Affect, culture, and morality, or is it wrong to eat your dog?

Abstract

Supervised by Jonathan Baron and Alan Fiske Are disgusting or disrespectful actions considered to be moral violations, even when they are harmless? Stories about victimless yet offensive actions (such as eating one's dead pet dog) were presented to Brazilian and U.S. adults and children, of high and low socioeconomic status. Results show that college students at elite universities judged these stories to be matters of social convention, or of personal preference. Most other subjects, especially in Brazil, judged the offensive actions to be universally wrong moral violations. Moral judgments were better predicted by affective reactions than by appraisals of harmfulness. These results support Shweder (1990), and Miller, Bersoff and Harwood (1990), and suggest that cultural norms and culturally shaped emotions have a substantial impact on the domain of morality and the process of moral judgment. Efforts to build cross-culturally valid models of moral judgment are discussed. v Table of Contents Acknowledgments .

The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment.

“…An intuitionist interpretation is just as plausible: the anti-abortion judgment (a gut feeling that abortion is bad) caused the belief that life begins at conception (an ex post facto rationalization of the gut feeling). Haidt, Koller, and Dias (1993) found evidence for such an intuitionist interpretation. They examined American and Brazilian responses to actions that were offensive yet harmless, such as eating one's dead pet dog, cleaning one's toilet with the national flag, or eating a chicken carcass one has just used for masturbation.…”

Conformorality. A Study on Group Conditioning of Normative Judgment

“…Bicchieri, 2006;Elster, 2009;Haidt, Koller, and Dias, 1993;Nichols, 2002;Turiel, 1977). Although 1 there are differences in the way particular researchers individuate different kinds of norms, many would agree that there are features that distinguish moral, social and what can be called "decency norms."…”

Harm, Affect, and the Moral/Conventional Distinction

“…As we noted earlier, paralleling work by Haidt ( Haidt et al , 1993 ; see also Greene & Haidt, 2002 ), Nichols (2002Nichols ( , 2004 has proposed that negative affect plays a central role in generating most of the components of the signature moral response. More specifi cally, Nichols maintains that subjects will be more inclined to generalize the applicability of norms and to regard them as authority independent if transgressions of the norms evoke negative affect.…”

“…But, the dissenters maintain, there are many societies in which such transgressions evoke one or more of the signature moral responses, and thus, contrary to (C-3), the regularities described in (C-1) and (C-2) are not pan-cultural. For example, Haidt et al , (1993) cleaved closely to the paradigm established by Turiel, and showed that low SES groups in both Brazil and the USA judged transgressions such as privately washing the toilet bowl with the national fl ag and privately masturbating with a dead chicken to be serious moral transgressions. Other researchers employing the moral/ conventional task methodology have reported similar results.…”

“…Though Turiel and his followers maintain that the moral/conventional distinction is constructed by children as they interact with their social environment ( Turiel 1979;Turiel 1983;Nucci 2001 ), some philosophers have argued that (C-3) suggests that knowledge of the moral/conventional distinction is innate ( Dwyer 1999( Dwyer , 2006. In an infl uential article and an important recent book, Shaun Nichols (2002Nichols ( , 2004 builds on suggestions made by researchers who emphasize the link between morality and emotions, such as Kagan (1984), Damasio (1994) and Haidt ( Haidt et al , 1993 ; see also Greene & Haidt 2002 ). In developing his ' sentimental rules ' hypothesis, Nichols draws out the implications of this link for work on the moral/ conventional distinction.…”