On the relevance of morality in social psychology: An introduction to a virtual special issue.

Recently, social psychology has become central in the study of morality. This turn to morality as a topic builds on social psychologists' long-standing interest in issues closely related to morality, such as cooperation, empathy, fairness, social norms and deviance. The present paper introduces a (virtual) special issue on morality by highlighting some of the 41 articles on 'moral' or 'morality' that have appeared in the European Journal of Social Psychology from 1973 to the present. The nineteen highlighted papers are organized into the main topics covered in research on morality published in EJSP: Emotion, Impression Formation and Trait Inference, Norms and Deviance, Stereotypes, and Reasoning and Judgment. A description of the historical trends that characterized research on morality in EJSP is also provided. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]