<p>This study investigates how actor status, moral foundations theory and Schwartz values influence the moral judgments of guilt and punishment. I argue that to understand individual values consequences for actions, they must be considered within organizational values and larger institutional logics frameworks. Building off Zerubavel’s conception of a three level cognition (Zerubavel 1999), I argue for a tri level conception of values and morality in order to more fully understand how moral judgements work as well as the social context in which they are shaped. Using original research, I offer evidence of three levels of morality. First, I evaluate actor status on judgments of guilt and punishment. I then evaluate individual moral culture using Schwartz Values (Schwartz 2012; Vaisey and Miles 2014). I evaluate the impact of the organization on moral culture measure through the use of status hierarchies (Sauder, Lynn, and Podolny 2012). Finally, I evaluate broader cultural morality using Moral Foundations Theory (Graham et al. 2016; Kesebir and Haidt 2010). Taken together, these three levels of morality present a more ecologically valid understanding of the ways in which moral culture works from the individual, through the meso-social level and to the broader culture. I demonstrate the complex ways in which moral judgments are influenced by universal concerns, organizational influences and individual characteristics. I find that moral foundations theory conceptions of harm does not predict judgments of guilt and punishment but that Schwartz Values do influence these moral judgments. I also find that it is the actor status that most strongly predicts the outcomes of guilt and punishment. The research provides a foundation for future research of how actor status influences moral judgments of guilt and punishment beyond the limited moral community of the current study.</p> / Dissertation

Cette recherche visait à mieux comprendre les liens la morale personnelle, l’identité sociale au Canada et les médias. Pour ce faire, une analyse quantitative s’appuyant sur trois échantillons de données a été effectuée, et ce, à la lumière de la théorie des fondements moraux (TFM) (Haidt & Joseph, 2008) et de la théorie de l’identité sociale (Tajfel, 1981). Les échantillons sont les suivants : a) les mots clés assignés aux plaintes déposées au Conseil canadien des normes de la radiotélévision (CCNR); b) l’expression des fondements moraux des textes des plaintes délibérées par le CCNR et c) les données des participants canadiens de YourMorals.org, une recherche toujours en cours de Ditto, Graham, Haidt et coll. Les analyses de données ont permis de déterminer si le contenu médiatique stimule l’expression de matrices morales particulières, en fonction de la région d’origine, du genre et de la langue des plaignants. Les résultats suggèrent qu’il existerait des distinctions morales selon le genre, la langue, les régions d'origine des participants et les stimuli vécus. La présente étude est la première à mettre à l’épreuve la théorie des fondements moraux quant au jugement moral face à un contenu médiatique. Ce faisant, elle jette un éclairage nouveau sur cette même théorie en l’appliquant au contexte canadien et éclairant les liens entre la moralité et les identités canadiennes.

Thesis advisor: Liane Young / Thesis advisor: James Dungan / Moral psychologists disagree over whether descriptively different moral violations represent distinct cognitive domains or are in fact unified by common cognitive mechanisms. The Moral Foundations Theory (MFT; Haidt, 2007) offers five different domains of moral transgressions: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. Both intentionality and omission bias (e.g. omissions such as letting someone die being judged less harshly than actions such as killing someone) have been shown to impact moral judgments; however, it remains unclear how these rules modulate judgments across moral transgressions of various types. Here, we investigate the role of intentionality and omission bias across different moral violations to determine if the divide between moral domains represent true cognitive, (as opposed to descriptive), differences. We utilized a 2 x 2 x 5 design to create stories across the 5 domains posited by MFT that were intentional/accidental cases of actions/omissions. Importantly, this study also looks at four distinct moral judgments of wrongness, responsibility, blameworthiness, and punishment to assess the role of these rules across judgments. We found that intent and action play different roles across judgments, particularly when comparing wrongness and punishment. Intent seems to matter more for wrongness, whereas action matters more for punishment. Further, these rules also differ across domains. We found that intent matters more for the individualizing foundations of harm and fairness (versus the binding foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity) in judgments of wrongness and punishment. The difference between action and omission is also more important for the individualizing foundations for punishment. These data suggest intentionality and omission bias manifest themselves uniquely across moral judgments and domains and provide evidence that there are meaningful differences between domains. / Thesis (BS) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: Psychology Honors Program. / Discipline: Psychology .

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The events of the Bunkerville standoff and the Malheur wildlife refuge occupation were both important confrontations with the government by the western land rights movement. Participants in and responders to the events engage in distinct moral judgments and rationales. Utilizing cultural schema analysis and moral foundations theory (MFT), I explored the differences in rationales and judgments made by participants and responders in their explicit, public moral discourses of both events. My analysis indicates that responders and participants defined and utilized the same moral foundations, but in distinct ways. Participants were more diverse in their invocation of moral foundations while responders centralized on judgments/rationales centered on harm/care and authority/subversion. I argue that the insights of content differences in construction/usage of moral foundations are a key contribution to the literature and usage of MFT. I further argue that future research on moral judgments utilizing MFT should endeavor to specify the moral and rational content of how moral foundations are employed, rather than simply documenting their distributions.

The goal of this research synthesis is to obtain evidence about a new and upcoming idea of how political ideology and religious beliefs may be predicted by disgust, moral codes and physiological activity. Previously, it was believed by some that politics and religion were a product of an individual's environment and influences of an individual's family and friend's beliefs. Current research is trying to explain how much a person's biology influences their beliefs. This thesis will aim to explain how it is possible to obtain these types of data and why this research is important.

Misogyny, a hatred against women, is an attitude that causes emotional distress and can negatively affect women's psychological and physical health. It has shown itself in extreme ways and can be crippling to women. Studies have shown that psychological distress is heightened when women are subjected to sexist events. Misogyny exists in the classroom, workplace, and politics, and is virtually inescapable from women. It is not uncommon for women in positions of power are often unjustly branded with cruel epithets. Despite the modernity of today's culture, misogyny is still a prevalent issue. This study seeks to assess the underlying predictors that are related to misogyny. In order to identify these predictors, factors such as Big Five personality traits, spirituality, and moral reasoning will be examined. Factors such as demographics were also considered. Participants consisted of university students within a general psychology course who completed an online questionnaire for course credit. The study title was deceptive in order to obtain more accurate results. Results indicate that there is a relationship between misogyny and the predicted variables.

The aim of the proposed work is to verify the hypothesis based on Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory, which says that the wider the range of the so-called moral foundations a political party addresses with its programme, the higher its chances of a good election result. This hypothesis is examined within the framework of Czech political reality. The first part of the work introduces Haidt's Theory of Moral Foundations and examines the question of its applicability to the Czech political sphere. In the next step, the mentioned theory is used (with the help of appropriate operationalization) as a means of analysing the election results of Czech political parties in the elections to the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Parliament in 2017 in order to verify this hypothesis. The programme points of the election programmes of ten Czech political parties are subjected to the analysis. These are the parties that, according to pre-election surveys, had the greatest chance of exceeding the 5 % electoral threshold for joining the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic (i. e. ANO 2011, ČSSD, ODS, SPD, TOP 09, KDU-ČSL KSČM, STAN, Pirate Party and Green Party). The second part of this work handles the analysis of the representation of the different moral foundations in the programme of all examined...

There is an ongoing debate among psychologists regarding the psychological factors underlying moral judgments. Rationalists argue that informational assumptions (i.e. ideological beliefs about how the world works) play a causal role in shaping moral judgments whereas intuitionists argue that informational assumptions are post hoc justifications for judgments made automatically by innate intuitions. In order to compare these two perspectives, the author conducted two studies in which informational assumptions related to ingroups and outgroups varied across conditions. In Study 1, political conservatives and liberals completed the moral relevance questionnaire while imagining they were in the US, Iran, or no specific country. Keeping in line with the predictions of the intuitionist perspective, the results showed that the judgments of conservatives and liberals did not significantly differ across conditions. Study 2 used a more in depth manipulation in which participants read a vignette about a government (US, Iran, or the fictional country of Kasbara) violating the rights of a minority group. As in Study 1, the results support the intuitionist perspective--the judgments of conservatives and liberals did not significantly differ across conditions. These findings play a small part in clarifying the role of informational assumptions in moral judgments.