Libertarians are an increasingly prominent ideological group in U.S. politics, yet they have been largely unstudied. Across 16 measures in a large web-based sample that included 11,994 self-identified libertarians, we sought to understand the moral and psychological characteristics of self-described libertarians. Based on an intuitionist view of moral judgment, we focused on the underlying affe...

We present a cognitive model of moral decision-making, MoralDM, which models psychological findings about utilitarian and deontological modes of reasoning. Current theories of moral decision-making extend beyond pure utilitarian models by relying strongly on contextual factors that vary with culture. In MoralDM, the impacts of secular versus sacred values are modeled via qualitative reasoning, ...

We review contemporary work on cultural factors affecting moral judgments and values, and those affecting moral behaviors. In both cases, we highlight examples of within-societal cultural differences in morality, to show that these can be as substantial and important as cross-societal differences. Whether between or within nations and societies, cultures vary substantially in their promotion an...

A theory is presented concerning the impact of attributions about the causes of emotional responses as they infl uence self-control in temptation situations. Research is reviewed indicating a high level of adult sensitivity to external infl uence in making such causal attributions. Two studies are presented in which the post transgression emotions of second-grade children are labeled shame (bec...

As the study of moral judgments grows, it becomes imperative to compare results across studies in order to create unified theories within the field. These efforts are potentially undermined, however, by variations in wording used by different researchers. The current study sought to determine whether, when, and how variations in wording influence moral judgments. Online participants responded t...

Triune Ethics Theory (TET) is a psychological theory developed to meet three goals. First, it attempts to harvest critical findings from neurobiology, affective neuroscience, and cognitive science and to integrate them into moral psychology for the purpose of informing psychological research on the moral life of persons. In contrast to dominant theories that focus on top-down, deliberative reas...

This article presents a theory of reasoning about moral propositions that is based on four fundamental principles. First, no simple criterion picks out propositions about morality from within the larger set of deontic propositions concerning what is permissible and impermissible in social relations, the law, games, and manners. Second, the mechanisms underlying emotions and deontic evaluations ...

Financing is the bottleneck that restricting the development of China's small and medium enterprises. The root cause of financing difficulty for SMEs is the serious information asymmetry that exists between financial institutions, which lead to adverse selection and moral hazard. In this paper, financing theories of SMEs information dissymmetry and credit rationing theories are used to analyze ...

The rationalistic theories of morality emphasize that reasoning plays an important role in moral judgments and prosocial behavior. Theory of mind as a reasoning ability in the mental domain has been considered a facilitator of moral development. The present study examined whether theory of mind was consistently positively associated with morality from middle childhood to late adulthood. Two hun...

We argue that prejudice should be investigated in the context of social-cognitive development and the interplay between morality and group identity. Our new perspective examines how children consider group identity (and group norms) along with their developing moral beliefs about fairness and justice. This is achieved by developing an integrated framework drawing on developmental and social psy...