Genocide: Punishing a Moral Wrong

On the Wrong Track: Process and Content in Moral Psychology

According to Joshua Greene's influential dual process model of moral judgment, different modes of processing are associated with distinct moral outputs: automatic processing with deontological judgment, and controlled processing with utilitarian judgment. This article aims to clarify and assess Greene's model. I argue that the proposed tie between process and content is based on a misinterpreta...

Punishing Collective Entities

Moral value transfer from regulatory fit: what feels right is right and what feels wrong is wrong.

People experience regulatory fit (E. T. Higgins, 2000) when the strategic manner of their goal pursuit suits their regulatory orientation, and this regulatory fit feels right. Fit violation feels wrong. Four studies tested the proposal that experiences of fit can transfer to moral evaluations. The authors examined transfer of feeling wrong from fit violation by having participants in a promotio...

The Order of Genocide : The Dynamics of Genocide in Rwanda

To begin, I’d like to describe the origins of the research project that ultimately became The Order of Genocide. I first traveled to Rwanda as a journalist in the mid-1990s, and, during my travels there and in what was then Zaire, I became deeply interested in the dynamics that ultimately led to the 1994 genocide. From my perspective as a journalist traveling in the region, the genocide was an ...

Compensatory effects in moral judgment: two rights don't make up for a wrong.

Ratings of the morality of persons described as having committed moral and immoral behaviors indicate that good deeds do not make up for bad ones. The overall goodness of a person is determined mostly by his worst bad deed, with good deeds having lesser influence. Addition of moral deeds does improve ratings of sets containing low-valued items, but, consistent with previous research, this compe...