Moral conviction

Moral conviction refers to the perception that one's feelings about a given attitude are based on one's beliefs about right and wrong. Holding an attitude with moral conviction means that a person has attached moral significance to it.[1]

Description

A conviction is an unshakable belief in something without needing proof or evidence. Moral conviction, therefore, refers to a strong and absolute belief or attitude that something is right or wrong, moral or immoral. Moral convictions have a strong motivational force.Moral motivation

This is an important topic of research because moralization has the potential to both inspire activism and change and also to instigate divisiveness and great destruction.[2][3]

Studies in social psychology indicate that moralization converts preferences into values, which act as moral imperatives, decreasing tolerance of differing opinions.[4] This can lead to an increased willingness to accept violent solutions to conflicts.[5] Moralized attitudes and opinions are more rigid than social conventions.[6]

Characteristics of moral conviction

People who hold moral convictions tend to perceive them as objectively true and universal in the sense that these should apply everywhere irrespective of the geographical location of time in history.

Moral convictions are often authority and peer-independent. People are less likely to be influenced by normative and majority influences. They are particularly resistant to conformity. Behavioral research in social psychology demonstrates that individuals who have a moral basis for their attitude or opinion are more likely to react against the group norm, or counter-conform.[7] For instance, one study[8] examined the reactions to a Supreme Court case that upheld states’ ability to decide whether to legalize physician-assisted suicide [Gonzales v. Oregon (2006)].[9] It was found that people's strength of moral conviction about physician-assisted suicide, and not their prior perceptions of the Supreme Court's legitimacy and fairness, was the strongest predictor of their perceptions of fairness and acceptance of the Court's decision in this case. Regardless of how legitimate they thought the Supreme Court was at baseline, morally convicted opponents of physician-assisted suicide perceived the decision to be unfair and nonbinding, whereas morally convicted opponents perceived the reverse.

Psychological and neural mechanisms

A few studies in cognitive neuroscience have begun to identify the neural mechanisms underpinning moral conviction. One recent study, using psychophysics, electroencephalography, and measures of attitudes on sociopolitical issues found that metacognitive accuracy, the degree to which confidence judgments separate between correct and incorrect trials,[10] moderates the relationship between moral conviction and social influence.[11] Participants who were lower in metacognitive ability were those who hold stronger moralization views. This could explain why such individuals are more likely to have extreme or radical views.[12] and are more immune to social influence.[13] Another study using functional magnetic resonance imaging found that participants' average political moralization scores on specific sociopolitical issues were associated with a blunted response in prefrontal cortex and amygdala but increased neural activity in ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex when they found political violence appropriate according to their own beliefs.[14] The authors of that study concluded by suggesting that moral convictions about sociopolitical issues raise their subjective value, overriding our natural aversion to interpersonal harm.

See also

References
  1. "Moral Conviction".
  2. Skikta, L. J. & Mullen, E. (2002). The dark side of moral conviction. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 35-41.
  3. Sabucedo, J. M., Dono, M., Alzate, M., & Seoane, G. (2018). The importance of protesters’ morals: Moral obligation as a key variable to understand collective action. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1–12.
  4. Rozin, P., Markwith, M., & Stoess, C. (1997). Moralization and becoming a vegetarian: The transformation of preferences into values and the recruitment of disgust. Psychological Science, 8(2), 67-73.
  5. Garrett, K. N., & Bankert, A. (2020). The moral roots of partisan division: How moral conviction heightens affective polarization. British Journal of Political Science, 50(2), 621–640.
  6. Turiel, E. (1983). The Development of Social Knowledge: Morality and Convention. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
  7. Hornsey, M. J., Smith, J. R., & Begg, D. (2007). Effects of norms among those with moral conviction: Counter‐conformity emerges on intentions but not behaviors. Social Influence, 2(4), 244-268.
  8. Wisneski, D. C., Lytle, B. L., & Skitka, L. J. (2009). Gut reactions: Moral conviction, religiosity, and trust in authority. Psychological Science, 20(9), 1059-1063.
  9. Wagner, D. M. (2007). Gonzales v. Oregon: The Assisted Suicide of Chevron Deference. Mich. St. L. Rev., 435.
  10. Fleming, S. M. (2017). HMeta-d: Hierarchical Bayesian estimation of metacognitive efficiency from 672 confidence ratings. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 1, 1–14.
  11. Yoder, K. J., & Decety, J. (2022). Moral conviction and metacognitive ability shape multiple stages of information processing during social decision-making. Cortex, 151, 162-175.
  12. Rollwage, M., Dolan, R. J., & Fleming, S. M. (2018). Metacognitive failure as a feature of those holding radical beliefs. Current Biology, 28, 4014–4021.
  13. Hornsey, M. J., Majkut, L., Terry, D. J., & McKimmie, B. M. (2003). On being loud and proud: Non-conformity and counter-conformity to group norms. British Journal of Social Psychology, 42, 319–335.
  14. Workman, C. I., Yoder, K. J., & Decety, J. (2020). The dark side of morality - Neural mechanisms underpinning moral convictions and support for violence. American Journal of Bioethics - Neuroscience, 11(4), 269–284.
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