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A growing literature shows that music increases prosocial behavior. Why does this occur? We propose a novel hypothesis, informed by moral psychology: evidence of others’ musicality may promote prosociality by leading us to judge musical individuals as having enhanced moral standing. This effect may be largely indirect, by increasing perceptions of how intelligent and emotionally sensitive musical individuals are. If so, simply knowing about others’ musicality should affect moral evaluations, such as wrongness to harm. Across four experiments (total N = 550), we found supportive evidence. Information that an animal or person had the capacity and motivation to engage with music led participants to judge these entities as more wrong to harm than matched neutral or non-musical counterparts. Similarly, knowing that a person was not musical made people judge them as less wrong to harm than neutral or musical counterparts. As predicted, musicality was positively associated with perceptions of capacities for emotionality and intelligence, and these broader factors partially mediated the relationship between musicality and wrongness to harm. These effects were not influenced by participants’ own musicality. Thus, non-moral attributes like musicality can impact moral consideration, carrying implications for social behavior and for interventions to promote prosociality.

When people who are generally loyal or fair have a momentary lapse in their moral behavior, how does that impact whether we continue to perceive them as loyal or fair people––and how is this shaped by our relative valuation of loyalty and fairness? Reasoning from an error-management perspective suggests the Moral Stringency Hypothesis: Upon witnessing a moral lapse, we should be especially prone to discount category membership for our most deeply valued moral categories, given the potential costs of affiliating with people who do not reliably adhere to our core moral values. However, another line of research on conceptions of the "true self" suggests the opposite. Specifically, the True Self Hypothesis predicts that we should reliably project our most strongly held moral values onto others, even after a lapse. Across two studies (N = 720), we found consistent evidence favoring the Moral Stringency Hypothesis over the True Self Hypothesis.

Investigating folk conceptions of choice and constraints havebeen problematic given that human actions are rarelyconsidered constrained. In this paper, we utilize humanoidrobots (more clearly influenced by determined programming)to empirically test children’s developing concepts of choiceand action. Using a series of agency attribution and choiceprediction tasks, we examined whether children differentiatefree will abilities between robots and humans. Resultsindicated that 5–7-year-old children similarly attributed theability to choose to both a robot and human child. However,for moral scenarios, participants considered the robot’s actionsto be more constrained than the human. These findingsdemonstrate that children appear to hold a nuancedunderstanding of choice across agents and across context.

How can social learning influence children’s inclinationstoward equality-based or merit-based fairness? To investigatethis question, six- and seven-year-olds were first presentedwith a pre-test distribution task in which they divided eightstickers between two hypothetical children, one of whom wasa more productive worker. Participants were then given brief,direct testimony that advocated either equality- or merit-basedfairness (whichever was not preferred at pre-test), and thatappealed either to emotions or reason. A novel experimenterthen presented participants with a post-test distribution task.The results indicated that a majority of children changed theirdistribution patterns from pre-test to post-test after beingprovided with direct testimony. These changes in resourcedistribution were accompanied by marked changes in thekinds of explanations that children provided. This researchindicates that children’s preferences for different forms of justresource distribution can be heavily influenced by socialcommunication.

The traditional cognitive developmental perspective on moral acquisition posits that children actively construct moral beliefs by assessing the negative impacts of antisocial behaviors. This account is not easily applied to actions that are considered immoral despite lacking consequences for others' welfare. We studied the moralization of behaviors without tangible impacts, specifically examining the independent and joint roles of feelings and norms in children's acquisition of purity-based morals. Seven-year-olds were shown pictures of anthropomorphic aliens engaged in unfamiliar activities and were asked to judge whether these actions were wrong or OK. Relative to a control condition matched for valence and informational complexity, children made elevated wrongness judgments when they were either disgusted or led to believe that the behaviors were unnatural. However, it was only in a condition that included both disgust induction and information about unnaturalness that children exhibited robust tendencies to judge the actions as wrong. This research therefore demonstrates that feelings and norms work in concert such that purity morals are most readily acquired when both factors are involved. The implications for accounts of moral development are discussed. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)

The status of disgust as a sociomoral emotion is debated. We conducted a stringent test of whether social stimuli (specifically, political outgroup members) can elicit physical disgust, as distinct from moral or metaphorical disgust. We employed stimuli (male faces) matched on baseline disgustingness, provided other ways for participants to express negativity toward outgroup members, and used concrete self-report measures of disgust, as well as a nonverbal measure (participants' facial expressions). Across three preregistered studies (total N = 915), we found that political outgroup members are judged to be "disgusting," although this effect is generally weaker for concrete self-report measures and absent for the nonverbal measure. This suggests that social stimuli are capable of eliciting genuine physical disgust, although it is not always outwardly expressed, and the strength of this result depends on the measures employed. We discuss implications of these results for research on sociomoral emotions and American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Morally convicted attitudes—attitudes grounded in core beliefs about fundamental right and wrong—play an important role in political psychology, public opinion, and political behavior. Extant research suggests that these attitudes are intensely held, likely to evoke strong emotional responses, more stable and less amenable to compromise, and perceived to be universally true. Despite a large body of research on how morally convicted attitudes affect behavior and choice, several open questions remain about their antecedents. There are two questions central to this article: First, can the news media effectively communicate a sense of moral conviction to the mass public? Second, if so, what are the factors that cause these attitudes to become morally convicted? Drawing on framing theory, appraisal theory, and research in political communication, we hypothesize that moral conviction can be effectively communicated using episodic (as opposed to thematic) frames, and also, that emotional reactions to such frames contribute to the development of moral conviction. Using four survey experiments and two replications, we find some support for our hypotheses, but we also find that treatment effects are likely context dependent. We close with a discussion about avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals often develop negative biases toward unfamiliar or denigrated groups. Two experimental studies were conducted to investigate the extent to which brief negative messages about novel social groups influence children's (4- to 9-year-olds'; N = 153) intergroup attitudes. The studies examined the relative influence of messages that are provided directly to children versus messages that are overheard and examined whether the force of these messages varies with children's age. According to implicit and explicit measures of children's intergroup attitudes, children rapidly internalized messages demeaning novel groups, thus forming negative attitudes toward outgroups merely on the basis of hearsay. These effects were generally stronger among older children, and were particularly pronounced when the message was provided directly to children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]