The present studies investigate the role of both cognitive and affective dimensions of moral conviction in contributing to negative interpersonal responses. After demonstrating that the cognitive and affective dimensions of moral conviction are distinct constructs, the studies show that the cognitive dimension is sufficient to produce many forms of interpersonal intolerance. Simply believing an issue to be moral (i.e., objectively grounded, non-negotiable) results in greater intolerance for (Study 1), less sharing with (Study 2), and greater distancing from (Study 3) people with divergent attitudes. The emotional intensity with which beliefs are experienced is not alone explanatory. Nonetheless, it interacts with moral beliefs to produce the highest levels of interpersonal intolerance, distancing from dissimilar others, and context insensitivity. This interaction pattern between moral beliefs and affect was specific to emotional intensity and not other measures of attitude strength (Study 3).

It has often been suggested that people's ordinary understanding of morality involves a belief in objective moral truths and a rejection of moral relativism. The results of six studies call this claim into question. Participants did offer apparently objectivist moral intuitions when considering individuals from their own culture, but they offered increasingly relativist intuitions considering individuals from increasingly different cultures or ways of life. The authors hypothesize that people do not have a fixed commitment to moral objectivism but instead tend to adopt different views depending on the degree to which they consider radically different perspectives on moral questions.

Recent scholarship (Goodwin & Darley, 2008) on the meta-ethical debate between objectivism and relativism has found people to be mixed: they are objectivists about some issues, but relativists about others. The studies discussed here sought to explore this further. Study 1 explored whether giving people the ability to identify moral issues for themselves would reveal them to be more globally objectivist. Study 2 explored people's meta-ethical commitments more deeply, asking them to provide verbal explanations for their judgments. This revealed that while people think they are relativists, this may not always be the case. The explanations people gave were sometimes rated by outside (blind) coders as being objective, even when given a relativist response. Nonetheless, people remained meta-ethical pluralists. Why this might be is discussed.

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