Pathogens or promiscuity? Testing two accounts of the relation between disgust sensitivity and binding moral values.

A recurrent observation in the field of moral psychology is that disgust sensitivity is associated with greater moralization of the binding (and particularly sanctity) moral domains. It is generally assumed that these effects are the result of disgust's role as an emotion that motivates pathogen avoidance (i.e., the pathogen avoidance account), yet alternative disgust-based accounts of moralization, namely those grounded in sexual avoidance (i.e., the promiscuity avoidance account), might also explain these observations. Across two studies (total N = 2,718), involving 10 diverse samples (from Australia, the United States, and Brazil), we found that after controlling for the shared variance of pathogen and sexual disgust, only measures of sexual disgust exhibited a positive (and strong) association with the binding moral foundations. These results argue against the pathogen avoidance account of disgust-binding effects and instead support the promiscuity avoidance account. Above all, this work highlights the utility of delineating the dimensionality of disgust to better characterize the different disgust-based motives underlying moral cognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

From ordinary to extraordinary: A roadmap for studying the psychology of moral exceptionality.

Some moral actions - including prosocial actions - are more exceptional than others. Within psychology, interest in such moral exceptionality is mounting, but a definition of the concept is lacking. Our review addresses this issue by integrating insights from the moral exemplar, heroism, and supererogation literatures. We propose an action-based definition that places the outperformance of prescriptive or descriptive moral norms at the core of moral exceptionality. Using our definition, we i) discuss how exceptionality is represented in moral constructs studied across psychology and ii) provide a template for identifying moral exceptionality in the prosocial domain.

Searching for meaning is associated with costly prosociality.

The study of meaning in life has largely centered on its relationship with personal well-being, while a focus on how meaning is related to enhancing the well-being of others has received less research attention. Although searching for meaning may imply lower personal well-being, we find that meaning-seekers are more motivated to perform costly prosocial actions for the sake of others' well-being, given the perceived meaningfulness of these behaviors. Studies 1-4 (N = 780) show that meaning-seeking correlates with the motivation to engage in a range of costly prosocial behaviors. Meaning-seeking is further shown to be distinct from pursuing happiness in its relationship with costly prosociality (Study 2 & 3) and to share a stronger association with high-cost than low-cost prosociality (Study 3 & 4). Study 5 (N = 370; pre-registered) further shows that the search for meaning is related to costly prosocial behavior in the recent past. While our studies are cross-sectional, the pattern of findings suggests that seeking meaning (rather than happiness) may play an important role in motivating altruistic tendencies.

Personality and moral judgment: Curious consequentialists and polite deontologists.

OBJECTIVE: How does our personality relate to the ways in which we judge right from wrong? Drawing on influential theories of moral judgment, we identify candidate traits that may be linked with inclinations toward (a) consequentialist judgments (i.e., those based on the outcomes of an action) and (b) deontological judgments (i.e., those based on the alignment of an action with particular moral rules). METHOD: Across two studies (total N = 843) we examined domains and aspects of the Big Five in relation to inclinations toward consequentialist and deontological judgments. RESULTS: In both studies, we found a unique association between intellect (curiosity, cognitive engagement) and consequentialist inclinations, in line with the view that deliberative cognitive processes drive such inclinations. We also found a consistent unique association between politeness (respectfulness, etiquette) and deontological inclinations, in line with the view that norm-adherence drives such inclinations. Neither study yielded a significant unique relation between deontological inclinations and compassion (sympathy, empathic concern)-or any other emotion-infused trait (e.g., Neuroticism)-as would be expected based on emotion-centered views of deontological moral judgment. CONCLUSIONS: These findings have implications for theories of moral judgment, and reveal how our personality may guide our approach to questions of ethics and morality.

Developing brief versions of the Moral Foundations Vignettes using a genetic algorithm-based approach.

The time-efficient assessment of moral values using systematically validated measures is a high priority in moral psychology research. However, few such options exist for researchers working with Moral Foundations Theory, one of the most popular theories in moral psychology. Across two samples totaling 1336 participants (756 Australian undergraduates and 580 American Mechanical Turk workers), we used a genetic algorithm-based (GA) approach to construct and validate abbreviated versions of the Moral Foundations Vignettes (MFV), a 90-item scale comprising vignettes of concrete violations of each of the six moral foundations. We constructed 36- and 18-item versions of the MFV, demonstrating close correspondence with the complete MFV, and adequate reliability, predictive validity, and factor-analytic goodness of fit for both abbreviated versions. Overall, the abbreviated scales achieve substantially reduced length with minimal loss of information, providing a useful resource for moral psychology researchers.

Subjective status and perceived legitimacy across countries.

The relationships between subjective status and perceived legitimacy are important for understanding the extent to which people with low status are complicit in their oppression. We use novel data from 66 samples and 30 countries (N = 12,788) and find that people with higher status see the social system as more legitimate than those with lower status, but there is variation across people and countries. The association between subjective status and perceived legitimacy was never negative at any levels of eight moderator variables, although the positive association was sometimes reduced. Although not always consistent with hypotheses, group identification, self-esteem, and beliefs in social mobility were all associated with perceived legitimacy among people who have low subjective status. These findings enrich our understanding of the relationship between social status and legitimacy.

Pixel asymmetry predicts between-object differences in the object-based compatibility effect.

When participants make left/right responses to unimanually graspable objects, response times (RTs) are faster when the responding hand is aligned with the viewed object's handle. This object-based compatibility effect (CE) is often attributed to motor activation elicited by the object's afforded grasp. However, some evidence suggests that the object-based CE is an example of spatial CEs, or Simon effects, elicited by the protruding nature of objects' handles. Moreover, recent work shows that the way in which objects are centred on-screen might attenuate or reverse CEs, perhaps due to differences in pixel asymmetry (the proportion of pixels either side of fixation) between centralities. In this study, we tested whether pixel asymmetry also contributes to between-object variation in object-based CEs. In experiment 1 (N = 34), we found that between-object differences in asymmetry predicted object-based CEs, such that objects with a greater proportion of pixels to the handle-congruent side of fixation produced larger CEs. In experiment 2 (N = 35), we presented participants with mug (low asymmetry) and frying pan (high asymmetry) images and found that between-object and within-object (due to stimulus centrality) differences in pixel asymmetry interact to moderate CEs. Base-centred stimuli (centred according to the width of the object's base) produced conventional CEs, whereas object-centred (centred according to the object's total width) stimuli produced negative CEs (NCEs). Furthermore, the effect of centrality was smaller for mugs than pans, indicating an interaction between within-object and between-object differences in pixel asymmetry.

Sidestepping spatial confounds in object-based correspondence effects: The Bimanual Affordance Task (BMAT).

Tucker and Ellis found that when participants made left/right button-presses to indicate whether objects were upright or inverted, responses were faster when the response hand aligned with the task-irrelevant handle orientation of the object. The effect of handle orientation on response times has been interpreted as evidence that individuals perceive grasp affordances when viewing briefly presented objects, which in turn activate grasp-related motor systems. Although the effect of handle alignment has since been replicated, there remains doubt regarding the extent to which the effect is indeed driven by affordance perception. Objects that feature in affordance-compatibility paradigms are asymmetrical and have laterally protruding handles (e.g., mugs) and thus confound spatial and affordance properties. Research has attempted to disentangle spatial compatibility and affordance effects with varying results. In this study, we present a novel paradigm with which to study affordance perception while sidestepping spatial confounds. We use the Bimanual Affordance Task (BMAT) to test whether object affordances in symmetrical objects facilitate response times. Participants (N = 36) used one of three (left unimanual/right unimanual/bimanual) responses to indicate the colour of presented objects. Objects afforded either a unimanual (e.g., handbag) or a bimanual (e.g., laundry hamper) grasp. Responses were faster when the afforded grasp corresponded with the response type (unimanual vs. bimanual), suggesting that affordance effects exist independent of spatial compatibility.

A meta-analysis of the object-based compatibility effect.

The object-based compatibility effect (CE) describes, in the context of two-choice keypress tasks, the facilitation of response times (RTs) by the correspondence between participants' response hand and the task-irrelevant orientation of a viewed object's handle. Object-based CEs are often attributed to affordance perception. Although the object-based CE paradigm is the major RT task used to study affordances, failures to replicate the effect have raised questions about its robustness. Moreover, it remains unclear whether the object-based CE is indeed indicative of affordances, or whether it is merely an example of spatial CEs brought about by the object's protruding handle. We present a meta-analysis of object-based CEs to (1) obtain a point estimate of the overall effect and (2) test for moderation consistent with either affordance or spatial compatibility accounts. From 88 independent effects (computed on 2359 participants), we estimated a small but significant compatibility effect (ES = 0.106, z = 5.44, p < .001 95% CI:[0.068, 0.145]), although evidence of publication bias suggests that the true effect is smaller in magnitude. Further, we found significant heterogeneity in effect sizes, indicating between-study variation beyond sampling variability. Moderator analyses indicated that CEs were larger when (1) task-relevant decisions were not about the function of objects, (2) when stimuli were silhouettes as opposed to photographs, and (3) when objects were centered on-screen according to their base or pixel distribution. Response mode (within vs between-hand) did not moderate CEs, nor did the critical interaction between stimulus type (photograph vs silhouette/illustration) and response mode. In all, results are mostly consistent with a spatial compatibility account of object-based CEs. Finally, analyses revealed moderation by trial and task structure, providing implications for study design.

Social Dominance Orientation Predicts Opposition to Hierarchy-Attenuating Intergroup Apologies.

People who value social hierarchy may resist giving intergroup apologies because such apologies may attenuate the very hierarchies that these people value. We tested this claim across four studies (total N = 541) by examining associations between social dominance orientation (SDO)-a measure of preference for social hierarchy-and support for intergroup apologies. We found that higher SDO scores, and specifically the antiegalitarianism subdimension (social dominance orientation-egalitarianism [SDO-E]), predicted less apology support among U.S. residents in both domestic (Study 1) and international (Study 2) contexts. In Study 3, we found that the effect generalizes to an Australian cultural context. In Study 4, we demonstrated that the negative effect of SDO-E can extend to third-party contexts and is only observed when apologizing would be hierarchy attenuating. These studies show that the desire to maintain social hierarchies is an important driver of opposition to hierarchy-attenuating intergroup apologies.

Moral and Affective Film Set (MAAFS): A normed moral video database.

Moral psychology has relied nearly exclusively on text stimuli in the development and testing of theories. However, text stimuli lack the rich variety of morally-relevant social and contextual cues available in everyday interactions. A consequence of this pervasive ecological invalidity may be that moral psychological theories are mischaracterized by an overreliance on cue-impoverished moral stimuli. We address this limitation by developing a cue-rich Moral and Affective Film Set (MAAFS). We crowd-sourced videos of moral behaviours, using previously validated text stimuli and definitions of moral foundations as a guide for content. Crowd-sourced clips were rated by 322 American and 253 Australian participants on a range of moral and affective dimensions, including wrongness, moral foundation relevance, punishment, arousal, discrete emotion-relevance, clarity, previous exposure, and how weird/uncommon the moral acts were. The final stimulus set contained sixty nine moral videos. Ratings confirmed that the videos are reliably rated as morally wrong and feature a variety of moral concerns. The validation process revealed features that make the MAAFS useful for future research: (1) the MAAFS includes a range of videos that depict everyday transgressions, (2) certain videos evoke negative emotions at an intensity comparable to mood induction films, (3) the videos are largely novel: participants had never seen more than 90% of the videos. We anticipate the MAAFS will be a particularly valuable tool for researchers in moral psychology who seek to study morality in scenarios that approximate real-life. However, the MAAFS may be valuable for other fields of psychology, for example, affective scientists may use these videos as a mood induction procedure. The complete stimulus set, links to videos, and normative statistics can be accessed at osf.io/8w3en.

The Socio-Moral Image Database (SMID): A novel stimulus set for the study of social, moral and affective processes.

A major obstacle for the design of rigorous, reproducible studies in moral psychology is the lack of suitable stimulus sets. Here, we present the Socio-Moral Image Database (SMID), the largest standardized moral stimulus set assembled to date, containing 2,941 freely available photographic images, representing a wide range of morally (and affectively) positive, negative and neutral content. The SMID was validated with over 820,525 individual judgments from 2,716 participants, with normative ratings currently available for all images on affective valence and arousal, moral wrongness, and relevance to each of the five moral values posited by Moral Foundations Theory. We present a thorough analysis of the SMID regarding (1) inter-rater consensus, (2) rating precision, and (3) breadth and variability of moral content. Additionally, we provide recommendations for use aimed at efficient study design and reproducibility, and outline planned extensions to the database. We anticipate that the SMID will serve as a useful resource for psychological, neuroscientific and computational (e.g., natural language processing or computer vision) investigations of social, moral and affective processes. The SMID images, along with associated normative data and additional resources are available at https://osf.io/2rqad/.

Alternatives to the fixed-set model: A review of appraisal models of emotion.

Over several decades, appraisal theory has emerged as a prominent theoretical framework explaining the elicitation and differentiation of emotions, and has stimulated a great deal of theorising and empirical research. Despite the large amount of research in this area, there are many aspects of appraisal theory and research that remain unclear or problematic. In this review, we identify a common assumption of many appraisal theories-the fixed appraisal set-and argue that this assumption, combined with a lack of explicit theorising about the predicted relationship between appraisals and emotions, leads to a lack of clarity in both appraisal models and the empirical testing of those models. We recommend that appraisal theorists move in a direction already taken by a small number of theorists, and adopt the starting assumption of a variable appraisal set. We further suggest that theories of concepts and categorisation may inform theorising about appraisal-emotion relationships.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Morality: Deontological, Consequentialist, and Emotive Language Use in Justifications Across Foundation-Specific Moral Violations.

Morality is inherently social, yet much extant work in moral psychology ignores the central role of social processes in moral phenomena. To partly address this, this article examined the content of persuasive moral communication-the way people justify their moral attitudes in persuasive contexts. Across two studies, we explored variation in justification content (deontological, consequentialist, or emotive) as a function of moral foundations. Using justification selection techniques (Study 1) and open-ended justification production (Study 2), results demonstrate a preference (a) for deontological appeals in justifications for the sanctity foundation, (b) for consequentialist appeals for the individualizing foundations (care and fairness), and (c) for emotive appeals in justifications for the binding foundations (loyalty, authority and sanctity). The present research questions the generality of inferences about the primacy of emotions/intuition in moral psychology research and highlights the important role of reasons in persuasive moral communication.

Wrongness in different relationships: Relational context effects on moral judgment.

Morality primarily serves social-relational functions. However, little research in moral psychology investigates how relational factors impact moral judgment, and a theoretically grounded approach to such investigations is lacking. We used Relational Models Theory and Moral Foundations Theory to explore how varying actor-victim relationships impacts judgment of different types of moral violations. Across three studies, using a diverse range of moral violations and varying the experimental design, relational context substantially influenced third-party judgment of moral violations, and typically independent of several factors strongly associated with moral judgment. Results lend novel but mixed support to Relationship Regulation Theory and provide some novel implications for Moral Foundations Theory. These studies highlight the importance of relational factors in moral psychology and provide guidelines for exploring how relational factors might shape moral judgment.

"No man is an island": Effects of interpersonal proximity on spatial attention.

While it is generally acknowledged that another person's presence can influence how we behave within our environment, our understanding of the mechanisms underlying this influence is limited. Three experiments investigated the effect of social presence on the lateral distribution of spatial attention. Shifts in spatial attention were measured using line bisection, while participants sat in each other's personal space. An attentional withdrawal was observed, whereby attention moved away from the other person when the same task was using turn-taking (Experiment 1) and independent responding (Experiment 2) paradigms. When participant pairs engaged in different tasks (Experiment 3), attentional withdrawal was no longer observed. Our results strongly suggest that the influence of interpersonal proximity on attention merits greater consideration than it has received from researchers investigating social effects on cognition.

A meta-analysis of the facilitation of arm flexion and extension movements as a function of stimulus valence.

This article presents a meta-analysis of research on the affective compatibility effect: the relative facilitation of arm flexion and extension movements, in response to positive and negative stimuli, respectively. Across 68 effect sizes (computed on 3169 participants), a small, significant average compatibility effect emerged (ES = .118; 95% CI [.051, .185]). Importantly, analyses also revealed significant heterogeneity in the set of effect sizes. Moderator analyses were conducted to explain this observed heterogeneity with a view to testing between extant theoretical accounts of the compatibility effect. Affective compatibility effects were significantly larger (1) for face stimuli than for words or pictorial stimuli; (2) when the negative stimuli partly comprising the effect were anger-related; (3) for responses made using vertical button press; (4) when situated aspects of the processing task framed flexion as approach and extension as avoidance; and (5) when explicit response labels framed flexion as positive and extension as negative. Significant reverse compatibility effects emerged (1) when aspects of the processing context framed flexion as avoidance and extension as approach and (2) when explicit response labels framed flexion as negative and extension as positive. The results of the meta-analysis provide little support for the strong embodiment, specific muscle activation account of affective compatibility and are broadly consistent with distance regulation, and, in particular, evaluative coding accounts.

Multiple emotions: a person-centered approach to the relationship between intergroup emotion and action orientation.

Although a great deal of research has investigated the relationship between emotions and action orientations, most studies to date have used variable-centered techniques to identify the best emotion predictor(s) of a particular action. Given that people frequently report multiple or blended emotions, a profitable area of research may be to adopt person-centered approaches to examine the action orientations elicited by a particular combination of emotions or "emotion profile." In two studies, across instances of intergroup inequality in Australia and Canada, we examined participants' experiences of six intergroup emotions: sympathy, anger directed at three targets, shame, and pride. In both studies, five groups of participants with similar emotion profiles were identified by cluster analysis and their action orientations were compared; clusters indicated that the majority of participants experienced multiple emotions. Each action orientation was also regressed on the six emotions. There were a number of differences in the results obtained from the person-centered and variable-centered approaches. This was most apparent for sympathy: the group of participants experiencing only sympathy showed little inclination to perform prosocial actions, yet sympathy was a significant predictor of numerous action orientations in regression analyses. These results imply that sympathy may only prompt a desire for action when experienced in combination with other emotions. We suggest that the use of person-centered and variable-centered approaches as complementary analytic strategies may enrich research into not only the affective predictors of action, but emotion research in general.

Elaborated contextual framing is necessary for action-based attitude acquisition.

Although arm flexion and extension have been implicated as conditioners of attitudes, recent work casts some doubt on the nature and strength of the coupling of these muscle contractions and stimulus evaluation. We propose that the elaborated contextual framing of flexion and extension actions is necessary for attitude acquisition. Results showed that when flexion and extension were disambiguated via elaborated contextual cues (i.e., framed as collect and discard within a foraging context), neutral stimuli processed under flexion were liked more than neutral stimuli processed under extension. However, when unelaborated framing was used (e.g., mere stimulus zooming effects), stimulus evaluation did not differ as a function of muscle contractions. These results suggest that neither arm contractions per se nor unelaborated framings are sufficient for action-based attitude acquisition, but that elaborated framings are necessary.

Our flaws are more human than yours: ingroup bias in humanizing negative characteristics.

Four studies investigated whether people tend to see ingroup flaws as part of human nature (HN) to a greater degree than outgroup flaws. In Study 1, people preferentially ascribed high HN flaws to their ingroup relative to two outgroups. Study 2 demonstrated that flaws were rated higher on HN when attributed to the ingroup than when attributed to an outgroup, and no such difference occurred for positive traits. Study 3 replicated this humanizing ingroup flaws (HIF) effect and showed that it was (a) independent of desirability and (b) specific to the HN sense of humanness. Study 4 replicated the results of Study 3 and demonstrated that the HIF effect is amplified under ingroup identity threat. Together, these findings show that people humanize ingroup flaws and preferentially ascribe high HN flaws to the ingroup. These ingroup humanizing biases may serve a group-protective function by mitigating ingroup flaws as "only human."