Throughout history, people have held beliefs about the blessings or curses that may result from coming into contact with certain objects or people, and many of these beliefs have a moral component to them. From a cognitive psychological point of view, cultural beliefs about "moral contagion" share common ground in universal human cognitive processes such as neurological threat-processing systems. These systems engage evolutionarily older areas of the brain which function in part to avert us from disgusting biological entities which may carry disease. It is not clear, however, if and how evolutionarily newer .social cognitive factors, such as individuals' concerns about their moral reputations, interact with these lower-level processes. This type of interface may explain why contagion concepts outside the realm of disease are so prevalent. The five studies presented in this thesis tested if social cues affected individuals' implicit reasoning about contagion in the moral domain. The results of these studies have important implications for understanding , how our cognition shapes and constrains explicit cultural beliefs about human moral identity.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:557661 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Lenfesty, H. L. |
| Publisher | Queen's University Belfast |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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