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Folk Moral Objectivism: The Case of Harmful Actions
It is controversial whether ordinary people regard beliefs about the wrongness of harmful actions as objectively correct. Our deflationary hypothesis, consistent with much of the evidence, is that people are objectivists about harmful actions that are perceived to involve injustice: when two parties...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8356942/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34393879 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.638515 |
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author | Sousa, Paulo Allard, Aurélien Piazza, Jared Goodwin, Geoffrey P. |
author_facet | Sousa, Paulo Allard, Aurélien Piazza, Jared Goodwin, Geoffrey P. |
author_sort | Sousa, Paulo |
collection | PubMed |
description | It is controversial whether ordinary people regard beliefs about the wrongness of harmful actions as objectively correct. Our deflationary hypothesis, consistent with much of the evidence, is that people are objectivists about harmful actions that are perceived to involve injustice: when two parties disagree about whether such an action is wrong, people think that only one party is correct (the party believing that the action is wrong). However, Sarkissian and colleagues claimed that this evidence is misleading, showing that when the two disagreeing parties are from radically different cultures or species, people tend to think that both parties are correct (a non-objectivist position). We argue that Sarkissian et al.'s studies have some methodological limitations. In particular, participants may have assumed that the exotic or alien party misunderstood the harmful action, and this assumption, rather than a genuinely non-objectivist stance, may have contributed to the increase in non-objectivist responses. Study 1 replicated Sarkissian et al.'s results with additional follow-up measures probing participants' assumptions about how the exotic or alien party understood the harmful action, which supported our suspicion that their results are inconclusive and therefore do not constitute reliable evidence against the deflationary hypothesis. Studies 2 and 3 modified Sarkissian et al.'s design to provide a clear-cut and reliable test of the deflationary hypothesis. In Study 2, we addressed potential issues with their design, including those concerning participants' assumptions about how the exotic or alien party understood the harmful action. In Study 3, we manipulated the alien party's capacity to understand the harmful action. With these changes to the design, high rates of objectivism emerged, consistent with the deflationary hypothesis. Studies 4a and 4b targeted the deflationary hypothesis more precisely by manipulating perceptions of injustice to see the effect on objectivist responding and by probing the more specific notion of objectivism entailed by our hypothesis. The results fully supported the deflationary hypothesis. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8356942 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-83569422021-08-12 Folk Moral Objectivism: The Case of Harmful Actions Sousa, Paulo Allard, Aurélien Piazza, Jared Goodwin, Geoffrey P. Front Psychol Psychology It is controversial whether ordinary people regard beliefs about the wrongness of harmful actions as objectively correct. Our deflationary hypothesis, consistent with much of the evidence, is that people are objectivists about harmful actions that are perceived to involve injustice: when two parties disagree about whether such an action is wrong, people think that only one party is correct (the party believing that the action is wrong). However, Sarkissian and colleagues claimed that this evidence is misleading, showing that when the two disagreeing parties are from radically different cultures or species, people tend to think that both parties are correct (a non-objectivist position). We argue that Sarkissian et al.'s studies have some methodological limitations. In particular, participants may have assumed that the exotic or alien party misunderstood the harmful action, and this assumption, rather than a genuinely non-objectivist stance, may have contributed to the increase in non-objectivist responses. Study 1 replicated Sarkissian et al.'s results with additional follow-up measures probing participants' assumptions about how the exotic or alien party understood the harmful action, which supported our suspicion that their results are inconclusive and therefore do not constitute reliable evidence against the deflationary hypothesis. Studies 2 and 3 modified Sarkissian et al.'s design to provide a clear-cut and reliable test of the deflationary hypothesis. In Study 2, we addressed potential issues with their design, including those concerning participants' assumptions about how the exotic or alien party understood the harmful action. In Study 3, we manipulated the alien party's capacity to understand the harmful action. With these changes to the design, high rates of objectivism emerged, consistent with the deflationary hypothesis. Studies 4a and 4b targeted the deflationary hypothesis more precisely by manipulating perceptions of injustice to see the effect on objectivist responding and by probing the more specific notion of objectivism entailed by our hypothesis. The results fully supported the deflationary hypothesis. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-07-28 /pmc/articles/PMC8356942/ /pubmed/34393879 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.638515 Text en Copyright © 2021 Sousa, Allard, Piazza and Goodwin. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Psychology Sousa, Paulo Allard, Aurélien Piazza, Jared Goodwin, Geoffrey P. Folk Moral Objectivism: The Case of Harmful Actions |
title | Folk Moral Objectivism: The Case of Harmful Actions |
title_full | Folk Moral Objectivism: The Case of Harmful Actions |
title_fullStr | Folk Moral Objectivism: The Case of Harmful Actions |
title_full_unstemmed | Folk Moral Objectivism: The Case of Harmful Actions |
title_short | Folk Moral Objectivism: The Case of Harmful Actions |
title_sort | folk moral objectivism: the case of harmful actions |
topic | Psychology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8356942/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34393879 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.638515 |
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