What Dilemma? Moral Evaluation Shapes Factual Belief

Tortured beliefs: How and when prior support for torture skews the perceived value of coerced information

“…with the responses coded as 1 through 4, respectively). We also employed Liu and Ditto's (2013) two measures of whether torture is morally right ("The use of forceful or harsh interrogation techniques on individuals suspected of terrorist activities is …," on a seven-point scale ranging from "Morally acceptable in most or all cases" to "Morally wrong in most or all cases," reverse coded to indicate moral acceptance) and deontologically right ("The use of […] is morally wrong even if it is effective in getting suspects to talk," rated on a seven-point scale ranging from "Strongly disagree" to "Strongly agree," reverse coded to indicate moral acceptance).…”

“…In scholarship on moral judgment, recent work argues that people readily use a "consequentialist crutch" to rationalize moral stances and achieve coherence in their perceptions: Those who see something as deontologically moral-as inherently right, consequences aside-also tend to see it as effective and beneficial (Ditto & Liu, 2011). Importantly, Liu and Ditto (2013) showed that those who deemed torture deontologically acceptable also believed it was generally effective. These results are consistent with the effect we posit, but leave open the possibility that broad expectations of torture's effectiveness cause general acceptance of torture.…”

“…On balance, American torture supporters seem to possess selective efficacy beliefs, expecting coercion to be more likely to yield valuable information when interrogated informants are members of a hostile outgroup (i.e., an al-Qaeda member tortured by US operatives) than when they are ingroup members (i.e., an American soldier tortured by al-Qaeda). The overall picture that emerges suggests that people strive for cognitive coherence (Liu & Ditto, 2013) in their perceptions of torture's efficacy and their judgments of torture's acceptability. Prior support for torture positively skews perceptions of coerced information value-but only when it is "us" torturing one of "them."…”

The pipeline project: Pre-publication independent replications of a single laboratory's research pipeline

“…Robust support for predictions based on the person-centered account of moral judgment (Pizarro & Tannenbaum, 2011;Uhlmann et al, 2015) was obtained across six original findings. The replication results also supported predictions regarding moral coherence (Liu & Ditto, 2013;Clark et al, in press) in perceptions of economic variables, but did not find consistent support for two specific hypotheses concerning moral judgments of organizations. Thus, the PPIR process allowed categories of robust effects to be separated from categories of findings that were less robust.…”

“…Such a correlation raises the possibility that moral concerns about fairness irrationally influence perceptions of economic processes. In other words, aspects of free markets that seem unfair on moral grounds (e.g., replacing hard-working factory workers with automated machinery that can do the job more cheaply) may be subject to distorted perceptions of their objective economic effects (a moral coherence effect; Clark, Chen, & Ditto, in press;Liu & Ditto, 2013).…”