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Vaccine hesitancy persists despite vaccination's important role in global health. As many vaccines provide social benefits through herd immunity, vaccination decisions can raise moral concerns. Two studies explored the role of moral convictions in vaccination decisions. Study 1 (N = 485) revealed higher vaccination intentions when individuals thought about vaccination in moral terms. Emotions and moral piggybacking positively predicted moral convictions. In Study 2 (N = 1,111), we evaluated the effects of emotional, moral, and scientific pro-vaccination arguments on moral convictions, support for mandatory vaccination, and tolerance of dissenting views. While no group differences were observed, moral convictions were correlated with increased support for mandatory vaccination but also with a reduced tolerance of dissenting opinions. Overall, moral convictions play a small but significant role in vaccination-related decisions. While moral convictions have beneficial effects on compliance, it is crucial not to overlook the adverse consequences, which may lead to a growing societal divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This text examines the challenges of carrying out fieldwork with the Military Police, an institution responsible for systematically targeting Rio de Janeiro’s favela populations with extreme levels of racialized state violence. It discusses how anthropologists can describe police officers in ways that avoid the pitfalls of binary thinking: of reproducing a cosmology of war that assumes a strict division between good and evil and instead produce accounts that hold space for complexity and change, without assuming a moral relativist position.

In recent years, scholars have theorized that one factor enflaming public divides over science and technology is moralization: an individual's perception that their position on an issue is rooted in fundamental moral right and wrong. In this article, I provide evidence for this proposition across five pre-registered hypotheses about the divisive attributes of moralized attitudes in the context of science and technology. Using public opinion data in the United States on three issues-combating climate change, developing gene editing therapies for humans, and labeling genetically modified food-this study demonstrates that moralized attitudes have the potential to exacerbate resistance to scientific evidence and hostility between those with opposing positions. These findings provide strong proof of concept that studying variation in the degree to which individuals moralize issues is an important future direction for understanding persistent public divides over science and technology.

Automated moral inference is an emerging topic of critical importance in artificial intelligence. The contemporary approach typically relies on language models to infer moral relevance or moral properties of a concept. This approach demands complex parameterization and costly computation, and it tends to disconnect with existing psychological accounts of moralization. We present a simple cognitive model for moral inference, Moral Association Graph (MAG), inspired by psychological work on moralization. Our model builds on word association network for inferring moral relevance and draws on rich psychological data. We demonstrate that MAG performs competitively to state-of-the-art language models when evaluated against a comprehensive set of data for automated inference of moral norms and moral judgment of concepts, and in-context moral inference. We also show that our model yields interpretable outputs and is applicable to informing short-term moral change., (© 2024 The Author(s). Topics in Cognitive Science published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Cognitive Science Society.)