of "healthy/unhealthy" foods are associated with behaviors, and the impacts of food insecurity and chronic disease management on food categorization and moralization.

Moral Frames Are Persuasive and Moralize Attitudes; Nonmoral Frames Are Persuasive and De-Moralize Attitudes.

Moral framing and reframing strategies persuade people holding moralized attitudes (i.e., attitudes having a moral basis). However, these strategies may have unintended side effects: They have the potential to moralize people's attitudes further and as a consequence lower their willingness to compromise on issues. Across three experimental studies with adult U.S. participants (Study 1: N = 2,151, Study 2: N = 1,590, Study 3: N = 1,015), we used persuasion messages (moral, nonmoral, and control) that opposed new big-data technologies (crime-surveillance technologies and hiring algorithms). We consistently found that moral frames were persuasive and moralized people's attitudes, whereas nonmoral frames were persuasive and de-moralized people's attitudes. Moral frames also lowered people's willingness to compromise and reduced behavioral indicators of compromise. Exploratory analyses suggest that feelings of anger and disgust may drive moralization, whereas perceiving the technologies to be financially costly may drive de-moralization. The findings imply that use of moral frames can increase and entrench moral divides rather than bridge them.

The Psychology of Moral Conviction.

This review covers theory and research on the psychological characteristics and consequences of attitudes that are experienced as moral convictions, that is, attitudes that people perceive as grounded in a fundamental distinction between right and wrong. Morally convicted attitudes represent something psychologically distinct from other constructs (e.g., strong but nonmoral attitudes or religious beliefs), are perceived as universally and objectively true, and are comparatively immune to authority or peer influence. Variance in moral conviction also predicts important social and political consequences. Stronger moral conviction about a given attitude object, for example, is associated with greater intolerance of attitude dissimilarity, resistance to procedural solutions for conflict about that issue, and increased political engagement and volunteerism in that attitude domain. Finally, we review recent research that explores the processes that lead to attitude moralization; we integrate these efforts and conclude with a new domain theory of attitude moralization.

The dark side of belief in Covid-19 scientists and scientific evidence.

We draw from an interdisciplinary literature on convictions to examine the manifestations and consequences of firmly held beliefs in Covid-19 (C19) science. Across three studies (N = 743), we assess participants' beliefs in C19 experts, and beliefs in supported and unsupported empirical evidence. Study 1 establishes the basic theoretical links and we show that an individual's belief in science on C19 is associated with dispositional belief in science and moralization of C19 mitigation measures. Our subsequent two studies show how stronger belief in C19 science influences distrust in unmasked individuals past the mandates, and greater endorsement of pandemic mitigation authoritarianism. We document the dark side that emerges when belief in C19 science extends beyond the generally desirable scientific literacy and manifests as a conviction that public health experts are the only ones who can handle the pandemic, and that even unsupported claims about C19 are supported by scientific evidence (e.g., risk of outdoor transmission is high). We also highlight our political ideology findings showing that both liberals and conservatives mis-calibrate C19 risks in different ways, and we conclude with discussing how examining the darker side of scientific beliefs can inform our understanding of people's reactions to the pandemic.

Why Men (Don't) Buy Sex: Purity Moralization and Perceived Harm as Constraints on Prostitution Offending.

This study explores the moralization of purity and perceptions of harm as constraints on sex buying among men. Purchasing sex has long been considered an offense against public morality. While personal morality provides a powerful constraint on offending, and people may vary in the extent to which they experience moral intuitions about bodily and spiritual purity, research has so far neglected the role of purity moralization in understanding sex buying behavior. We hypothesize specifically that moral intuitions about purity constrain sex buying by leading people to perceive it as inherently wrong and by eliciting perceptions that sex buying is harmful to prostitutes. We test these hypotheses in a nationally representative survey of U.S. men (N = 2,525). Results indicate that purity moralization is associated with reduced sex buying, and that this relationship is mediated fully by perceptions of sex buying as harming prostitutes.

Moralization and Mismoralization in Public Health.

Moralization is a social-psychological process through which morally neutral issues take on moral significance. Often linked to health and disease, moralization may sometimes lead to good outcomes; yet moralization is often detrimental to individuals and to society as a whole. It is therefore important to be able to identify when moralization is inappropriate. In this paper, we offer a systematic normative approach to the evaluation of moralization. We introduce and develop the concept of 'mismoralization', which is when moralization is metaethically unjustified. In order to identify mismoralization, we argue that one must engage in metaethical analysis of moralization processes while paying close attention to the relevant facts. We briefly discuss one historical example (tuberculosis) and two contemporary cases related to COVID-19 (infection and vaccination status) that we contend to have been mismoralized in public health. We propose a remedy of de-moralization that begins by identifying mismoralization and that proceeds by neutralizing inapt moral content. De-moralization calls for epistemic and moral humility. It should lead us to pull away from our tendency to moralize-as individuals and as social groups-whenever and wherever moralization is unjustified.

Incidental disgust does not cause moral condemnation of neutral actions.

Emotivism in moral psychology holds that making moral judgements is at least partly an affective process. Three emotivist hypotheses can be distinguished: the elicitation hypothesis (that moral transgressions elicit emotions); the amplification hypothesis (that disgust amplifies moral judgments); and the moralisation hypothesis (that affect moralises the non-moral). Even though the moralisation hypothesis is the strongest and most radical form of emotivism, it has not been systematically experimentally tested. Most previous studies have used as stimuli morally wrong actions, and thus they cannot answer whether disgust is sufficient to moralise an otherwise neutral action. In Experiment 1 (N = 87) we tested the effect of incidental disgust on morally neutral scenarios, and in Experiment 2 (N = 510) the differential effect of disgust on neutral and wrong scenarios. The results did not support either the moralisation or the amplification hypothesis. Instead, Bayesian analyses provided substantial evidence for the null hypothesis that incidental disgust does not affect moral ratings. The results are in line with a recent meta-analysis suggesting that disgust has no effect on moral ratings.

Child Sexual Abuse and the Moralization of Purity.

Recent studies were able to associate disgust with the moral domain of purity, as well as a heightened sensitivity to disgust with sexual victimization. However, no empirical evidence has yet to document the exact relation between sexual victimization and its impact on the moralization of purity. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine the relationship between child sexual abuse (CSA) and the moral domain of purity, by means of judgments toward three different types of disgust: pathogen, sexual and moral. To test this, The Three Domains of Disgust Scale (TDDS) was given to both CSA participants (n = 29) and to a non-sexually abused population (N-SAP; n = 31). . Results have shown a statistically significant difference between the CSA and N-SAP groups on the combined dependent variables (i.e., pathogen, sexual and moral disgust). However, only the sexual disgust domain, out of the other two domains has been found to hold significance. Furthermore, consistent with previous empirical findings, similar gender patterns of moral judgments have been found between the two groups (i.e., CSA and N-SAP), though with a statistical significance only in the sexual domain. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Reconsidering the Moralization of Health: Practices Versus Concepts, and What We Can Learn from Evidence-based Research.

This article aims to do two things. First, it argues that moralization of health occurs not only at the practical level of individual healthcare choices and health states, but also at the conceptual level of health itself. This is most evident in cases where the concept of health is presumed to possess the property of "overridingness" when compared to competing values and norms, that is, when it is treated as taking precedence over other values and norms it may come into conflict with. Second, the article makes a case for being critically skeptical of specific deployments of the concept of health when it has been moralized in this way. In such cases, what typically results is that some other personal value/norm, or set of values/norms, held by the individual is treated as intrinsically at odds with the concept of health, which is presumed, uncritically, to be superior, often because it is taken to be free-standing and self-justifying. Yet, a growing body of evidence-based research suggests that the role played by dimensions of personal meaningfulness in the quality of individuals' overall health is quite underappreciated. It is useful to think of these dimensions of personal meaning and significance as representing the individual's values. Thus, taking these data more seriously ought to lead to a reevaluation of the moralization of health at the conceptual level. In the first place, it is not obvious that if the concept of health runs afoul of other values/norms held by an individual, the latter should automatically yield. In the second place, they suggest that other values/norms held by an individual are not necessarily intrinsically opposed to the concept of health, but in fact may go a good distance in support of it.

Responsibility, planning and risk management: moralizing everyday finance through financial education.

The individualization, privatization and marketization of risk management represent a fundamental dimension of the financialization of everyday life. As individuals are required to engage with financial products and services as the main way of protecting themselves from risks and uncertainties, their economic welfare and security are construed as depending largely on their own financial decisions. Within this setting, the concept of financial literacy and accompanying practices of financial education have emerged as a prominent institutional field handling the formulation and communication of the attributes and dispositions that arguably constitute the proper financial actor. This article analyzes financial education programmes currently conducted by state agencies in Israel, examining the notions and principles they articulate when defining and explaining proper financial conduct. The study indicates that moral themes and categories occupy a salient place in the formulation of the character traits that constitute the desired literate financial actor. Notions of individual responsibility, planning ahead and rational risk management are presented not merely as instrumental resources, but as moral imperatives. Through these notions, the programmes moralize a broad array of everyday practices of personal finance such as saving, investing, borrowing and budget management, thereby connecting the sphere of financial matters to the domain of moral virtues. Offering a representation of particular modes of financial conduct as constitutive components of morally virtuous personhood, these practices imbue the financial field as a whole, especially its current generalized logic of individualized and marketized risk management, with moral meanings, hence contributing to the normalization and depoliticization of the financialization of everyday life.

High economic inequality is linked to greater moralization.

Throughout the 21st century, economic inequality is predicted to increase as we face new challenges, from changes in the technological landscape to the growing climate crisis. It is crucial we understand how these changes in inequality may affect how people think and behave. We propose that economic inequality threatens the social fabric of society, in turn increasing moralization-that is, the greater tendency to employ or emphasize morality in everyday life-as an attempt to restore order and control. Using longitudinal data from X, formerly known as Twitter, our first study demonstrates that high economic inequality is associated with greater use of moral language online (e.g. the use of words such as "disgust", "hurt", and "respect'). Study 2 then examined data from 41 regions around the world, generally showing that higher inequality has a small association with harsher moral judgments of people's everyday actions. Together these findings demonstrate that economic inequality is linked to the tendency to see the world through a moral lens.

In masks we trust: explicit and implicit reactions to masked faces vary by political orientation.

Previous studies in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic indicated that wearing a medical-style mask affects whether a stranger's face is judged as more trustworthy, socially desirable, or likely to be ill. However, given political controversies around mask use, these effects might vary by political orientation. In a pre-registered online experiment, we measured evaluations of trustworthiness, social desirability and perceived illness in masked and unmasked faces by 1241 British and US participants. We included questions on political orientation, along with the implicit online-VAAST approach/avoid task to test reaction times to masked/unmasked faces. There was a medium-sized effect of masks on trustworthiness and a significant interaction with political orientation, in that conservatives found masked faces less trustworthy than did liberals. Participants were quicker to approach masked than unmasked faces, but conservatives were relatively slower than liberals. The effects on trustworthiness suggest that differential moralization of novel social norms can affect how their adherents are evaluated in terms of their suitability for social interactions. Furthermore, the congruence between implicit and explicit methods implies that such differences can have deep-seated effects on reactions.

Moralization and self-control strategy selection.

To manage conflicts between temptation and commitment, people use self-control. The process model of self-control outlines different strategies for managing the onset and experience of temptation. However, little is known about the decision-making factors underlying strategy selection. Across three experiments (N = 317), we tested whether the moral valence of a commitment predicts how people advise attentional self-control strategies. In Experiments 1 and 2, people rated attentional focus strategies as significantly more effective for people tempted to break moral relative to immoral commitments, even when controlling for perceived temptation and trait self-control. Experiment 3 showed that as people perceived commitments to have more positive moral valence, they judged attentional focus strategies to be significantly more effective relative to attentional distraction strategies. Moreover, this effect was partly mediated by perceived differences in motivation. These results indicate that moralization informs decision-making processes related to self-control strategy selection.

Reducing economic inequality is 'just right': Moral conviction predicts support for redistributive government policies.

Individuals may support economic redistribution because of practical considerations, but also because they perceive it as morally necessary according to their personal ethical beliefs. Across three studies, we investigated whether attitudes towards reducing economic inequality can be experienced with moral conviction (i.e. perceived as rooted in one's core beliefs about right and wrong) and motivate support for redistributive government policies. In Study 1 (N = 138), reducing economic inequality moral conviction scores were comparable to other highly moralized topics (e.g. euthanasia) and higher than lowly moralized topics (e.g. tattoos). In Study 2 (N = 325) and Study 3 (N = 271), the moral conviction for reducing economic inequality positively predicted support for several redistributive government policies. Additionally, while empathic concern (Study 2 and 3) provided mixed results, structural causal attributions (Study 3) mediated this effect. Therefore, our findings highlight the importance of personal moral significance in understanding what motivates support for redistributive policies.

Moralization and extremism robustly amplify myside sharing.

We explored whether moralization and attitude extremity may amplify a preference to share politically congruent ("myside") partisan news and what types of targeted interventions may reduce this tendency. Across 12 online experiments (N = 6,989), we examined decisions to share news touching on the divisive issues of gun control, abortion, gender and racial equality, and immigration. Myside sharing was systematically observed and was consistently amplified when participants (i) moralized and (ii) were attitudinally extreme on the issue. The amplification of myside sharing by moralization also frequently occurred above and beyond that of attitude extremity. These effects generalized to both true and fake partisan news. We then examined a number of interventions meant to curb myside sharing by manipulating (i) the audience to which people imagined sharing partisan news (political friends vs. foes), (ii) the anonymity of the account used (anonymous vs. personal), (iii) a message warning against the myside bias, and (iv) a message warning against the reputational costs of sharing "mysided" fake news coupled with an interactive rating task. While some of those manipulations slightly decreased sharing in general and/or the size of myside sharing, the amplification of myside sharing by moral attitudes was consistently robust to these interventions. Our findings regarding the robust exaggeration of selective communication by morality and extremism offer important insights into belief polarization and the spread of partisan and false information online.

Attitude Moralization Within Polarized Contexts: An Emotional Value-Protective Response to Dyadic Harm Cues.

Polarization about societal issues involves attitudinal conflict, but we know little about how such conflict transforms into moral conflict. Integrating insights on polarization and psychological value protection, we propose a model that predicts when and how attitude moralization (i.e., when attitudes become grounded in core values) may be triggered and develops within polarized contexts. We tested this model in three experiments (total N = 823) in the context of the polarized Zwarte Piet (blackface) debate in the Netherlands. Specifically, we tested the hypotheses that (a) situational cues to dyadic harm in this context (i.e., an outgroup that is perceived as intentionally inflicting harm onto innocent victims) trigger individuals to moralize their relevant attitude, because of (b) emotional value-protective responses. Findings supported both hypotheses across different regional contexts, suggesting that attitude moralization can emerge within polarized contexts when people are exposed to actions by attitudinal opponents perceived as causing dyadic harm.

Moralizing the COVID-19 Pandemic: Self-Interest Predicts Moral Condemnation of Other's Compliance, Distancing, and Vaccination.

The emergence of the novel coronavirus has put societies under tremendous pressure to instigate massive and rapid behavior change. Throughout history, an effective strategy to facilitate novel behaviors has been to morally condemn those who do not behave in an appropriate way. Accordingly, here, we investigate if complying with the advice of health authorities-for example, to physically distance or vaccinate-has emerged as a moralized issue during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Study 1, we rely on data (N = 94K) from quota-sampled rolling cross-sectional online surveys from eight countries (Denmark, Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, the United Kingdom, and the United States). We find that large majorities find it justified to condemn those who do not keep a distance to others in public and around half of respondents blame ordinary citizens for the severity of the pandemic. Furthermore, we identify the most important predictors of condemnation to be behavior change and personal concern, while institutional trust and social distrust also play large but less consistent roles. Study 2 offers a registered replication of our findings on a representative sample of Britons (N = 1.5K). It shows that both moralization and condemnation of both vaccination and general compliance are best predicted by self-interested considerations.

A Person-Centered Approach to Moralization-The Case of Vaping.

Using e-cigarettes for smoking cessation is a controversial topic among health experts. Evidence suggests that vaping might have been moralized among the general public. Despite the detrimental consequences of moralizing health behaviors on social cohesion and health, some argue for using moralization strategically to prevent and combat vaping. We aim to add to the body of literature showing the dangers of moralization in health by proposing a person-centered approach to the moralization of anti-vaping attitudes. Our cross-sectional survey explores the moralization of anti-vaping attitudes and its predictors on a convenience sample of 348 Romanian never-vapers, before the final vote to severely restrict vaping. By fitting a hierarchical regression model on our data, we found support for a unique contribution of negative prototypes (ß = 0.13) and opinions of vapers (ß = 0.08) in predicting moralization, with significant contributions of piggybacking on moralized self-control, on moralized attitudes toward smoking and on sanctity/degradation, disgust, anger, harm to children, and gender. Together, these variables explained 56% of the variance of the moralization of anti-vaping attitudes. Our findings add to our knowledge of motivated moralization and advise against using moralization in health, suggesting that people may weaponize it to legitimize group dislike.

How food overconsumption has hijacked our notions about eating as a pleasurable activity.

The negative effects of overconsumption of food have been extensively studied, with a focus on overweight and negative food attitudes. In this overview, we argue that this negative perspective has spilled over to food consumption in general, which is in contrast with eating as a pleasurable activity that contributes to people's well-being. We review four areas of research that have recently emerged: (de)moralization of food consumption, moderate eating for pleasure, intuitive and mindful eating, and the social benefits of eating. Throughout these four themes, it becomes clear that there needs to be a clear distinction between overconsumption of food, bearing negative consequences, and normal levels of food consumption. The latter is positively associated with enjoyment, contentment, and our social and psychological well-being.