Jesse Graham's research while affiliated with University of California and other places
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Publications (96)
Eight preregistered studies (total N = 3,758) investigate the role of values and relational context in attributions for moral violations, focusing on the following questions: (1) Do people's values influence their attributions? (2) Do people's relationships with the violator (self, close other, distant other) influence their attributions? (3) Do th...
Despite the widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines, the United States has a depressed rate of vaccination relative to similar countries. Understanding the psychology of vaccine refusal, particularly the possible sources of variation in vaccine resistance across U.S. subpopulations, can aid in designing effective intervention strategies to inc...
Infectious diseases have been an impending threat to the survival of individuals and groups throughout our evolutionary history. As a result, humans have developed psychological pathogen-avoidance mechanisms and groups have developed societal norms that respond to the presence of disease-causing microorganisms in the environment. In this work, we d...
This chapter reviews research on variations in moral judgments and concerns across the ideological spectrum and across political groups. It pays particular attention to the pluralist model of moral foundations (moral concerns about care, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity), first reviewing how they vary along the left–right ideological spectrum....
Moral psychology is the study of how human minds make and are made by human morality. This state of the art volume covers contemporary philosophical and psychological work on moral psychology, as well as notable historical theories and figures in the field of moral psychology, such as Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, and the Buddha. The volume’s 50 chap...
Moral Foundations Theory has been a generative framework in moral psychology in the last two decades. Here, we revisit the theory and develop a new measurement tool, the Moral Foundations Questionnaire-2 (MFQ-2), based on data from 25 populations. We demonstrate empirically that Equality and Proportionality are distinct moral foundations while reta...
Infectious diseases have been an impending threat to the survival of individuals and groups throughout our evolutionary history. As a result, humans have developed psychological pathogen-avoidance mechanisms and groups have developed societal norms that respond to the presence of disease-causing microorganisms in the environment. In this work, we d...
Despite the widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines, the United States has a depressed rate of vaccination as of September 2021. Understanding the psychology of collective vaccine refusal, particularly the sources of variation across U.S. sub-populations, can aid in designing effective intervention strategies to increase vaccination across dif...
Language is a psychologically rich medium for human expression and communication. While language usage has been shown to be a window into various aspects of people's social worlds, including their personality traits and everyday environment, its correspondence to people's moral concerns has yet to be considered. Here, we examine the relationship be...
In fourteen studies, we tested whether political conservatives’ stronger free will beliefs were linked to stronger and broader tendencies to moralize, and thus a greater motivation to assign blame. In Study 1 (meta-analysis of five studies, n=308,499) we show that conservatives have stronger tendencies to moralize than liberals, even for moralizati...
Across seven studies (five preregistered), we show that power reduces the degree to which people morally condemn transgressions that elicit disgust. This effect is explained by power reducing the subjective experience of disgust instead of the categorization of behaviors as disgusting. Power does not reliably reduce other negative emotions besides...
Most moral psychology research has been conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. As such, moral judgment, as a psychological phenomenon, might be known to researchers only by its WEIRD manifestations. Here, we start with evaluating Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) using the Moral Foundations Questionnair...
Most moral psychology research has been conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. As such, moral judgment, as a psychological phenomenon, might be known to researchers only by its WEIRD manifestations. Here, we start with evaluating Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) using the Moral Foundations Questionnair...
In psychology, much is known about the effects of self-control on morality, and many self-control principles have been used to improve moral behavior (Baumeister & Exline, 1999). From a philosophical perspective, this is unsurprising: management of inappropriate temptations and impulses is an enduring problematic in the ethics literature, and “exec...
Language is a psychologically rich medium for human expression and communication. While it is often used in moral psychology as an intermediary between researcher and participant, much of the human experience that occurs through language — our relationships, conversations, and, in general, the everyday transmission of our thoughts — has yet to be s...
In 14 studies, we tested whether political conservatives' stronger free will beliefs were linked to stronger and broader tendencies to moralize and, thus, a greater motivation to assign blame. In Study 1 (meta-analysis of 5 studies, n = 308,499) we show that conservatives have stronger tendencies to moralize than liberals, even for moralization mea...
Disagreements about how resources should be distributed are often heated, perhaps because people suspect that distributive justice beliefs that clash with their own derive from nefarious motives. In this paper, we consider a less pessimistic explanation for diversity in distributive justice beliefs: such beliefs are influenced by what one considers...
Do clashes between ideologies reflect policy differences or something more fundamental? The present research suggests they reflect core psychological differences such that liberals express compassion toward less structured and more encompassing entities (i.e., universalism), whereas conservatives express compassion toward more well-defined and less...
Needle exchange services reduce the spread of disease. However, these services lack public support, in part because of moral misgivings. Research suggests that moral attitudes are grounded in at least five “foundations”: (1) Care, (2) Fairness, (3) Loyalty, (4) Authority, and (5) Purity. Understanding the moral basis of needle exchange attitudes co...
We conducted preregistered replications of 28 classic and contemporary published findings, with protocols that were peer reviewed in advance, to examine variation in effect magnitudes across samples and settings. Each protocol was administered to approximately half of 125 samples that comprised 15,305 participants from 36 countries and territories....
We conducted preregistered replications of 28 classic and contemporary published findings, with protocols that were peer reviewed in advance, to examine variation in effect magnitudes across samples and settings. Each protocol was administered to approximately half of 125 samples that comprised 15,305 participants from 36 countries and territories....
What causes leaders to punish subordinates unjustly? And why might leaders keep punishing subordinates unjustly, even when this increases workplace misconduct? In the current paper we address these questions by suggesting that power and status cause leaders to punish unjustly. We review evidence on the effects of power and status on punishment, rev...
Despite sharing conceptual overlap, morality and self-control research have led largely separate lives. In this article, we highlight neglected connections between these major areas of psychology. To this end, we first note their conceptual similarities and differences. We then show how morality research, typically emphasizing aspects of moral cogn...
Despite sharing conceptual overlap, morality and self-control research have led largely separate lives. In this article, we highlight neglected connections between these major areas of psychology. To this end, we first note their conceptual similarities and differences. We then show how morality research, typically emphasizing aspects of moral cogn...
Do appeals to moral values promote charitable donation during natural disasters? Using Distributed Dictionary Representation, we analyze tweets posted during Hurricane Sandy to explore associations between moral values and charitable donation sentiment. We then derive hypotheses from the observed associations and test these hypotheses across a seri...
How can schools help students build moral character? One way is to use prepackaged moral education programs, but as we report here, their effectiveness tends to be limited. What, then, can schools do? We took two steps to answer this question. First, we consulted more than 50 of the world’s leading social scientists. These scholars have spent decad...
Clusters of unvaccinated children are particularly susceptible to outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease 1,2. Existing messaging interventions demonstrate short-term success, but some may backfire and worsen vaccine hesitancy ³. Values-based messages appeal to core morality, which influences the attitudes individuals then have on topics like vacc...
Do appeals to moral values promote charitable donation during natural disasters? Using Distributed Dictionary Representation, we analyze tweets posted during Hurricane Sandy to explore associations between moral values and charitable donation sentiment. We then derive hypotheses from the observed associations and test these hypotheses across a seri...
This guide is intended to be a manual for coding the moral content of natural languagedocuments and a record of the USC Computational Social Science and Virtue Ideologyand Morality labs’ protocol for coding the moral content of social media and othertexts. The general goal is for this guide to be a self-contained manual that can be usedfor training...
When do people see self-control as a moral issue? We hypothesize that the group-focused “binding” moral values of Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Purity/degradation play a particularly important role in this moralization process. Nine studies provide support for this prediction. First, moralization of self-control goals (e.g., losing we...
Doris proposes that the exercise of morally responsible agency unfolds as a collaborative dialogue among selves expressing their values while being subject to ever-present constraints. We assess the fit of Doris' account with recent data from psychology and neuroscience related to how people make judgments about moral agency (responsibility, blame)...
In attempting to understand the increased rates of immoral behavior associated with psychopathic personality, researchers have largely focused on identifying deficits such as reduced concerns for the well-being of others. However, we have little understanding of what does motivate individuals with psychopathic traits. What do these individuals valu...
Moral foundations theory (MFT) is a novel psychological framework that advances a pluralist view of morality, expandng it beyond commonly discussed themes of preventing harms and injustices to individuals. According to MFT societies construct moral virtues, norms, and meanings based upon multiple psychological systems (moral foundations): Care/harm...
The idea of the moral circle pictures the self in the center, surrounded by concentric circles encompassing increasingly distant possible targets of moral concern, including family, local community, nation, all humans, all mammals, all living things including plants, and all things including inanimate objects. The authors develop the idea of two op...
We present the data from a crowdsourced project seeking to replicate findings in independent laboratories before (rather than after) they are published. In this Pre-Publication Independent Replication (PPIR) initiative, 25 research groups attempted to replicate 10 moral judgment effects from a single laboratory’s research pipeline of unpublished fi...
Jumping to negative conclusions about other people’s traits is judged as morally bad by many people. Despite this, across six experiments (total N = 2,151), we find that multiple types of moral evaluations—even evaluations related to open-mindedness, tolerance, and compassion—play a causal role in these potentially pernicious trait assumptions. Our...
This crowdsourced project introduces a collaborative approach to improving the reproducibility of scientific research, in which findings are replicated in qualified independent laboratories before (rather than after) they are published. Our goal is to establish a non-adversarial replication process with highly informative final results. To illustra...
Does sharing moral values encourage people to connect and form communities? The importance of moral homophily (love of same) has been recognized by social scientists, but the types of moral similarities that drive this phenomenon are still unknown. Using both large-scale, observational social-media analyses and behavioral lab experiments, the autho...
Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) is a novel psychological framework that advances a pluralist view of morality, expanding beyond commonly-discussed themes of preventing harms and injustices to individuals. According to MFT societies construct moral virtues, norms, and meanings based upon multiple psychological systems (moral foundations): Care/harm,...
We review contemporary work on cultural factors affecting moral judgments and values, and those affecting moral behaviors. In both cases, we highlight examples of within-societal cultural differences in morality, to show that these can be as substantial and important as cross-societal differences. Whether between or within nations and societies, cu...
Empirically analyzing empirical evidence
One of the central goals in any scientific endeavor is to understand causality. Experiments that seek to demonstrate a cause/effect relation most often manipulate the postulated causal factor. Aarts et al. describe the replication of 100 experiments reported in papers published in 2008 in three high-ranking...
Moral judgments about harm versus impurity differ in a number of nonsuperficial ways, as shown by dozens of studies, conducted by dozens of separate research labs, using a wide variety of methods and stimuli. Gray and Keeney attempt to explain away these differences by arguing that the “confounds” of severity and typicality may account for them all...
Research suggesting that political conservatives are happier than political liberals has relied exclusively on self-report measures of subjective well-being. We show that this finding is fully mediated by conservatives' self-enhancing style of self-report (study 1; N = 1433) and then describe three studies drawing from "big data" sources to assess...
The authors review the various ways moral hypocrisy has been defined and operationalized by social psychologists, concentrating on three general types: moral duplicity, moral double standards, and moral weakness. While most approaches have treated moral hypocrisy as an interpersonal phenomenon, requiring public claims, preaching (versus practicing)...
Results from a nationally representative survey (N = 1, 341) provide evidence that self-reported nonvoting behavior is associated with lower endorsement of moral concerns and values (Study 1). Across three studies, five large samples (total N = 27,038), and two presidential elections, we replicate this pattern and show that the explicit intention n...
Morality may be of the highest importance to us, as Einstein put it. But how often do we actually experience morality in our day-to-day lives, and what forms does this experience take? The science of morality has flourished in recent years as methods from social psychology, behavioral economics, neuroscience, experimental philosophy, and cultural a...
A landmark debate in moral psychology concerns gender differences in moral judgment. This debate concluded that, when making moral judgments, women are primarily driven by moral concerns about caring for others, whereas men are primarily driven my moral concerns about fairness/justice. However, empirical findings have been inconsistent and limited...
Political psychology is a dynamic field of research that offers a unique blend of approaches and methods in the social and cognitive sciences. Political psychologists explore the interactions between macrolevel political structures and microlevel factors such as decision-making processes, motivations, and perceptions. In this article, we provide a...
Throughout history, principles such as obedience, loyalty, and purity have been instrumental in binding people together and helping them thrive as groups, tribes, and nations. However, these same principles have also led to in-group favoritism, war, and even genocide. Does adhering to the binding moral foundations that underlie such principles unav...
Three studies examined the associations between relational adult attachment and moral judgment. Study 1 shows that attachment- related anxiety and avoidance are uniquely and differentially related to moral concerns. Relative to low insecurity, higher avoidance was associated with weaker moral concerns about harm and unfairness, whereas higher anxie...
Theoretical approaches that treat religiosity as an evolutionary byproduct of cognitive mechanisms to detect agency may help to explain the prevalence of superstitious thinking, but they say little about the social–motivational (or ideological) functions of religious beliefs or the specific contents of religious doctrines. To address these omission...
Where does morality come from? Why are moral judgments often so similar across cultures, yet sometimes so variable? Is morality one thing, or many? Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) was created to answer these questions. In this chapter, we describe the origins, assumptions, and current conceptualization of the theory and detail the empirical findings...
The target article's climato-economic theory will benefit by allowing for bidirectional effects and the heterogeneity of types of freedom, in order to more fully capture the coevolution of societal wealth and freedom. We also suggest alternative methods of testing climato-economic theory, such as longitudinal analyses of these countries' histories...
The Model of Moral Motives will be of great value to moral psychology, both for its conceptualization of the provide/protect distinction at different levels of analysis (intrapersonal, interpersonal, intragroup, intergroup) and for its usefulness in integrating multiple theoretical perspectives on morality. To the latter end, this commentary makes...
We explored cultural and historical variations in concepts of happiness. First, we analyzed the definitions of happiness in dictionaries from 30 nations to understand cultural similarities and differences in happiness concepts. Second, we analyzed the definition of happiness in Webster's dictionaries from 1850 to the present day to understand histo...
We investigate whether a small digital trace, gathered from simple repeated matrix game play data, can reveal fundamental aspects of a person’s sacred values or moral identity. We find correlations that are often counterintuitive on the surface, but are coherent upon deeper analysis. This ability to reveal information about a person’s moral identit...
Mutualism provides a compelling account of the fairness intuitions on display in economic games. However, it is not yet clear how well the approach holds up as an explanation of all human morality. The theory needs to be tested outside the methodological neighborhood it was born in; such testing has the potential to greatly improve our understandin...
We investigated the moral stereotypes political liberals and conservatives have of themselves and each other. In reality, liberals endorse the individual-focused moral concerns of compassion and fairness more than conservatives do, and conservatives endorse the group-focused moral concerns of ingroup loyalty, respect for authorities and traditions,...
Where does morality come from? Why are moral judgments often so similar across cultures, yet sometimes so variable? Is morality one thing, or many? Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) was created to answer these questions. In this chapter we describe the origins, assumptions, and current conceptualization of the theory, and detail the empirical findings...
The scientific study of morality has blossomed in the past decade, yielding key insights into the psychological processes underlying moral judgments. This blossoming has generally taken place along two streams of research: one concerning cultural and individual differences in these processes, and one concerning their situational determinants. Altho...
Reproducibility is a defining feature of science. However, because of strong incentives for innovation and weak incentives for confirmation, direct replication is rarely practiced or published. The Reproducibility Project is an open, large-scale, collaborative effort to systematically examine the rate and predictors of reproducibility in psychologi...
Libertarians are an increasingly prominent ideological group in U.S. politics, yet they have been largely unstudied. Across 16 measures in a large web-based sample that included 11,994 self-identified libertarians, we sought to understand the moral and psychological characteristics of self-described libertarians. Based on an intuitionist view of mo...
Moral Foundations Theory (Haidt & Graham, 2007) explains the intractability of many political disagreements as the result of liberals and conservatives reacting to different patterns of intuitive moral concerns. Research using self-report measures has shown that liberals endorse the Care/harm and Fairness/cheating foundations but generally do not e...
a b s t r a c t Commentators have noted that the issue stands taken by each side of the American ''culture war'' lack conceptual consistency and can even seem contradictory. We sought to understand the psychological underpinnings of culture war attitudes using Moral Foundations Theory. In two studies involving 24,739 participants and 20 such issues...
At the age of 87, several years after he had stopped writing, Isaiah Berlin responded to an invitation from a Chinese professor to summarize his ideas for publication in China. He produced an extraordinary essay that defended moral pluralism and warned against its enemy, moral monism (or moral absolutism), which he defined as the thesis that "to al...
The moral domain is broader than the empathy and justice concerns assessed by existing measures of moral competence, and it is not just a subset of the values assessed by value inventories. To fill the need for reliable and theoretically grounded measurement of the full range of moral concerns, we developed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire on th...
We attempted to reduce college students' use of their cars with an online intervention. Every other day for 2 weeks, students reported the number of miles they had avoided driving. In a 2 × 2 design, participants received feedback about pollution avoided (e.g., CO2 saved), financial feedback (e.g., gas money saved), or no feedback. A control group...
Number of citations and the h-index are popular metrics for indexing scientific impact. These, and other existing metrics, are strongly related to scientists' seniority. This article introduces complementary indicators that are unrelated to the number of years since PhD. To illustrate cumulative and career-stage approaches for assessing the scienti...
Libertarians are an increasingly vocal ideological group in U.S. politics, yet they are understudied compared to liberals and conservatives. Much of what is known about libertarians is based on the writing of libertarian intellectuals and political leaders, rather than surveying libertarians in the general population. Across three studies, 15 measu...
This article presents a socioecological approach (accounting for physical, societal, and interpersonal environments) to psychological theorizing and research. First, we demonstrate that economic systems, political systems, religious systems, climates, and geography exert a distal yet important influence on human mind and behavior. Second, we summar...
Kenrick et al. (2010, this issue) make an important contribution by presenting a theory of human needs within an evolutionary framework. In our opinion, however, this framework bypasses the human uniqueness that Maslow intended to capture in his theory. We comment on the unique power of culture in shaping human motivation at the phylogenetic, ontog...
The two leading candidates for the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nomination, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, had very similar policy positions and yet demonstrated appeal to disparate populations. Much has been written in the press about demographic differences between supporters of these candidates, but little is known about these groups’ p...
Social psychologists have often followed other scientists in treating religiosity primarily as a set of beliefs held by individuals. But, beliefs are only one facet of this complex and multidimensional construct. The authors argue that social psychology can best contribute to scholarship on religion by being relentlessly social. They begin with a s...
A long-standing puzzle for moral philosophers and psychologists alike is the concept of psychopathy, a personality disorder marked by tendencies to defy moral norms despite cognitive knowledge about right and wrong. Previously, discussions of the moral deficits of psychopathy have focused on willingness to harm and cheat others as well as reasoning...
How and why do moral judgments vary across the political spectrum? To test moral foundations theory (J. Haidt & J. Graham, 2007; J. Haidt & C. Joseph, 2004), the authors developed several ways to measure people's use of 5 sets of moral intuitions: Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity. Across 4 stu...