Moral dilemmas often pose dramatic and gut-wrenching emotional choices. It is now widely accepted that emotions are not simply experienced alongside people's judgments about moral dilemmas, but that our affective processes play a central role in determining those judgments. However, much of the evidence purporting to demonstrate the connection between people's emotional responses and their judg...

Consumers frequently encounter moral violations in everyday life. They watch movies and television shows about crime and deception, hear news reports of corporate fraud and tax evasion, and hear gossip about cheaters and thieves. How does exposure to moral violations influence consumption? Because moral violations arouse disgust and because disgust is an evolutionarily important signal of conta...

Moral psychology is a rapidly growing field with two principle lineages. The main line began with Jean Piaget and includes developmental psychologists who have studied the acquisition of moral concepts and reasoning. The alternative line began in the 1990s with a new synthesis of evolutionary, neurological, and social-psychological research in which the central phenomena are moral emotions and ...

Studied the relationship between social motivation and approaches to moral decision making, and also the emotions people experience in real life moral dilemmas. 44 students were interviewed about a moral dilemma that they had faced in the past. Social motivation was measured with Emmons’ (1989) idiographic personal strivings method. Intimacy motivation was related to a preference for making dec...

Gratitude is conceptualized as a moral affect that is analogous to other moral emotions such as empathy and guilt. Gratitude has 3 functions that can be conceptualized as morally relevant: (a) a moral barometer function (i.e., it is a response to the perception that one has been the beneficiary of another person's moral actions); (b) a moral motive function (i.e., it motivates the grateful pers...

Drawing on an analogy to language, I argue that a suite of novel questions emerge when we consider our moral faculty in a similar light. In particular, I suggest the possibility that our moral judgments are derived from unconscious, intuitive processes that operate over the causal-intentional structure of actions and their consequences. On this model, we are endowed with a moral faculty that ge...