How much could your heart embrace? What about your behavior? The Socio‐moral Radar as a behavioral expression of moral regard

Abstract

Studying the scope and limits of individuals' moral concern is a relevant topic in many disciplines. The construct of Socio-moral Radar that this study introduces focuses on the behavioral expression of people's commitment with existing social problems and tries to reflect the degree of their moral inclusiveness as active citizens. Our main goal is to explore the extent and variations of people's willingness to engage with different social problems, developing an empirical instrument to measure it. Thus, we design the Socio-moral Radar (SmR) Scale to register the intention to perform different forms of social engagement directed at various causes or entities. We test the relationships of the scale with several variables, including the Moral Expansiveness Scale. We empirically differentiate two facets of the SmR based on the types of entities object of socio-moral commitment: humans and nature. Regression analysis is used to test their predictors. We discuss the usefulness of the SmR to explain social participation through the lenses of moral inclusiveness.