IM I ANNUAL
ViM REVIEWS
Annual Review of Psychology
The Psychology of Moral Conviction
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Linda J. Skitka,1 Brittany E. Hanson,2
G. Scott Morgan,3 and Daniel C. Wisneski2
'Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60607, USA; email: lskitka@uic.edu
2Department of Psychology, Saint Peter's University, Jersey City, New Jersey 07306, USA; email: bhanson@saintpeters.edu, dwisneski@saintpeters.edu
'Department of Psychology, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey 07940, USA; email: smorgan@drew.edu
Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2021. 72:347-66
First published as a Review in Advance on September 4,2020
The Annual Review of Psychology is online at psych.annualreviews.org
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-063020-030612
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Keywords
moral conviction, moralization, demoralization, morality, authority independence
Abstract
This review covers theory and research on the psychological characteristics and consequences of attitudes that are experienced as moral convictions, that is, attitudes that people perceive as grounded in a fundamental distinction between right and wrong. Morally convicted attitudes represent something psychologically distinct from other constructs (e.g., strong but nonmoral attitudes or religious beliefs), are perceived as universally and objectively true, and are comparatively immune to authority or peer influence. Variance in moral conviction also predicts important social and political consequences. Stronger moral conviction about a given attitude object, for example, is associated with greater intolerance of attitude dissimilarity, resistance to procedural solutions for conflict about that issue, and increased political engagement and volunteerism in that attitude domain. Finally, we review recent research that explores the processes that lead to attitude moralization; we integrate these efforts and conclude with a new domain theory of attitude moralization.
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Contents
ESSENTIALISM VERSUS SUBJECTIVISM..................................... 349
THE DOMAIN THEORY OF ATTITUDES..................................... 350
Measurement and Operationalization............................................ 351
Perceived Objectivity and Universality........................................... 352
Authority and Peer Independence............................................... 352
Means Versus Ends............................................................. 3 54
Obligation and Motivation...................................................... 354
Political Engagement........................................................... 355
Intolerance..................................................................... 355
Unwillingness to Compromise.................................................. 356
Moral Conviction and Emotion................................................. 356
ATTITUDE MORALIZATION.................................................. 357
The Domain Model of Attitude Moralization.................................... 360
Moral Recognition.............................................................. 360
Moral Amplification............................................................ 360
Demoralization................................................................. 361
CONCLUSION.................................................................. 362
Moral conviction:
the belief that a given attitude is a reflection of one's core feelings or beliefs about fundamental issues of right and wrong
Moralization: the
processes by which an attitude increases in moral conviction or attains moral relevance
Demoralization: the
processes by which an attitude decreases in moral conviction
Greta Thunberg had enough. After experiencing record heat waves and forest fires in Sweden during the summer of 2018, she felt she needed to take a personal stand to wake people up about the issue of climate change. She therefore decided to single-handedly launch a school strike by showing up every day to protest outside the parliament in central Stockholm in the weeks leading up to the September Swedish election. "It is my moral responsibility to do what I can," she explained (cited in Crouch 2018). Greta's solo strike went viral on social media and inspired other concerned young people to follow her lead. Young people across the world started engaging in Fridays for the Future protests, where they vowed to boycott school until their countries would adhere to the 2015 Paris Agreement, which aims to prevent global temperatures from rising 1.5°C above prein-dustrial levels. On March 15,2019, an estimated 1.6 million students from 124 different countries walked out of school to demand climate change action (Haynes 2019).
What motivated Greta to take a stand on the issue of climate? She explains her motivations in moral terms: Her position on climate change is a reflection of her fundamental beliefs about right and wrong, good and evil, with respect to this issue. These beliefs in turn create a sense of responsibility, if not a compulsion to do something in support of them. In other words, Greta— and no doubt many she has inspired—experiences her position on climate change with the force of moral conviction.
The goal of this article is to review what we know about the psychology of moral conviction and to suggest some promising areas to break new ground. The focus here on moral conviction complements the article by Malle (2021) in this volume on more general moral judgments as well as previous related reviews (on moral justification, see Mullen & Monin 2016; on religion, see Bloom 2012). We begin by reviewing the theoretical orientation of the moral conviction program of research and then turn to operationalization and measurement of the construct. We then review the domain theory of attitudes as well as research that has tested hypotheses generated from it. Next, we turn to review new research that is beginning to explore more deeply the psychological antecedents of moral conviction. We close by discussing attitude moralization and demoralization
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as especially ripe areas for future research and by proposing a domain theory of attitude moral-ization that offers some testable hypotheses going forward.
ESSENTTALISM VERSUS SUBJECTIVISM
Researchers often imply that morality is an inherent property of some issues, situations, choices, attitudes, judgments, and so on. Stanley Milgram, for example, famously argued that his studies on destructive obedience shed light on the comparative power of strong situations versus individual commitments to morality: "[When] ordinary people ... are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few have the resources to resist authority" (Milgram 1974, p. 6). In another study, researchers concluded that people's attitudes about the Iraq war and the economy (which the researchers assumed were nonmoral issues) were more important in shaping Americans' candidate preferences in the 2004 presidential election than attitudes about abortion or gay marriage (which the researchers assumed were moral issues) (Hillygus & Shields 2005). In neither case, however, were participants asked whether they perceived their situation (e.g., the Milgram experiment) or any of the issues (e.g., the Iraq war) in moral terms. We argue that to know whether people are willing to sacrifice their moral beliefs to obey authorities, or whether their vote is primarily based on moral or other concerns, one first has to ask them whether their moral concerns are relevant to the situation or issue in the first place.
Asking people whether and to what degree a given attitude is one they hold with moral conviction differs from most other contemporary approaches to studying morality, which generally start with a theoretical orientation of what counts as a moral concern instead. Moral foundation theorists, for example, defined five domains of moral concern1 and designed scales to measure them (Graham et al. 2009). Rather than start with a definition of what counts as a moral concern, researchers working on moral conviction have instead asked people whether they see their position on given issues as a reflection of their personal moral beliefs and convictions. In other words, unlike most approaches that define a priori what counts as part of the moral domain, the moral conviction approach allows participants to define the degree to which their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs reflect something moral. From this perspective, the moral conviction program of research is very much bottom up rather than top down in its approach to understanding morality.
There are at least two key assumptions of the moral conviction program of research, positing that (a) people can access and report the degree to which their attitudes reflect their core moral convictions and (b) perceptions of morality are a matter of degree rather than only a matter of kind. The idea that people can access and report on moral concerns is supported by social domain theory (e.g., Turiel 2006,2012) and by research on people's ability to distinguish between preferences, normative conventions, and moral concerns. Social conventions stretch across a continuum that goes from arbitrary personal preferences (e.g., color preferences, musical tastes) to important and widely shared social standards subject to legitimate sanction (e.g., driving on the correct side of the street) (Huebner et al. 2010). The boundaries between the moral and conventional domains may not always be perfectly sharp but are sharp enough that even very young children (e.g., 39 months of age) recognize and reliably distinguish between moral and conventional notions of right and wrong (Smetana & Braeges 1990). In short, people—including young children—can reliably access conceptions of morality and can distinguish those conceptions from both preferences and normative conventions.
*At times, moral foundations theorists also acknowledge other possible foundational beliefs, such as those concerning liberty/oppression (Iyer et al. 2012).
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We also argue that morality is a matter of degree rather than strictly a matter of kind. Consistent with this premise, the moral significance people attach to different issues varies over time, cultures, and individuals. Attitudes toward smoking, for example, have changed from being a matter of preference to being increasingly moralized over the last 50-60 years (Rozin & Singh 1999). In a similar vein, at one time there were no legal restrictions on abortion in the United States, and abortion services were openly marketed. Restrictions on abortion in the United States were not initially grounded in concerns about morality but were rather rooted in concerns about medical licensure and the desire of increasingly professionalized health care providers to stem competition from midwives and homeopaths (Reagan 1997). Abortion attitudes also vary rather substantially across cultures (Osnos 2012) as well as within cultures (Ryan 2014, Skitka et al. 2005). For example, some people's abortion attitudes reflect personal preferences—they simply would prefer to have backstop protection against an unwanted pregnancy. Others' positions reflect their commitment to a given faith community or religious doctrine. In summary, morality is not an essential feature of some decisions, choices, judgments, or attitude domains—rather, it is a meta-perception people have about some of their decisions, choices, judgments, and attitudes that can vary in strength.
The domain theory of attitudes predicts that what people subjectively experience as moral is psychologically different from what they subjectively experience as a preference or convention (see Figure 1) (Nucci 2001, Nucci & Turiel 1978, Skitka 2014, Skitka et al. 2005). Attitudes that are in the domain of preference are those that are perceived as matters of taste or subjective inclinations. People are very tolerant of others whose tastes differ from their own. Conventional attitudes tend
THE DOMAIN THEORY OF ATTITUDES
Preference
• Personaltastes
• Subjective
• Tolerant
• Absolute/universal
• Norms • Factual
• Coordination rules . Authority independent
• Authority/group . Ties with emotion dependent . Motivating/justifying/
• Narrow obligatory
Convention Moral imperative
• Resistant to change
• Intolerant
Figure 1
A domain theory of attitudes.
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to be rooted in norms, or what in-group members tend to believe. Although conventional attitudes may lead perceivers to make claims about right and wrong (e.g., that it would be wrong to drive on the left side of the road in the United States), they would mean that it is normatively wrong, rather than essentially wrong; the act would only be bad because it breaks a coordination rule, and not because it is inherently bad. Conventional attitudes are often supported by authority dictates but tend to have defined boundaries. It is wrong, for example, to drive on the left side of the street in the United States, but people think it is perfectly acceptable to do so in Great Britain or Australia. Attitudes that are experienced as moral convictions theoretically differ from attitudes experienced as preferences and conventions in a variety of ways, including: the degree to which they are experienced as cultural universals and absolutes and as facts about the world; their independence from what authorities, the law, and so on have to say about the matter; their particularly strong ties with emotion; the degree to which they are inherendy obligatory and self-justifying; their resistance to change; and their association with intolerance for differing viewpoints. We will discuss each of these characteristics in turn, after reviewing the measurement of moral conviction.
Authority
independence: a focus more on ideals and the way things ought to be than on compliance with the authority
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Measurement and Operationalization
Moral conviction is generally measured by using transparent and face-valid self-report measures. Although people may not always be skilled at explaining why they believe a given attitude is moral, they have little problem recognizing whether and to what degree a given attitude reflects a moral conviction (see Figure 2 for example items).
Some research has explored whether the simple categorization of an attitude as moral is a better operationalization of moral conviction than measuring it as a matter of strength or degree (e.g., Wright et al. 2008). Knowing the strength of moral conviction and not just its classification as moral, however, explains unique variance in theoretically relevant variables such as social distancing (Wright et al. 2008).
Other researchers have used various operationalizations of moral conviction that we see as problematic. These operationalizations sometimes confound moral conviction with other concepts that moral conviction should theoretically predict (e.g., universalism or authority independence; see Bloom 2013, van Zomeren et al. 2011); combine measures of moral conviction with measures of other dimensions of attitude strength (e.g., centrality; see Garguilo 2010); use other
Hornseyetal. (2003)
To what extent do you feel your position on_
...based on strong personal principles? ...morally correct? ...a moral stance?
9-point scale, 1 = not at all, 9 = very much
Skitkaetal. (2005) How much are your feelings about_
...connected to your core moral beliefs or convictions?
Skitka et al. (2009), Skitka & Wisneski (2011)
How much are your feelings about_
...connected to your core moral beliefs or convictions? ...based on fundamental questions of right and wrong?
Ryan (2014), Skitka et al. (2017)
How much are your feelings about_
...connected to your core moral beliefs or convictions? ...based on fundamental questions of right and wrong? ...based on moral principles?
5-point scale, 1 = not at all, 5 = very much
Figure 2
Examples of operationalizations of moral conviction.
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attitude strength indices, such as importance, as proxy measures of moral conviction (e.g., Besley 2012, Earle & Siegrist 2008); or average moral convictions about a host of different attitude objects rather than a specific one (Asadullah et al. 2019). These approaches create conceptual and empirical confusion. Moral conviction, for example, is both theoretically and empirically distinct from attitude strength dimensions such as importance, certainty, or centrality; in fact, attitude strength indices sometimes have relationships with other variables that are the inverse of their relationships with face-valid measures of moral conviction (Skitka et al. 2005). For these reasons, we argue that researchers should use measures that explicitly assess moral content and should avoid using proxies or confounds with other constructs. Therefore, the papers we selected for this review are ones that measure moral conviction using items that capture people's meta-perceptions of the degree to which a specific attitude reflects their moral concerns, and we did not include studies that use proxy measures or averages of moral concerns across different attitude objects. We also excluded studies that label some attitudes as moral (e.g., attitudes about social issues) without asking participants to what degree they themselves see the issue as a reflection of a moral one.
The domain theory of attitudes predicts that, relative to their otherwise strong but nonmoral-ized attitudes, people will perceive attitudes in the moral domain as more universal and objectively true, as authority independent, as more motivating or obligatory, and as resistant to change or social influence; moreover, people will be especially intolerant of those who violate their morally convicted attitudes. We review evidence in support of each of these predictions next.
Perceived Objectivity and Universality
Among other predictions, the domain theory of attitudes posits that people's morally convicted attitudes are characterized by two interrelated metacognitions: perceived objectivity and universality. People tend to perceive their morally convicted attitudes as objectively true facts that are grounded in fundamental truths about reality. People also perceive their morally convicted attitudes as universally generalizable truths that apply across time, places, and cultures. To test these hypotheses, Morgan & Skitka (2020) had participants report their degrees of moral conviction on a wide range of issues (e.g., abortion, capital punishment, gun control, immigration, same-sex marriage), as well as the degree to which they perceived their position on each issue to be objectively true and universally applicable. Moral conviction consistently predicted perceived objectivity and universality across issues, even when controlling for indices of attitude strength. A meta-analysis of 21 issues across 3 studies found that the strength of moral conviction was significantly associated with perceived objectivity [meta-analytic r (4,669) = 0.50, p < 0.001], and universahty [meta-analytic r (4,773) = 0.44,/) < 0.001].
Consistent with these findings, there is an implicit association between objectivity and moral conviction on implicit association tests (IAT) (Kidder & Crites 2014), and people make faster universality evaluations about whether other people should or should not engage in a given behavior if they first evaluated the behavior as morally right or wrong rather than as pragmatically good or bad, or pleasant or unpleasant (Van Bavel et al. 2012). Taken together, these results support the hypothesis that attitudes high in moral conviction are perceived much like facts and universals, something that distinguishes them from attitudes that might otherwise be perceived as strong but not moral.
Authority and Peer Independence
Moral beliefs also appear to be authority and peer independent. When people's moral convictions are at stake, they are more likely to believe that duties and rights follow from the greater moral
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purposes that underlie authorities, rules, and procedures than from the authorities, rules, and procedures themselves (e.g., Kohlberg 1976, Rest et al. 1999, Skitka et al. 2008). Moral beliefs are not inherently antiestablishment or antiauthority; they just are not dependent on establishment, convention, rules, or authorities. People tend to focus more on ideals and perceptions of what ought to and should be when their moral convictions are at stake than on a duty to comply with authorities or the rules.
There is considerable support for the authority independence of moral convictions. Research that studied reactions to a Supreme Court case that upheld states' ability to decide whether to legalize physician-assisted suicide [Gonzales v. Oregon (2006)], for example, found that people's strength of moral conviction about physician-assisted suicide, and not their prior perceptions of the Supreme Court's legitimacy and fairness, emerged as the strongest predictor of their perceptions of fairness and acceptance of the Court's decision in this case. Regardless of how legitimate they thought the Supreme Court was at baseline, morally convicted opponents of physician-assisted suicide perceived the decision to be unfair and nonbinding, whereas morally convicted opponents perceived the reverse (Skitka et al. 2009; see also Skitka 2002, Skitka & Mullen 2002, Wisneslri et al. 2009). Interestingly, these effects of moral conviction are independent of the degree to which the same attitude is experienced as a religious conviction (see also Skitka et al. 2018). The Supreme Court study was also later replicated in the context of the US Supreme Court's decision that laws prohibiting same-sex marriage were unconstitutional (Hanson et al. 2016).
Other research has found behavioral support for the prediction that people will reject authorities and the rule of law when their outcomes violate their moral convictions. For example, Mullen & Nadler (2008) exposed people to legal decisions that supported, opposed, or were unrelated to their moral convictions. The experimenters distributed a pen with a post-exposure questionnaire and asked participants to return the questionnaire and pen at the end of the experimental session. Consistent with the prediction that decisions, rules, and laws that violate people's moral convictions erode support for the relevant authorities and institutional systems, participants were more likely to steal the pen after exposure to a legal decision that was inconsistent rather than one that was consistent with their personal moral convictions.
Attitudes that are high in moral conviction are also more resistant to normative and majority influence (Aramovich et al. 2012; Conover & Miller 2018; Hornsey et al. 2003,2007). One of the most replicated findings in social psychology is that people tend to conform to majority group opinion (see Cialdini & Trost 1998 for a review). People conform to majority group norms even when they individually have a contrary point of view for largely two reasons. First, people are often concerned that going against group norms could expose them to ridicule and disenfranchisement from the group, and they hope that going along will maintain or build acceptance and belonging (Asch 1956). Second, people conform when they are not confident about the right answer or the best way to behave, and they turn to peers for guidance and information (e.g., Deutsch & Gerard 1955, Sherif 1936). When people have strong moral convictions, however, they prefer to distance themselves from attitudinally dissimilar others (Skitka et al. 2005, Wright et al. 2008), and therefore they have little desire to look to attitudinally dissimilar peers to discover the right answer. Consistent with this idea, people's moral convictions are resistant to majority influence and consensus information (e.g., Aramovich et al. 2012). People continue to uphold their moral point of view despite these well-known pressures to conform, even when their nonconformity is explicitly public and behavioral (Hornsey et al. 2003, 2007) and when controlling for a number of indices of attitude strength (Aramovich et al. 2012). In summary, moral convictions appear to inoculate people from pressures that usually lead them to defer to authorities, to the rule of law, or to the pressures of normative or majority influence.
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Means Versus Ends
One extension of the authority independence hypothesis is that when people have moral certainty about the outcome that authorities and institutions should deliver, they judge whether the decision, the authority, and the system itself are legitimate as a function of whether they decide the issue "correcdy"—i.e., whether the decision/outcome is consistent with the perceivers' morally preferred conclusion. Correct decisions indicate to perceivers that authorities and institutions are appropriate and work as they should and are therefore fair. Incorrect answers signal that the system is somehow broken and is not working as it should. In other words, the domain theory of attitudes posits that people use their sense of morality as a key point of reference to judge outcome and procedural fairness, as well as the basic legitimacy of the system (e.g., Skitka et al. 2009, Wisneski et al. 2009).
Consistent with these ideas, the strength of moral conviction associated with people's outcome preferences related to legal decisions, election outcomes, and so on is a consistently stronger predictor of the degree to which they perceive these outcomes as fair than is a consideration of whether these decisions are made using fair or unfair procedures (Mullen & Skitka 2006, Skitka 2002, Skitka & Houston 2001, Skitka & Mullen 2002; see Skitka et al. 2008 for a detailed review). In one study, for example, participants were either given or denied voice in a group decision on how to divide a donation to a charity whose aims were consistent or inconsistent with the participants' stance on a given issue (abortion). Participants perceived having voice as fairer than not having voice in the decision about how to allocate the money; however, whether the process was fair (i.e., whether they had voice) or not did not affect the participants' perceptions of the fairness of the choice of charity. When the participants' position on abortion was high in moral conviction, the only thing that affected their perceptions of the fairness of the decision was whether the aims of the charity were consistent or inconsistent with their moral position on abortion (Bauman & Skitka 2009).
Studies that examined participants' reactions to vigilante justice also lend support to the idea that people become more focused on ends over means when their moral concerns are at stake. The participants reported their responses to the death of a criminal defendant whom they believed to be truly guilty (which was associated with a moral conviction that the defendant must be punished), truly innocent (which was associated with a moral conviction that the defendant must not be punished), or whose guilt or innocence was unclear (which was associated with low moral conviction with respect to punishment). In all cases, half of the participants learned that the defendant had died because of an act of vigilante justice before the case went to trial and the other half that the defendant had died because of the death penally after a fair trial. Participants with strong moral convictions about defendant guilt or innocence thought the outcome (the defendant's death) was, respectively, equally fair or unfair, and whether the death was a consequence of vigilantism or due process of law had no effect. The comparative fairness of the procedures only affected perceptions of outcome fairness in the ambiguous guilt condition (Skitka & Houston 2001). This and other research finds that people are tolerant of nearly any means, including lying and violence, so long as they achieve morally preferred ends (e.g., Mueller & Skitka 2018, Reifen Tagar et al. 2014, Skitka 2002, Skitka & Mullen 2002, Zaal et al. 2011).
Obligation and Motivation
Another way that morally convicted attitudes theoretically differ from attitudes rooted in conventions or preferences is the degree to which perceivers feel obligated to act on them. Consistent with this idea, the more morally convicted people feel about a given issue, the less they feel they have a choice when making attitudinally relevant decisions (Kouchaki et al. 2018). Furthermore, stronger
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moral convictions are associated with perceived stronger obligations to take a stand, which in turn predicts intentions to engage in specific forms of activism and collective action (Sabucedo et al. 2018).
Three studies tested the degree to which perceived obligations explained the connection between moral convictions and activist intentions relative to a variety of other possible mediators in the contexts of a graduate assistant strike, a university faculty unionization movement, and undergraduates' reactions to comprehensive testing as a mandatory graduation requirement (Morgan 2011). In each study, the mediational role of obligation was tested relative to people's beliefs that their actions were likely to make a difference (i.e., efficacy), their desire to advance their group's interests (i.e., group identification), their anticipated regret at not becoming more involved in the issue, and their anticipated pride at becoming involved in the issue. Obligation (in all three studies) and anticipated pride (in one study) mediated the relationship between moral conviction and intended activism; the other variables did not.
The sense that moral convictions are obligatory extends beyond people's expectations of themselves to also influence their expectations of others. For example, people with stronger moral convictions on an issue also feel more negative emotions toward political opponents, largely because they see supporting their side (and not the other side) as a moral obligation (Zaal et al. 2017). In sum, the motivational potency of moral conviction appears to be explained by a sense of obligation to act in the name of one's moral beliefs, something people are also willing to project onto others.
Political Engagement
Consistent with the idea that moral convictions are experienced as obligations, considerable research also finds that moral conviction predicts political engagement. Stronger moral convictions about a given cause are associated with increased cause-related activism intentions (Mazzoni 2015, Milesi & Alberici 2018,Morgan 2011), activism behavior (Sabucedo et al. 2018, van Zomeren et al. 2012, Zaal et al. 2011), and both prospective and retrospective reports of voting (Morgan et al. 2010, Ryan 2014, Skitka & Bauman 2008). In a study that investigated Hungarian participants' behaviors in the context of a refugee crisis, stronger moral convictions about the crisis predicted both greater political activism (e.g., participating in demonstrations, contacting government officials, expressing positions on online forums) and volunteerism (e.g., working at camps and shelters, collecting donations, providing financial support) on behalf of refugees (Kende et al. 2017). A metaanalysis of 21 data sets including 40 issues and 39,085 cases found that greater moral conviction about given causes or candidates was associated with greater political engagement (i.e., activism, voting), an effect that was equally strong for those on the political left and right (Skitka et al. 2015). The relationship between moral conviction and political engagement is robust even when controlling for a host of alternative explanations, including strength of partisanship (Skitka & Bauman 2008), religious conviction (Morgan et al. 2010), attitude strength (Morgan 2011, Skitka & Bauman 2008), and perceived efficacy of political engagement (Kende et al. 2017,Morgan 2011).
Intolerance
If people view their moral convictions as objectively correct and universally applicable, then they can be expected to view those who disagree with their moral beliefs as fundamentally wrong and opposed to truth. As a result, people are likely to be intolerant of those who disagree with their closely held moral convictions. Supporting this hypothesis, higher levels of moral conviction predict intolerance of attitudinally dissimilar others based on a variety of both self-report and behavioral measures. For example, people with stronger moral convictions about a given issue prefer
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greater social and physical distance from attitudinally dissimilar others (Skitka et al. 2005, Zaal et al. 2017), results that replicate in both the United States and China (Skitka et al. 2013). People also physically sit farther away from an interaction partner whom they believe has a different (as compared to similar) position on an issue they moralize (Skitka et al. 2005, Wright et al. 2008). Likewise, when children and adolescents classify an attitude as moral they are also less accepting of attitudinal differences with others (Wright 2012). The propensity to moralize attitudes across many political issues (i.e., the moralization of politics) also predicts greater self-reported social distance as well as prejudice, social media avoidance, anger, incivility, and antagonism toward out-group partisans (Garrett & Bankert 2020; cf. Bizumic et al. 2017).2 Furthermore, the link between moral conviction and intolerance is weaker under conditions of mindfulness and stronger under cognitive load, which suggests that the association of moral conviction and intolerance is more of an automatic than a controlled process (Baumgartner & Morgan 2019).
Unwillingness to Compromise
People are also less likely to compromise when a moral conviction is at stake. People who moralize their attitudes on political issues view proposed compromises related to the issues less favorably and are less supportive of political candidates who are willing to negotiate on the matters at hand (Ryan 2019; cf. Clifford 2019). One intriguing line of recent research explored the effect of moral conviction on the strategies people used in economic games that were modified to reflect compromises on political issues. Across several modified economic games, participants who held their positions on the issues with moral conviction (compared to those who did not) were more likely to take aggressive bargaining positions and less likely to compromise when playing against someone they thought disagreed with them (Delton et al. 2020).
Moral Conviction and Emotion
The domain theory of attitudes also predicts that attitudes high in moral conviction are likely to have different and perhaps stronger relationships with emotion than otherwise strong but non-moral attitudes. Research, however, has revealed that the relationship between emotion and moral conviction is complicated and multifaceted. Moral conviction is associated with a host of emotions, including emotions related to the morally convicted issue itself (e.g., Skitka & Wisneski 2011); self-relevant emotions, such as anticipated pride at becoming politically engaged and anticipated guilt at failing to do so (Morgan 2011, Skitka et al. 2017); and emotional reactions to those who either agree or disagree with one's position (e.g., Ryan 2014).
People had a host of emotional reactions, for example, about the beginning of the 2003 Iraq war, including anxiety (i.e., feeling anxious, uncertain, scared, and afraid), a form of guilty glee (i.e., feeling pleased, glad, strong, and guilty), and anger (i.e., feeling angry and mad). People whose support of or opposition to the war was high in moral conviction had stronger positive and negative emotional reactions to the war, respectively, than those whose support or opposition was weak in moral conviction, even after controlling for attitude strength (Skitka & Wisneski 2011). Similarly, compared to people with weaker convictions, supporters and opponents of physician-assisted suicide experienced stronger positive and negative emotions, respectively,
2Bizumic et al. (2017) found no relationship between moral conviction and prejudice. Unlike other research that does find this relationship, however, Bizumic and colleagues did not take into account attitude stance, that is, whether participants were in a similar or different position relative to the targets of possible (intolerance.
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when thinking about the issue, even after controlling for attitude strength (Skitka & Wisneski 2011). Stronger moral convictions are also associated with higher levels of physiological arousal (i.e., skin conductance) even after controlling for measures of attitude strength (e.g., attitude importance and extremity) (Garrett 2018). These results are consistent with the idea that moral convictions are associated with stronger emotional responses than equally strong but nonmoral attitudes.
People also seem to project their own experience of the connection between moral convictions and emotion onto their expectations of others. More specifically, people believe that individuals have stronger moral convictions than groups do, a finding that is explained by the belief that individuals have a greater capacity for emotional experience than do groups (Jago et al. 2019). Emotions also mediate the relationship between moral conviction and a host of other judgments and behavior. For example, the aforementioned finding that people use their moral convictions as guides (rather than procedures) to judge the fairness of outcomes is mediated by anger at nonpre-ferred outcomes (Mullen & Skitka 2006). Similarly, anticipated pride at becoming involved and regret about failing to become involved mediate the relationship between moral conviction and activist intentions (Skitka et al. 2017). Although these results establish clear ties between moral convictions and emotions, correlational findings like these beg the following question: Which comes first, moral convictions or emotions?
The answer appears to be "both." Using longitudinal methods, one study found that people's moral conviction about preferred and nonpreferred presidential candidates early in the election cycle predicted greater enthusiasm and hostility toward these respective candidates later in the election cycle, as well as greater perceived harm of electing nonpreferred candidates and benefits of electing preferred candidates (Brandt et al. 2015). In other words, changes in moral conviction are associated with subsequent changes in both attitudinally relevant emotions and cognitive appraisals (perceived harms and benefits). Longitudinal and experimental studies, however, also indicate that emotions are critical predictors of changes in moral conviction and are more reliable predictors of those changes than cognitive appraisals such as perceptions of harm (e.g., Brandt et al. 2015, Clifford 2019, Feinberg et al. 2019, Wisneski & Skitka 2017). In other words, emotions are clearer antecedents of moral conviction than perceived harms or benefits, but both emotion and perceived harms and benefits are consequences of changes in moral conviction.
In sum, the domain theory of attitudes predicts—and empirical evidence demonstrates—that moral conviction has a number of psychologically important characteristics and consequences. People experience their moral convictions as objectively and universally true and as something that obligates action. Among other things, people's moral convictions seem to inoculate them from peer and authority influence and shape their responses to others, including their tolerance and willingness to compromise. Given how fundamental the consequences of holding moral convictions are to understanding people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, it is important to understand how attitudes become moral in the first place, that is, the processes that lead to attitude moralization.
ATTITUDE MORALIZATION
Efforts to understand attitude moralization have generally explored the relative roles of emotion and reasoning in this process. The social intuitionist model (SIM) of moral judgment suggests that attitudes are likely to become moralized through flashes of moral intuition: a fast, automatic, affect-laden process that is independent of conscious, deliberate reasoning (Haidt 2001). The theory of dyadic morality (TDM) also predicts that the moralization process is intuitive, but in
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contrast to the SIM, it makes the specific prediction that it is an intuitive perception of harm (broadly denned) that moralizes (e.g., Gray et al. 2012, Schein & Gray 2018). According to the TDM, feelings of moral conviction would come to be associated with an attitude object to the extent that harm is intuitively associated with it.
Feinberg et al. (2019) recently proposed a push-pull model of moralization that attempts to integrate these perspectives. According to the push-pull model, the moralization process starts with a particularly evocative stimulus that arouses strong emotions and cognitions that in concert signal possible moral relevance; the more strongly people experience these emotions and cognitions, the more likely they are to perceive the stimuli as morally relevant [what Wisneski & Skitka (2017) called the moral shock hypothesis].
Another route to attitude moralization proposed by Rozin (1999) and incorporated into the push-pull model is the notion of moral piggybacking, that is, the idea that moralization can occur when people experience or acquire new information that leads them to consciously recognize a link between something that was previously viewed as unrelated to morality (e.g., eating meat) and a preexisting moral belief (e.g., killing is wrong). Therefore, moral piggybacking occurs when people recognize the inconsistency between an existing moral belief and another belief.
In addition to positing several factors that can lead to enhanced moralization (i.e., push variables), the push-pull model also posits forces that should lead people to minimize moralization (i.e., pull variables). People may sometimes react defensively when confronted with moral shocks or explicit attempts to manipulate their moral sensibilities (they respond with reactance; see Brehm 1966), and this may lead to resistance to changing their position on the issue; consequently, they may double down on their initial take on the issue instead. The hedonic benefits of persisting in a nonmoralized stance could similarly constrain attempts to moralize. People may resist attempts to shift their opinion on meat consumption, for example, largely because of the pleasure they associate with eating meat. Attempts to moralize will sometimes be met with justifications and rationalizations that support people's hedonic preferences. The push-pull model implies that moralization happens as a joint function of moral shock (strong emotions and recognition of harm) and moral piggybacking. Although the empirical record consistendy confirms the role of emotion, support for the role of harm and/or moral piggybacking is less consistent.
Several studies, for example, find that having strong attitudinally relevant emotions increases feelings of moral conviction, whereas appraisals of harm do not. In one study, participants were exposed to disgusting images directly related to the issue of abortion (e.g., aborted fetuses), to images unrelated to the issue (e.g., overflowing toilets, animals being harmed), or to control images (e.g., office furniture), and they were then asked to report their level of moral conviction about abortion (Wisneski & Skitka 2017). These images were presented at speeds that did or did not allow for conscious awareness of the image's content3 to manipulate whether participants were aware or unaware of the source of the emotion and to test the degree to which moralization could occur intuitively, outside of conscious awareness. Increases in moral conviction relative to controls only emerged in the disgust (aborted fetus) condition and only when there was conscious awareness of what people had seen. The effect of attitude-relevant emotion on moralization was replicated in another study and was mediated by self-reported feelings of disgust and not by anger or harm appraisals. This result is inconsistent with both the SIM and TDM because moralization only occurred when people had conscious awareness of the stimuli, and because disgust
3 Pilot testing indicated that participants experienced higher levels of disgust in response to the disgust-eliciting stimuli relative to control images, even when the stimuli were presented at speeds too fast for conscious recognition of the photo content.
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but not harm mediated the effect of the moral shock on moral conviction (see also Skitka et al. 2017).
Feinberg et al. (2019) conducted three longitudinal studies of the processes that lead to the moralization of attitudes related to consuming meat. The first study collected data at the beginning, middle, and end of an introductory psychology course that emphasized animal rights and welfare. The second and third studies surveyed community samples and comprised seven sessions: Three sessions involved exposure to videos that highlighted the pain and suffering of animals during the process of meat production, and four sessions were devoted to data collection. The results of these studies suggest that moralization occurs largely through the three processes proposed by the push-pull model: an intensification of emotional reactions to the issue of eating meat (i.e., disgust, guilt), stronger recognition of harm, and moral piggybacking (i.e., making a connection between the issue and existing moral beliefs). That said, some participants responded to the interventions with psychological reactance instead—in other words, exposure to the animal harm and suffering messages led them to moralize the issue of meat consumption less, rather than more— which suggests that the hedonic benefits of meat consumption may play a role in the suppression of attitude moralization in this context.
Taken as a whole, research on attitude moralization therefore has found support for the hypothesis that emotion plays an important role in the moralization process and mixed support for the role of harm perceptions in it. One reason we see the mixed evidence about harm perceptions may be differences in the kinds of issues researchers have chosen to study. Some issues may require more deliberation and emphasis on harm to become moralized; just as there are different routes to persuasion, a more central and a peripheral route (e.g., Petty & Cacioppo 1986), there may be multiple routes to moralization. This possibility, however, begs the question, under which conditions is a particular route a necessary (rather than sufficient) path toward attitude moralization? The domain theory of attitudes provides some clues.
Previous studies of attitude moralization have focused on different kinds of issues. Studies that found a role for more deliberation and for harm perceptions focused on attitudes about meat consumption (e.g., Feinberg et al. 2019, Rozin 1999, Rozin et al. 1997) or smoking (Rozin & Singh 1999). Studies that did not find a role for harm, in contrast, examined abortion attitudes (Wisneski & Skitka 2017) and candidate preferences (Brandt et al. 2015). Drawing from the domain theory of attitudes, it is important to note that meat consumption and abortion attitudes vary in the percentages of people who see each issue as a preference, convention, or moral imperative. Few people in the United States, where the samples for these studies were drawn, for example, identify as vegetarian (~2-6%); moreover, in a study 60% of self-identified vegetarians reported having eaten meat in the previous 48 hours (Simcikas 2018). Attitudes about meat consumption are therefore likely, on average, to reflect preferences or normative conventions. In contrast, only 31 % of Americans say that abortion is not a moral issue (Lipka & Gramlich 2019). Therefore, one plausible reason that studies using different attitude objects arrive at different conclusions about the role of cognitive elaboration and harm in attitude moralization may be that they studied attitudes that are largely from different starting domains.
We suggest that the moralization of abortion attitudes is more likely to be a case of moral amplification, given that perceivers are likely to already have some basic moral recognition of cultural prescriptions or proscriptions related to the issue. In contrast, the moralization of attitudes about meat consumption is more likely to require an initial stage of moral recognition, that is, the creation of a new awareness of the possible moral implications of the issue (Rhee et al. 2019). Taken together, the differences between these different approaches to attitude moralization reveal that the domain of the initial attitude is likely to be an important moderator of the processes required for attitude moralization and, possibly, demoralization.
Moral amplification:
the strengthening of existing moral associations with an attitude object
Moral recognition:
the creation of a new awareness of the moral implications of an attitude object
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The Domain Model of Attitude Moralization
We propose a domain model of attitude moralization that integrates the existing domain theory of attitudes and theory and research on attitude moralization. The domain model of attitude moralization proposes that the processes involved in attitude moralization depend on the domain of the initial attitude. When the initial attitude is perceived as a preference, the process of moralization requires an initial stage of moral recognition, followed by moral amplification. When initial attitudes are perceived as conventions or as weak moral convictions, moralization will not require moral recognition but will instead be primarily shaped by processes that lead to moral amplification. We elaborate on these predictions next.
Moral Recognition
When one's initial attitude is perceived as a preference or mindless habit (e.g., eating meat is okay), an important precursor to attitude moralization will be recognition of the possible moral significance of the attitude object. Moral recognition can involve recognition that one's existing position can be reconstrued in moral rather than simply preferential terms, or it can involve recognition of moral objections to one's initial preference. We suggest that persuading someone to recognize the moral significance of an existing preference will require central rather than peripheral routes to attitude change (Petty & Cacioppo 1986), largely through a recognition of harm (Rhee et al. 2019) but quite possibly also through new emotional associations, such as disgust. Feinberg et al.'s (2019) study of attitudes on meat consumption is an excellent example of the lands of processes likely to be involved in the moralization of a preference, including repeated exposure to information-dense persuasive messages, opportunities for moral piggybacking, considerable cognitive elaboration, and the recruitment of new emotional reactions to the attitude domain. In short, moral recognition is more likely to be cognitively effortful, deliberate, and elaborative even when emotions are also involved. Moral shock (e.g., exposure to disgust- or anger-inducing information, or feelings of intense enthusiasm), however, is unlikely to be sufficient to moralize preexisting preferences without additional persuasive messaging about harm and/or benefits as well as moral recognition through moral piggybacking. Consistent with the push-pull model, factors that are likely to inhibit moral recognition include the strength of the perceived hedonic benefits of one's initial preference, habit, and rationalizations of the desirability of one's initial preference (Feinberg et al. 2019).
Moral Amplification
The processes involved in the moralization of conventional or weakly moralized attitudes can be described as moral amplification,4 whereby a weakly moralized attitude becomes more strongly moralized. Someone whose attitude about abortion is rooted in conventional norms rather than a sense of moral imperative, for example, is nonetheless likely to realize that others see the issue in a moral fight and perhaps to see some of their reasons. In other words, people whose attitudes are rooted in conventional norms or weak moral convictions already have some recognition that
4Moral amplification as a term is often used to describe the processes that lead to harsher moral judgments, generally in the study of the possible role of incidental emotion in people's moral judgments. The connection between incidental emotional cues and moral judgment, however, has proven to be tenuous (Landy & Goodwin 2015; cf. Schnall et al. 2015). Here, we use the term "moral amplification" to describe the processes involved in strengthening the moral associations people already have with a given attitude object.
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the issue can be moralized. Moralization in these cases does not require the acquisition of a new moral recognition, but rather the amplification or strengthening of an existing but weak moral recognition.
The processes involved in the moral amplification of conventional or weakly moralized attitudes are likely to differ from those involved in moral recognition in at least four ways: (a) People with attitudes in these perceptual domains are likely to be more aware of proscriptive norms against or prescriptive norms in support of their initial attitude, which means that at least some moral recognition already exists; (b) hedonic attachment to one's existing attitude is likely to be lower than it is for preferences, and therefore hedonic benefits are less likely to be resistance factors; (c) conformity pressures and group loyalty are likely to be more salient and important resistance factors given that these attitudes are likely to be based on potentially valued group identities or existing conformity pressures; and (d) there is greater potential for reactance that could lead to counter-moralization of one's initial position, that is, moralization in opposition to any attempt to change one's initial attitude. In other words, although some of the same variables are involved in both moral amplification and moral recognition, the strength of the factors is predicted to vary as a function of whether the initial position is a preference versus a convention or weakly moralized attitude. Wisneski & Skitka's (2017) study of abortion attitudes seems to be a good example of the moralization of attitudes that are likely to be initially experienced as conventional or as weakly moralized, a situation in which exposure to even a very brief but vivid moral shock is sufficient to lead to attitude moralization without requiring cognitive elaboration or intense efforts at persuasion or enhanced perceptions of harm.
Demoralization
Although there appears to be growing interest in attitude moralization, an equally important area of inquiry (with substantial sociopolitical significance) is attitude demoralization. Some research exploring what predicts attitude change when attitudes are high in moral conviction suggests some directions for future research in this area.
There is mixed evidence about the degree to which attitudes high in moral conviction are more resistant to counter-attitudinal persuasive messages than attitudes that are low in moral conviction (e.g., Brannon et al. 2019, Luttrell et al. 2016). Whether people with morally convicted attitudes are persuadable appears to vary as a function of the specific persuasive message. Morally convicted attitudes appear to be resistant to nonmoralized counter-attitudinal messages (e.g., those that frame arguments in terms of pragmatic concerns) or messages that emphasize consequences (e.g., harms and benefits). Moralized attitudes, however, show greater malleability in response to moralized counter-attitudinal messages (e.g., arguments that are framed using deontological or rules-based messaging; see Luttrell et al. 2019, Ryan 2019) or messages that emphasize counter-attitudinal anger and disgust (Clifford 2019). There are also hints that people's moral convictions are attenuated when they are at odds with their financial interests (Bastian et al. 2015).
Although the above studies were not specifically designed to look at attitude demoralization and for the most part were focused instead on attitude change, they provide some suggestions about the processes likely to be involved in attitude demoralization, including exposure to belief-inconsistent information, shifts in moral cognitions (harms, for example, that are reconstrued as neutral or even as benefits), emotional de-escalation, and/or moralization of an alternative position on the issue. Exposure to especially evocative emotional cues inconsistent with the percenter's standing position, however, seems especially likely to backfire and lead to reactance and counter-moralization instead. More research is clearly needed to gain a better understanding of the processes that lead to both attitude moralization and demoralization.
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CONCLUSION
One of the key insights of the moral conviction program of research is that morality is very much in the eye of the beholder. Knowing the degree to which someone sees a given issue as relevant to their personal sense of morality, moreover, has wide-ranging implications, including their tolerance of those who do not share their point of view, their willingness to compromise or accept procedural solutions for conflict, their willingness to become politically engaged, and a host of other variables.
As suggested in this review, attitudes held with moral conviction have a psychological profile that corresponds well with the domain theory of attitudes. Moral convictions differ from otherwise strong but nonmoral attitudes in that they are perceived as more objectively and universally true, authority independent, and obligatory. In addition to these distinctions, moral convictions predict the degree to which people perceive that the ends justify the means in achieving morally preferred outcomes, their unwillingness to compromise on morally convicted issues, and their political engagement and willingness to engage in volunteerism on the one hand and to accept lying, violence, and cheating to achieve preferred ends on the other.
Directions for future research include learning more about the emergence of moral convictions during development, the changes in moral convictions and related processes over the life span, and the psychological functions that moral convictions serve in people's lives. An especially important step for future research will be to understand the processes underlying attitude moralization and demoralization. The field is beginning to gain some understanding of attitude moralization, but there remains much research to be done, including expanding empirical inquiry to also study attitude demoralization. Understanding the psychology of moral conviction seems to be especially important at this sociopolitical moment, when political cleavages are especially deep and we need to find consensus on how to begin to solve pressing problems such as climate change, immigration, and the maintenance of public health in the face of the current and likely future pandemics. It remains critically important to discover new ways to diminish moral cleavages that can undermine and delegitimize democratic institutions and processes, contribute to intolerance, and give rise to an unwillingness to compromise.
FUTURE ISSUES
1. How do moral convictions develop in adolescence and early adulthood? Are there critical periods during which people tend to develop many of their moral convictions about political or other topics?
2. How do people's moral conviction and related processes change over the life span?
3. What psychological functions does moral conviction serve in people's fives?
4. What is the relative role of emotion versus reasoning in predicting how attitudes become moralized or demoralized? Are moralization and demoralization distinct or interrelated processes?
5. Most moral conviction work is done in political contexts. Does moral conviction outside of politics look similar or different from moral conviction in politics?
6. Are the processes involved in moral recognition and moral amplification the same or different?
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DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The authors are not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank Lindsay Keeran for her assistance in identifying the articles discussed in this review.
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