Although previous research has focused on competence and sociability as the characteristics most important to positive group evaluation, the authors suggest that morality is more important. Studies with preexisting and experimentally created in-groups showed that a set of positive traits constituted distinct factors of morality, competence, and sociability. When asked directly, Study 1 particip...

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 ...

Every society is governed by certain rules (the law), customs, norms and values; and these are intricately crucial to the maintenance of public morality. Invariably, there is a public morality which provides the cement of any human society; the law, especially the criminal law, must regard it as a primary function to reflect and maintain this public morality. Criminal Codes lay down various off...

10,000 words on a single picture, and a similar Japanese proverb devalues this to only 100 words. In most languages the current consensus seems to be that a picture is worth 1000 words. Whatever the true worth in words a good picture is capable of conveying (sometimes quite complex) meaning clearly and without the need for language. Show a picture of an elephant to speakers of two different lan...

Normative behavior is a human universal that is intimately linked to morality. Morality is an adaptation to the specifically human subsistence niche of hunting and gathering, which is skill-intensive and therefore relies on transmission of opaque knowledge and involves critical interdependence, reliance on coordinated division of labor, and synchronized collective action. This lifestyle require...

Recent justice theory and research has variously proposed morality as a motive, an aspect of identity, and as a characteristic of attitudes. The current chapter provides a critical review of each of these approaches, and concludes that (a) morality plays an important role in fairness reasoning, (b) morality has ties to both prosocial and antisocial reactions and behavior, (c) it may be more use...

Literature morality relation has remained a point of vital critical debate since the ancient civilization. In the twentieth Century this question has continued ton inspire critical debate despite phenomenal decline in religious and moral aspect of life. But literature and morality relationship is complex and oscillates between complete interdependence to dissociation of such a relation. The stu...

This paper argues that morality is required to allow the gains from trade to be reaped by reducing the ‘policing’ type of transactions costs involved in opportunistic behaviour. But, as Hume emphasised neither God nor Reason can justify any particular morality, the only source of morality must be local traditions which socialize children through the moral emotions of shame and guilt. Capitalism...

Given intractable secular moral pluralism, the force and significance of the four principles (autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice) of Tom Beauchamp and James Childress must be critically re-considered. This essay examines the history of the articulation of these four principles of bioethics, showing why initially there was an illusion of a common morality that led many to hold t...

Human morality entails a typical self-control dilemma in which one must conform to moral rules or socially desirable norms while exerting control over amoral, selfish impulses. Extant research regarding the connection between self-control and level of construal suggest that, compared with a low-level, concrete construal (highlighting means and resources, e.g., answering 'how' questions), a high...