Here’s Why We Believe That Beautiful Animals Are More Deserving Of Our Protection

By Emma Young

Do you think a ladybird is more beautiful than a locust? If you do, you probably also feel that the ladybird is “purer” than the locust, and this leads you to believe that it possesses more inherent moral worth. This, at least, is the conclusion of a new paper that inextricably links perceptions of purity, beauty, and moral standing for people as well as animals, and even landscapes and buildings.

Earlier studies have found that the more we feel an entity has a mind, and is capable of sensations and feelings, the greater its moral standing — that is, we think that there is a stronger moral aspect to decisions about to how it should be treated. Aesthetic judgements have an impact, too — people and animals perceived to be more beautiful tend to be perceived as having a greater moral standing. Now the new work, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, on a total of more than 1,600 people, finds that perceptions of purity should be added into these equations.

In the first of six studies, Christoph Klebl at the University of Melbourne and colleagues used a measure of “desire to protect” a number of animals as an indicator of the moral standing ascribed to each. The participants also rated the degree to which each “ugly” or “beautiful” fish, butterfly or bird (examples of each were selected by the researchers) made them think of something “pure”, as well as how useful and inspiring they were, and how much they made them feel disgusted, afraid or sad.

Purity perceptions emerged as being relevant to the desire to protect. In fact, there was no direct effect of beauty (vs ugliness) on moral standing; instead, animals judged to be more beautiful were also judged to be more pure, and it was this that led participants to see them as having greater moral standing. (Perceptions of how “useful” the animals were also relevant).

A second study involved 12 photos of human faces, half previously judged to be attractive and half unattractive. It produced very similar results: perceptions of beauty were linked to purity judgements, and so to moral standing scores.

Next, the team turned their attention to inanimate targets. They found that, again, participants judged “beautiful” vs “ugly” lakes, mountains and even buildings to be “purer” and to be more deserving of protection, which the team again interpreted as reflecting greater moral standing. Again, though, perceived utility (and, for buildings, judgements of how inspiring each example was) did also influence the results.

If you’re wondering whether a desire to protect a lake, say, really reflects judgements of moral standing, the researchers did, too. Follow-up studies used a more explicit moral standing scale for the animals and buildings included in the earlier studies (rather than the “protection deservedness” scale). Participants had to rate the extent to which harming the animal or building would be morally wrong, for example. And again, beautiful animals and buildings were seen as more pure, and this lead to higher moral standing scores.

“The present studies provided empirical evidence that people attribute moral standing to a wide range of beautiful targets, including both sentient beings (humans and animals) and non-sentient entities (landscapes and buildings)”, the researchers note. Beyond that, “we provided empirical evidence for purity intuitions as a psychological mechanism through which people view beautiful entities as possessing moral standing.”

Conservation organisations are sometimes criticised for picking attractive flagship species or sites. But this work does suggest that the more beautiful the threatened target, the more strongly people will feel that those threats are morally wrong. If an “ugly” species in dire need of help shares a threatened habitat with a more attractive species, then focusing on the cute one could well be the sensible approach. The results suggest that focusing on the purity of other at-risk targets could be useful, too. Conservation efforts might perhaps highlight the purity of a building’s Modernist style, say, or the pure, original nature of an old-growth forest. “Our findings… suggest novel and practical avenues through which to leverage moral concern for a wide range of targets such as animals, plants, or works of architecture,” the team concludes.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2021/08/11/heres-why-we-believe-that-beautiful-animals-are-more-deserving-of-our-protection/(accessed 11.8.21)

We Tend To See Acts We Disapprove Of As Deliberate — A Bias That Helps Explain Why Conservatives Believe In Free Will More Than Liberals

By guest blogger Jesse Singal

One of the most important and durable findings in moral and political psychology is that there is a tail-wags-the-dog aspect to human morality. Most of us like to think we have carefully thought-through, coherent moral systems that guide our behaviour and judgements. In reality our behaviour and judgements often stem from gut-level impulses, and only after the fact do we build elaborate moral rationales to justify what we believe and do.

A new paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology examines this issue through a fascinating lens: free will. Or, more specifically, via people’s judgments about how much free will others had when committing various transgressions. The team, led by Jim A. C. Everett of the University of Kent and Cory J. Clark of Durham University, ran 14 studies geared at evaluating the possibility that at least some of the time the moral tail wags the dog: first people decide whether someone is blameworthy, and then judge how much free will they have, in a way that allows them to justify blaming those they want to blame and excusing those they want to excuse.

The researchers examined this hypothesis, for which there is already some evidence, through the lens of American partisan politics. In the paper they note that previous research has shown that conservatives have a greater belief in free will than liberals, and are more moralising in general (that is, they categorise a larger number of acts as morally problematic, and rely on a greater number of principles — or moral foundations — in making these judgements). The first two of the new studies replicated these findings — this is consistent with the idea, put simply, that conservatives believe in free will more because it allows them to level more moral judgements.

There’s a lot to unpack in the remaining studies, but here are a few of the key findings:

In Study 4, the researchers found that when it came to attribution of free will in instances that were viewed as “equally immoral for liberals and conservatives,” (such as spreading malicious rumours about a co-worker) there was no longer any correlation between participants’ political stance (liberal vs. conservative) and their evaluations of how much free will the transgressor had. This lends support to the idea that “differences in conservatives’ and liberals’ perception of free will may be partially due to differences in moralisation, rather than representing any generalised, abstract belief that human behaviours are freely chosen.”

In Study 5, the researchers found that when they deliberately presented participants with hypothetical acts designed to be viewed as more immoral by liberals — such as “Robert sends a formal complaint to his child’s school after finding that his child’s kindergarten teacher is transgendered” — the normal pattern reversed itself, and it was now liberals who attributed more free will to the actors in question. (This finding was weaker, and only statistically significant when the researchers bumped up their sample beyond its initial size.)

In Study 7, the researchers synthesised the aforementioned findings and randomly assigned online participants recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to situations in which the person committing a bad act was either described as liberal or conservative and as acting in order to achieve liberal or conservative goals. After confirming that the MTurk respondents viewed moral harms against their own political group more harshly, the researchers also found “tentative — but weak — evidence” in favour of their overall hypothesis: liberal MTurkers viewed conservative bad actors as having more free will than bad-acting liberals, and conservative MTurkers viewed liberal bad actors as having more free will than bad-acting conservatives. In short, when people take political actions that we morally disapprove of, we’re more inclined to believe they did it of their own volition. This bias afflicts conservatives more often, because they’re more morally disapproving, but can just as easily afflict liberals.

Some of the evidence is mixed, but overall the paper suggests that even judgments about free will (a complex philosophical concept that has been the subject of much debate and introspection) can’t escape the gut-impulse nature that underlies so much human moralising. Though preliminary, this is an important finding that could have ramifications for society. For one thing, if we have a tendency to view agents as more free when their bad acts offend us politically, but as less free when they don’t, that’s the sort of psychological tendency that could be echoed in law enforcement.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/04/14/we-tend-to-see-acts-we-disapprove-of-as-deliberate-a-bias-that-helps-explain-why-conservatives-believe-in-free-will-more-than-liberals/#more-39454(accessed 14.4.20)

Why do people think suicide is morally wrong?

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Public surveys show many people view suicide as morally wrong. When you ask them why, they usually refer to the harm caused to the deceased's family and friends, and to the victim themselves. However, a fascinating new study uncovers evidence suggesting that a more important reason people feel suicide is morally wrong is because they see it as tainting the victim's soul. This is the case even for liberal non-religious people. The finding is another example of how our implicit moral judgments are often at odds with our conscious, explicitly stated moral reasoning.

Joshua Rottman and his colleagues presented 174 US participants (114 women; average age 21) online with eight fabricated obituaries that had the appearance of a real obituary published in a paper. The participants were mostly non-religious liberals. Half of them read obituaries about people killed by murder; the other half read obituaries for people killed by suicide. The wording for the obituaries began with a simple statement (e.g. "Louise Parker, who was 68 years old, died on January 11, 2008 due to [suicide/homicide]"). Apart from that single word difference at the end of the opening statement, the remainder of each obituary - a respectful description of the deceased - was the same for participants in the two conditions.

After reading each obituary, the participants were asked to rate the death according to how morally wrong it was; how angry it made them feel; how disgusted it made them feel; how much harm had been done; and whether the victim's soul had been tainted. The order of the questions was randomised. The participants were also asked to state explicitly why each suicide/homicide is morally wrong.

Overall, homicides were judged more morally wrong than suicides, as you'd expect. However, on average the suicides were also rated as morally wrong, consistent with previous public surveys. The most revelatory finding is that the participants' ratings for the moral wrongness of suicides was not correlated with their ratings of the harm caused. Rather, their judgment of moral wrongness was correlated with their ratings of how much the victim's soul was tainted. Consistent with this, the participants' feelings of disgust predicted their ratings for the moral wrongness of suicide, but their feelings of anger did not.

In contrast, to the findings for suicide, ratings for the moral wrongness of homicide were associated with judgments about harm, but not ratings about the tainting of victims' souls. "These results support our principal hypothesis," the researchers said, "suicide, but not homicide, is considered immoral when there are elevated concerns about spiritual taint (impurity), while the same is not true for concerns about harm." Intriguingly, this result was at odds with the participants' explicitly stated reasons for finding suicide morally wrong, which tended to focus on harm caused.

What about the participants' religious and political beliefs? As you might expect, those who were more conservative and religious tended to judge suicide as more morally wrong. But perhaps the most astonishing result from this research is that the link between seeing the victim's soul as tainted and seeing a suicide as morally wrong was just as strong for the non-religious and liberal as for the religious and conservative.

"These results suggest that even if people explicitly deny the existence of religious phenomena, natural tendencies to at least implicitly believe in souls can underlie intuitive moral judgments", the researchers said. The research has some limitations, as the researchers acknowledged - for example, all the participants were from the US, and there's a need to examine other forms of suicide, such as suicide bombers. Also, the causal role of beliefs about purity has not yet been proven.

However, the authors are to be credited for publishing several replications of their main finding (not detailed here). "A greater understanding of the processes that are relevant to the condemnation of suicide victims may prove useful for the millions worldwide who are affected by this widespread tragedy", the researchers concluded.

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SOURCE:

BPS RESEARCH DIGEST : http://www.researchdigest.org.uk/

Rottman J, Kelemen D, and Young L (2014). Tainting the soul: Purity concerns predict moral judgments of suicide. Cognition, 130 (2), 217-26 PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24333538

Author weblink: http://www.joshuarottman.com/