Moral text processing was used as an ecologically valid method for assessing implicit and explicit moral understanding and development. The authors tested undergraduates, seminarians, and graduate students in political science and philosophy for recall of moral narratives and moral expository texts. Multivariate analyses of covariance using educational experience as an independent variable, age...

Aversive emotional reactions to real or imagined social harms infuse moral judgment and motivate prosocial behavior. Here, we show that the neurotransmitter serotonin directly alters both moral judgment and behavior through increasing subjects' aversion to personally harming others. We enhanced serotonin in healthy volunteers with citalopram (a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) and contra...

Moral judgment in the mature state depends on "theory of mind", or the capacity to attribute mental states (e.g., beliefs, desires, and intentions) to moral agents. The current study uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the cognitive processes for belief attribution in moral judgment. Participants read vignettes in a 2x2x2 design: protagonists produced either a negat...

Moral text processing was used as an ecologically valid method for assessing implicit and explicit moral understanding and development. The authors tested undergraduates, seminarians, and graduate students in political science and philosophy for recall of moral narratives and moral expository texts. Multivariate analyses of covariance using educational experience as an independent variable, age...

A recent theory proposes that moral judgment is an evolved strategy for choosing sides in conflicts. Evidence from moral psychology undermines previous evolutionary theories of morality focused on cooperation. I show how the side-taking hypothesis explains these otherwise puzzling patterns of moral judgment — especially its focus on actions rather than intended consequences. Moral judgment offe...

With the emergence of Web 2.0, people are able to share their thoughts and photos with their friends and strangers. Yet, they also risk invasion of their privacy. Information privacy has therefore become an important issue in the information age. In this research, we focus on the influence of anger on immoral judgment of privacy invasion in cyberspace. Specifically, two scenarios, nonviolent an...

The present research examines evidence for the sentimentalist claim that emotions are the foundation of moral judgment. It considers the psychopath, known for his deficient emotional capacities, as a case study to test intuitions about the emotion’s role in moral judgment. Graham and colleagues (2009) examined moral judgment differences between psychopaths and non-psychopaths. Psychopaths showe...

To investigate the role of episodic thought about the past and future in moral judgment, we administered a well-established moral judgment battery to individuals with hippocampal damage and deficits in episodic thought (insert Greene et al. 2001). Healthy controls select deontological answers in high-conflict moral scenarios more frequently when they vividly imagine themselves in the scenarios ...

Emotion plays an important role in moral judgment, and people always use emotion regulation strategies to modulate emotion, consciously or unconsciously. Previous studies had investigated only the relationship between emotion regulation strategies and moral judgment in the Harm domain, and revealed divergent results. Based on Moral Foundations Theory, the present study extended the investigatio...