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Levels of moral condemnation often vary with outcome severity (e.g., extreme destruction is morally worse than moderate damage), but this is not always true. We investigated whether judgments of purity transgressions are more or less sensitive to variation in dosage than judgments of harm transgressions. In three studies, adults (N = 426) made moral evaluations of harm and purity transgressions that systematically varied in dosage (frequency or magnitude). Pairs of low-dosage and high-dosage transgressions were presented such that the same sets of modifiers (e.g., "occasionally" vs. "regularly," "small" vs. "large") or amounts (e.g., "millimeter" vs. "centimeter") were reused across moral domains. Statistical interactions between domain and dosage indicated robust distinctions between the perceived wrongness of high-dosage and low-dosage harms, whereas moral evaluations of impure acts were considerably less influenced by dosage. Our findings support the existence of a cognitive distinction between purity-based and harm-based morals and challenge current wisdom regarding relationships between intentions and outcomes in moral judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the psychological foundations of biocentrism. It discusses the distinct forms of biocentrism, one of which stems from a desire to avoid hurting sentient beings and the other stems from a desire to uphold purity. Also discussed are the moral concerns about purity or sanctity where biocentrism can be based.

Highlights: [•] Suicide is unlike many immoral acts, which often involve harm to others. [•] Subjects read and evaluated obituaries describing victims of suicide or homicide. [•] Purity concerns and feelings of disgust account for moral judgments of suicide. [•] Harm-based concerns do not account for moral judgments of suicide, unlike homicide. [•] Explicit justifications do not reflect the underlying source of moral judgments. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: 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. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Many people judge suicide to be immoral. We have found evidence that these moral judgments are primarily predicted by people’s belief that suicide taints the soul and by independent concerns about purity. This finding is inconsistent with accounts that define morality as fundamentally based upon harm considerations. In this commentary, we respond to a critique of our finding, and we provide further support for our original conclusions. Even when applying new exclusion criteria to our data, an examination of effect sizes demonstrates that concerns about purity robustly and meaningfully explain variance in moral judgments of suicide. While harm concerns sometimes predict moral judgments of suicide alongside purity concerns, they reliably explain a much smaller proportion of the variance than do purity concerns. Therefore, data from six studies continue to suggest that the relevance of harm concerns for moral judgments of suicide is substantially overshadowed by the contribution of purity concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Biases against physically unclean and unhygienic people emerge by the age of 5. • These biases are generally constant across different causes of dirtiness. • Children's and adults' biases are stronger when evaluating people of similar ages. • Biases manifest similarly for participants from the United States and from India. Cleanliness is universally valued, and people who are dirty are routinely marginalized. In this research, we measured the roots of negative attitudes toward physically unclean individuals and examined the differences that exist in these attitudes between childhood and adulthood. We presented 5- to 9-year-old children and adults (total N = 260) with paired photographs of a dirty person and a clean person, and we measured biases with a selective trust task and an explicit evaluation task. In Study 1, where images of adults were evaluated, both children and adults demonstrated clear biases, but adults were more likely to selectively trust the clean informant. Study 2 instead used images of children and included several additional tasks measuring implicit attitudes (e.g., an implicit association task) and overt behaviors (a resource distribution task) and also manipulated the cause of dirtiness to include illness, enjoyment of filth, and accidental spillage. Children and adults again revealed strong biases regardless of the cause of dirtiness, but only children exhibited a bias on the explicit evaluation task. Study 3 replicated these findings in India, a country that has historically endorsed strong purity norms. Overall, this research indicates that dirty people are targets of discrimination from early in development, that this is not merely a Western phenomenon, and that this pervasive bias is most strongly directed at individuals of similar ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]