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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 Women's bodies have long been subject to societal control. We examine a form of gender/sex bias that may be used to justify and maintain such control: the moralization of women's bodies. Across two studies with US samples (total N = 805), we show that people draw more strongly on morality when justifying their views about women's (vs. men's) autonomy over their bodies. Study 1 showed that a wide range of body‐related behaviours were seen as more of a moral issue for women than for men—a pattern that was absent for behaviours unrelated to bodily autonomy. Study 2 focused on a context with more opposition to women's bodily autonomy (public toplessness) and showed that people drew more strongly on morality when justifying their opposition to women's, compared to men's, bodily autonomy. Exploratory analyses suggested that sexist beliefs may play an important role in such gendered moralization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the COVID‐19 pandemic, behaviours that violated various precautionary policies were recurring. The present research examined how Chinese participants' perception of targets in terms of immorality and dehumanization depends on the target's knowledge of their COVID‐19 infection. In Study 1 (N = 223), we manipulated the presentation of the target's knowledge of their COVID‐19 infection before violating policies and observed that a target who knew they were infected was perceived as more immoral and less human than a target who knew they were not infected. In Study 2 (N = 267), we replicated this effect and further observed that a target was perceived as less moral and human even when they did not acquire knowledge of their COVID‐19 infection until after having violated the policies. Moreover, perceived immorality played a mediating role between the target's knowledge of their COVID‐19 infection and dehumanization, which was moderated by risk perception of COVID‐19 in Study 2, but not by fear of COVID‐19 in Study 1. These findings increase our understanding of the phenomenon of moralization in the context of a pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the COVID‐19 pandemic, the imposition of moralistically justified costs on unvaccinated individuals was used to incentivize vaccination uptake. Here, we ask whether such a strategy creates adverse consequences in the form of lowered trust in the pandemic response among unvaccinated individuals, which could jeopardize their compliance with the broader set of health interventions. As our empirical case, we use a press conference held by the Danish government on 8 November 2021, where COVID‐19‐vaccination passports were reintroduced, in part, to pressure unvaccinated people to take up the vaccine. We analyse the effects of the press conference using daily, nationally representative survey data (total N = 24,934) employing a difference‐in‐differences design. We demonstrate that the press conference decreased the trust in the pandemic management by 11 percentage points among unvaccinated individuals, while trust remained high among vaccinated individuals. Moralistic cost imposition also reduced collective action motivation and coping appraisal among unvaccinated individuals, and, while it increased societal threat appraisal among vaccinated people, it failed to do so among unvaccinated individuals. Our findings imply that decision‐makers using moralized cost imposition as a health intervention should be aware of its potential unintended adverse consequences. [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.

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Soziologie is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The resurgence of interest in psychedelic substances for psychiatric treatment has sparked both excitement and scepticism within the scientific community. This paper addresses the moralisation and hype surrounding psychedelic therapies. Through a systematic review of the literature and a detailed case study, we illustrate that the therapeutic effect of psychedelics is not solely pharmacological but is instead facilitated by their ability to enhance psychotherapy. The paper explores the historical context of psychedelics in psychiatry, their mechanism of action, and evidence of their efficacy in treating depression. We highlight the necessity of integrating psychedelics with psychotherapeutic interventions and emphasise the importance of methodological rigour and ethical standards in psychedelic research and practice. By presenting an informed understanding of psychedelic treatments, we advocate for their consideration as legitimate alternatives alongside traditional therapies, offering a potential paradigm shift in psychiatric care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how scholars of Greek and Roman antiquity in the German-speaking territories in the first half of the nineteenth century define scientificity (Wissenschaftlichkeit). I will argue that antiquity studies in this period of its foundation as a discipline is an instructive case to examine with regard to questions as to how scientific knowledge is established as different from other forms of knowledge, how scientific fields establish relative autonomy from other fields and what forms scientific autonomy can take. Widely recognised as important for the history of the modern research university, the case is not only interesting because it is influential. It is also interesting because the discussions in this period are so different to discussions in the later nineteenth century in the social sciences and the humanities, which have shaped debates about scientificity in sociology and cognate disciplines: We find here a notion of social and cultural research as a scientific endeavour, discussed not primarily with reference to or in defence against the natural sciences, but rather defined against imitative learning and the expectation that research provide moral support for the emerging Germany by idealizing the Greeks. The case highlights moralization as a source of heteronomy in cultural fields in addition to the more widely discussed forces of the market and the influence of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines pedagogical materials and Catholic youth magazines to uncover how, between 1926 and 1939, the Juventud Católica Femenina Mexicana (JCFM) pursued peasant moralization campaigns driven by young women's shared distrust of Indigenous and mixed-race campesinas. It unearths the authoritarian dimensions of the group's educational initiatives and exposes these efforts as fundamentally racial, gendered, and class-conscious political and religious projects. Moreover, this article traces how the JCFM, as an influential upper-class laywomen's group, tried—and failed—to establish a nationwide educational curriculum grounded in Church doctrine to counter the influence of Protestant missions and Mexico's nascent Secretariat of Public Education. It attributes these shortcomings to laywomen's adherence to social hierarchy and their reluctance to offer meaningful solutions to peasant women's economic hardships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Richard Bentley famously called Prudentius ‘Christianorum Maro et Flaccus’. Recent work has explored the extent and detail of Prudentius’ Virgilian intertextuality, most notably in the allegorical epic the Psychomachia, but also in many others of his works. Horatian lyric is laid under contribution not just in the lyric metres of the hymns in the Cathemerinon. The personal Praefatio and Epilogus allude mostly to Horace, and hardly at all to Virgil (not surprising, given Horace’s use of first-person genres in autobiographical mode). In this paper I focus on allusion to a poet arguably almost as important for Prudentius as Virgil and Horace, Ovid. In particular, I look at Prudentius’ allusion to the themes and language of Ovidian metamorphosis.

We review social-psychological evidence for a theoretically integrative and dynamic model of intergroup conflict escalation within democratic societies. Viewing individuals as social regulators who protect their social embeddedness (e.g., in their group or in society), the intergroup value protection model (IVPM) integrates key insights and concepts from moral and group psychology (e.g., group identification, outrage, moralization, protest) into a functional intergroup value protection process. The model assumes that social regulators are continuously looking for information diagnostic of the outgroup's intentions to terminate the relationship with the ingroup, and that their specific cognitive interpretations of an outgroup's action (i.e., as a violation of ingroup or shared values) trigger this process. The visible value-protective responses of one group can trigger the other group's value-protective responses, thus dynamically increasing chances of conflict escalation. We discuss scientific implications of integrating moral and group psychology and practical challenges for managing intergroup conflict within democratic societies. The 2021 Capitol Hill attack exemplifies a major "trigger event" for different groups to protect their values within a democratic society. Which specific perceptions generate such a triggering event, which value-protective responses does it trigger, and do such responses escalate intergroup conflict? We offer the intergroup value protection model to analyze the moral and group psychology of intergroup conflict escalation in democratic societies. It predicts that when group members cognitively interpret another group's actions as violating ingroup or shared values, this triggers the intergroup value protection process (e.g., increased ingroup identification, outrage, moralization, social protest). When such value-protective responses are visible to the outgroup, this can in turn constitute a trigger event for them to protect their values, thus increasing chances of intergroup conflict escalation. We discuss scientific implications and practical challenges for managing intergroup value conflict in democratic societies, including fears of societal breakdown and scope for social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Interamericana de Psicología is the property of Sociedad Interamericana de Psicologia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines the issue of heroism as a sufficient condition for the acquisition of citizenship. I define heroism as exceptional, supererogatory, and risky acts of altruism and heroic citizenship as the reward for a heroic action carried out by a non-citizen resident of membership rights. I mobilize in particular the case of Mamoudou Gassama, 'the Spiderman of Paris', who was naturalized by the French President in 2018 after saving a child. While such positive outcomes for people in precarious legal and political situations are valuable, I provide a critical analysis of the ideological scaffolding and political meaning of heroic citizenship, i.e. how it is publicly justified and practiced. I argue that heroic citizenship constitutes a fiat of citizenship that reproduces a problematic picture of citizenship, relying on three ideological tropes: nationalism, sovereigntism, and moralism. Heroic citizenship represents the other side of a broader policy trend that has transformed citizenship into a privilege to earn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Previous studies in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic indicated that wearing a medical-style mask affects whether a stranger’s face is judged as more trustworthy, socially desirable, or likely to be ill. However, given political controversies around mask use, these effects might vary by political orientation. In a pre-registered online experiment, we measured evaluations of trustworthiness, social desirability and perceived illness in masked and unmasked faces by 1241 British and US participants. We included questions on political orientation, along with the implicit online-VAAST approach/avoid task to test reaction times to masked/unmasked faces. There was a medium-sized effect of masks on trustworthiness and a significant interaction with political orientation, in that conservatives found masked faces less trustworthy than did liberals. Participants were quicker to approach masked than unmasked faces, but conservatives were relatively slower than liberals. The effects on trustworthiness suggest that differential moralization of novel social norms can affect how their adherents are evaluated in terms of their suitability for social interactions. Furthermore, the congruence between implicit and explicit methods implies that such differences can have deep-seated effects on reactions.

Previous studies in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic indicated that wearing a medical-style mask affects whether a stranger's face is judged as more trustworthy, socially desirable, or likely to be ill. However, given political controversies around mask use, these effects might vary by political orientation. In a pre-registered online experiment, we measured evaluations of trustworthiness, social desirability and perceived illness in masked and unmasked faces by 1241 British and US participants. We included questions on political orientation, along with the implicit online-VAAST approach/avoid task to test reaction times to masked/unmasked faces. There was a medium-sized effect of masks on trustworthiness and a significant interaction with political orientation, in that conservatives found masked faces less trustworthy than did liberals. Participants were quicker to approach masked than unmasked faces, but conservatives were relatively slower than liberals. The effects on trustworthiness suggest that differential moralization of novel social norms can affect how their adherents are evaluated in terms of their suitability for social interactions. Furthermore, the congruence between implicit and explicit methods implies that such differences can have deep-seated effects on reactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The study of intergroup emotions has been the focus of attention in recent decades to explain their incidence in the phenomena of political participation, electoral decision, social protest and collective actions, among others. However, there is still contradictory evidence on the role of emotions in political attitudes and behaviors, so reliable measures are required for their investigation. Currently, there are multiple measurement tools that are linked to innovative digital strategies for political communication, including specialized dictionaries for the detection of emotional language and its different valences (Garzón et al., 2020). However, it is required to expand the evidence of validity of new linguistic corpora that expand the existing dictionaries in Spanish to classify the narratives of political discourses. This study aims to validate a tool that allows linguistic analysis in political contexts. Method: An instrumental study was carried out and narratives of governors from 14 Latin American countries were analyzed, which were chosen by the Spanish language of the dictionary to establish measures of construct validity and convergence. Results: Existence of four factorial components (two positive and two negative) that group intergroup emotions, increasing the number of existing ones and delimiting them in the political context. Conclusions: Although the study provides elements to carry out studies based on intergroup emotions related specifically in political context, it is important to point out that it can be approached from different dimensions for a more holistic vision and in the understanding that socio-cultural and political juncture variables can determine errors, if they are approached only from a single methodological perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Psychosozial is the property of Psychosozial-Verlag GmbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the context of public health crises such as the COVID‐19 pandemic, it is essential that individuals cooperate by complying with preventive measures (e.g., wearing a mask). The current research examines how high trust in close others is linked to less cooperation—that is, less compliance with measures—and thus, undermines collective interests. Specifically, we test whether individuals are less willing to comply with preventive measures when interacting with close others they trust. We conducted two experiments in which participants read a vignette depicting a social interaction with either close others (e.g., family) or strangers. Participants had to report the extent to which they would (1) trust the other people in the situation and (2) comply with the mask wearing and physical distancing measures during this interaction. In both experiments, we find that when individuals are considering an interaction with close others, they report experiencing higher trust which is then linked to lower compliance with preventive measures. In Experiment 2, we further demonstrate that participants report less compliance with preventive measures around close others, even when they perceive non‐compliance with the measures as morally "wrong". Our findings shed light on the challenges that compliance with preventive measures poses during social interactions in a context of high trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adopting Van Leeuwen's model of legitimation, this study critically scrutinizes the ways in which the State validates a death sentence and uncovers patterns of legitimizing strategies, along with their lexico-grammatical manifestations in the penalty phase of capital trials, including moralization, rationalization and authorization. The findings reveal that moralization plays a part in constructing "us-them" boundaries through negative evaluative lexis, agency-oriented transitivity patterns, as well as oppositional reference terms. The use of rationalization, observed in reason and purpose clauses as well as legal lexis and future predicates, emphasizes the legal ideology of facticity, impartiality, and objectivity at the expense of humanistic consideration of the person on trial. Authorization bestows power by incorporating various authoritative voices as well as the jurors' verdicts in the guilt phase of the trial. It is argued that in their legitimating practice, the State denies capital defendants the full consideration that the law requires and fails to differentiate and justify the necessity of the lethal choice over life imprisonment. This, in turn, potentially leads to the creation of death-inclined jurors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legitimation of Chinese medicine has long been a politically and morally charged subject in China since the early twentieth century. In recent years, there is an apparent surge of enthusiasm in developing and promoting Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), as evidenced by the state's frequent lauding of its advantages and the implementation of a series of supportive policies and regulations. During the Covid-19 pandemic in China, TCM has again gained ample attention in major state-owned media outlets due to its proclaimed effects in treating Covid-19. In this article, I will conduct an interdisciplinary study of the semiotic work dedicated to legitimating TCM treatment of Covid-19 in the social media account of an official TCM institution. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and textual analysis supported by reference to history and anthropology of medicine, I will examine closely how the above-mentioned semiotic work is achieved through reference to a range of theoretical and moral arguments. Moreover, the paradoxes and inconsistencies in this process of semiotic construction will be discussed to shed light on the deeper issues concerning the entangled relationship of health science and politics in China, as well as the epistemological difficulties in promoting TCM inside and outside China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attitudes towards socially sensitive topics tend to be polarized and moralized. Literature showed that in the political arena people tend to consider their group different from the outgroup in moral terms, and how this perceived distance is capable of producing discrimination against the outgroup. In light of this evidence, the aim of this study (N = 234) was to examine the dynamics between Pro‐vaxers and No‐vaxers in relation to the SARS‐COV‐2 vaccine. Participants evaluated the strength of their attitude towards the COVID‐19 vaccine, and the extent to which this attitude was moralized. They reported the perceived moral distance between the ingroup and the outgroup and completed a scale of outgroup animalistic dehumanization. Results showed a positive association between the strength of the attitude towards the vaccine and its moralization. The tendency to moralize the attitude was positively associated with the perception of moral distance between ingroup and outgroup, and this positively associated with the outgroup dehumanization. A sequential mediation model showed an indirect effect that links attitude strength to dehumanization through attitude moralization and the perception of moral distance between groups. Results are discussed in the light of recent theories on the moralization of attitudes and its importance in institutional communication. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainability has been well used (and abused) as "buzz-word", label or language token for certain behavior and action in political, organizational and increasingly in individual communication. Based on critical approaches in language, discourse and communication studies, the paper explores potential processes of normalization of sustainability as a new norm, discusses new theories and methodological variations that can be applied to better understand sustainable development, and offers a theoretical concept for cultivation of sustainability as a dialectic process of questioning and stabilization in transformation and change processes. Complemented by a communication for development and social change perspective, the paper lays the theoretical foundation for an understanding of sustainability as organizing principle in socio-ecological change processes, which is further elaborated in the contributions of this Special Issue, which are introduced at the end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do family values endure decades after an enterprise is no longer a family business? Addressing this question has been a challenge in social theory, and it is an issue of particular concern for family businesses where firm and family values are often indistinguishable. We analyze the transmission of family, organizational, and religious values across generations in Cadbury, a multinational confectionary company founded in England in 1824. We identify sacralization as a central process that explains Cadbury's success in transferring values across time and different organizational structures. We describe how sacralization is driven by moralization, communion, and syncretism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of moralisation of health behaviours was introduced in social psychology to describe the attribution of moral properties to habits and conditions like smoking or being a vegetarian. Moral properties are powerful motivators for people and institutions, as they may trigger blame, stigma, and appraisal, as well as the polarisation of interest and scientific hype. Here I extend the concept and illustrate how medicines and treatments can be seen as if they had moral properties, too, when they come to be regarded as good or bad in the moral sense, and not just in the instrumental sense of benefiting or harming health. I propose the hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) controversy of 2020 as an example of moralisation of a medicine. HCQ and chloroquine are anti-malarial drugs, whose off-label use for Covid-19 was hotly discussed in the early months of the pandemic, both in the media and within the scientific community, and eventually dismissed when robust evidence came out. The point of the paper is to show that moralisation of health products and treatments may influence individual and institutional decisions in significant ways, and also affect research. For these reasons, it should be carefully monitored and critically assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To manage conflicts between temptation and commitment, people use self-control. The process model of self-control outlines different strategies for managing the onset and experience of temptation. However, little is known about the decision-making factors underlying strategy selection. Across three experiments (N = 317), we tested whether the moral valence of a commitment predicts how people advise attentional self-control strategies. In Experiments 1 and 2, people rated attentional focus strategies as significantly more effective for people tempted to break moral relative to immoral commitments, even when controlling for perceived temptation and trait self-control. Experiment 3 showed that as people perceived commitments to have more positive moral valence, they judged attentional focus strategies to be significantly more effective relative to attentional distraction strategies. Moreover, this effect was partly mediated by perceived differences in motivation. These results indicate that moralization informs decision-making processes related to self-control strategy selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To examine if personal and comparative optimism, perceived effectiveness, and moralization of vaccination predict people's decision to get vaccinated. Methods: We measured self-reported vaccination decisions in a five-wave longitudinal study (N 5,000/wave) in Belgium over a six months period (December 2020-May 2021) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the predictors were demographic factors, personal and comparative optimism for three aspects of COVID-19 (infection, severe disease, good outcome), perceived effectiveness of vaccination, and the extent to which vaccination is being viewed in prosocial terms (altruism, civic spirit) versus as instrumental in one's self-interest (common sense, concern about one's health). Results: The actual availability of vaccines changed people's outlook on vaccination. Marked differences emerged in vaccination decision between linguistic-cultural regions (Flemish Region, Walloon Region, Brussels Capital Region). Personal and comparative optimism predicted vaccination decisions to different extents depending on participants' age and on whether the optimismwas for infection, severe disease, or a good outcome. In older participants, vaccination decision was mostly predicted by personal optimism; in younger participants, it was mostly predicted by comparative optimism. Moralizing vaccination predicted a lower likelihood of a positive vaccination decision, that is, higher vaccine hesitancy or refusal, particularly in older participants. Conclusions: Assessments of risk perception serving to inform vaccination campaigns should differentiate between expectations concerning the risk of infection and expectations concerning the outcome of an infection. Public health messages should address comparative optimism, particularly when targeting younger populations. Contrary to popular belief, moralizing vaccination may reduce the willingness to get vaccinated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There seems to be a consensus across both the fashion system and academia that “fast fashion” has a problem with sustainability. An increase in consumption of cheap and accessible clothing is behind the rise in extraction and pollution across the world seems obvious, and often the solutions offered span from material and technical solutions to awareness-raising and ethical education of consumers. But most of these interventions either implicitly or explicitly push blame on the consumers of cheap goods. It is “they” who consume too much, the consumers of cheap garments. While goods and behaviors readily available to the upper strata of society are deemed sustainable, it is the aspirational consumption of less affluent consumers that needs to be rectified. This article examines how the general discourse on sustainable fashion strikes unevenly at the lower rungs of social hierarchies, amplifying differences in privilege and wealth while also moralizing, preaching down to, and denigrating the desires of the poor. Using Felix Guattari’s framework of the three ecologies, the discussion examines some familiar tropes in sustainability discourse, focusing on three lines: the emphasis on industrial and technological solutionism, the undermining of democratic principles, and the emotional besmirching of aspirations. These three tendencies add up to a contemporary equivalent of sumptuary laws aiming to hold back the social mobility and lowly desires of the masses. While this may not be the intent of the promoters of sustainable fashion, a thoughtless and single-minded critique of fast fashion impacts the dissemination of agency and blame across the definitions of sustainability. The article calls for practitioners to examine the premises of sustainable fashion more closely. Any serious discussion around fashion must start with the question: What is to be sustained?

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Politik is the property of Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Individuals may support economic redistribution because of practical considerations, but also because they perceive it as morally necessary according to their personal ethical beliefs. Across three studies, we investigated whether attitudes towards reducing economic inequality can be experienced with moral conviction (i.e. perceived as rooted in one's core beliefs about right and wrong) and motivate support for redistributive government policies. In Study 1 (N = 138), reducing economic inequality moral conviction scores were comparable to other highly moralized topics (e.g. euthanasia) and higher than lowly moralized topics (e.g. tattoos). In Study 2 (N = 325) and Study 3 (N = 271), the moral conviction for reducing economic inequality positively predicted support for several redistributive government policies. Additionally, while empathic concern (Study 2 and 3) provided mixed results, structural causal attributions (Study 3) mediated this effect. Therefore, our findings highlight the importance of personal moral significance in understanding what motivates support for redistributive policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of the novel coronavirus has put societies under tremendous pressure to instigate massive and rapid behavior change. Throughout history, an effective strategy to facilitate novel behaviors has been to morally condemn those who do not behave in an appropriate way. Accordingly, here, we investigate if complying with the advice of health authorities—for example, to physically distance or vaccinate—has emerged as a moralized issue during the COVID‐19 pandemic. In Study 1, we rely on data (N = 94K) from quota‐sampled rolling cross‐sectional online surveys from eight countries (Denmark, Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, the United Kingdom, and the United States). We find that large majorities find it justified to condemn those who do not keep a distance to others in public and around half of respondents blame ordinary citizens for the severity of the pandemic. Furthermore, we identify the most important predictors of condemnation to be behavior change and personal concern, while institutional trust and social distrust also play large but less consistent roles. Study 2 offers a registered replication of our findings on a representative sample of Britons (N = 1.5K). It shows that both moralization and condemnation of both vaccination and general compliance are best predicted by self‐interested considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite gaining significant cultural and academic currency, penal abolitionism remains unable to radically problematize the punishment of individuals found responsible of exceptionally disturbing acts of criminalized violence. Through an empirical examination of a recent Canadian controversy over penal governance articulated to the transfer of a "monster" to a correctional healing lodge, the article makes legible our difficulties in communicating about appropriate responses to exceptional criminalized incidents which would forgo the use of afflictive sanctions as retaliatory harms. Engaging penal abolitionism empirically, theoretically and normatively, the article notably suggests that the limits of penal abolitionism can be explicated by the fact that its critique is premised on an instrumentalist conception of penalty which neglects the communicational function of punishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

Moralization is a social-psychological process through which morally neutral issues take on moral significance. Often linked to health and disease, moralization may sometimes lead to good outcomes; yet moralization is often detrimental to individuals and to society as a whole. It is therefore important to be able to identify when moralization is inappropriate. In this paper, we offer a systematic normative approach to the evaluation of moralization. We introduce and develop the concept of 'mismoralization', which is when moralization is metaethically unjustified. In order to identify mismoralization, we argue that one must engage in metaethical analysis of moralization processes while paying close attention to the relevant facts. We briefly discuss one historical example (tuberculosis) and two contemporary cases related to COVID-19 (infection and vaccination status) that we contend to have been mismoralized in public health. We propose a remedy of de-moralization that begins by identifying mismoralization and that proceeds by neutralizing inapt moral content. De-moralization calls for epistemic and moral humility. It should lead us to pull away from our tendency to moralize-as individuals and as social groups-whenever and wherever moralization is unjustified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Morally charged rhetoric is commonplace in political discourse on immigration but scholars have not examined how it affects divisions over the issue among the public. To address this gap, we employ preregistered survey experiments in two countries where anti-immigration rhetoric has been prominent: the United States and Denmark. We demonstrate that exposure to moralized messages leads respondents to place greater moral weight on their existing immigration opinions and become more averse to political leaders and, in the United States, social interaction partners who espouse opposite beliefs. This suggests that political moralization contributes to moral conflict and affective polarization. We find no evidence, however, that moral framing produces attitudinal polarization—that is, more extreme immigration opinions. Our study helps make sense of the heightened intensity of anti-immigrant politics even when attitudes are stable. It also suggests a promising avenue for comparative research on affective polarization by shifting the focus from partisanship to the moralization of existing issue disagreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The seventies are the most explicitly militant period in Foucault's career. A key concept in the first half of these years, and one that will prove fundamental, both in understanding the birth of prison and of crime, is that of illegalities. The purpose of this article is to trace the influence that readings of E.P. Thompson's work by Foucault had on the development of this concept of illegalisms, the silent dialogue established between the two authors around two concepts: the subsistence riot and illegalisms. As well as the analysis of the different meaning and objective that this concept is acquiring in Foucault's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral framing and reframing strategies persuade people holding moralized attitudes (i.e., attitudes having a moral basis). However, these strategies may have unintended side effects: They have the potential to moralize people's attitudes further and as a consequence lower their willingness to compromise on issues. Across three experimental studies with adult U.S. participants (Study 1: N = 2,151, Study 2: N = 1,590, Study 3: N = 1,015), we used persuasion messages (moral, nonmoral, and control) that opposed new big-data technologies (crime-surveillance technologies and hiring algorithms). We consistently found that moral frames were persuasive and moralized people's attitudes, whereas nonmoral frames were persuasive and de-moralized people's attitudes. Moral frames also lowered people's willingness to compromise and reduced behavioral indicators of compromise. Exploratory analyses suggest that feelings of anger and disgust may drive moralization, whereas perceiving the technologies to be financially costly may drive de-moralization. The findings imply that use of moral frames can increase and entrench moral divides rather than bridge them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There seems to be a consensus across both the fashion system and academia that "fast fashion" has a problem with sustainability. An increase in consumption of cheap and accessible clothing is behind the rise in extraction and pollution across the world seems obvious, and often the solutions offered span from material and technical solutions to awareness-raising and ethical education of consumers. But most of these interventions either implicitly or explicitly push blame on the consumers of cheap goods. It is "they" who consume too much, the consumers of cheap garments. While goods and behaviors readily available to the upper strata of society are deemed sustainable, it is the aspirational consumption of less affluent consumers that needs to be rectified. This article examines how the general discourse on sustainable fashion strikes unevenly at the lower rungs of social hierarchies, amplifying differences in privilege and wealth while also moralizing, preaching down to, and denigrating the desires of the poor. Using Felix Guattari's framework of the three ecologies, the discussion examines some familiar tropes in sustainability discourse, focusing on three lines: the emphasis on industrial and technological solutionism, the undermining of democratic principles, and the emotional besmirching of aspirations. These three tendencies add up to a contemporary equivalent of sumptuary laws aiming to hold back the social mobility and lowly desires of the masses. While this may not be the intent of the promoters of sustainable fashion, a thoughtless and single-minded critique of fast fashion impacts the dissemination of agency and blame across the definitions of sustainability. The article calls for practitioners to examine the premises of sustainable fashion more closely. Any serious discussion around fashion must start with the question: What is to be sustained?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The children's literature in Romanian publications fulfills a predetermined role, that of the formation of the young lecturer, by using symbols both from his current life and the fantastic one, to propagate him in a new world, most of the times that the fairy tale. Moreover, this type of literature is responsible for the dissemination among the young audience of messages with an ideological background. In this article we aim to highlight the contribution of writers Victor Eftimiu and Demostene Botez to the formation of children's literature, considering two perspectives: analytical and panoramic, with the aim of presenting the writers' own style. We observe, therefore, themes of nature, discipline, respect and discremination, which convey various teachings to the readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]