Maarten P. Zaal

You’re either with us or against us! Moral conviction determines how the politicized distinguish friend from foe

Three studies investigated how politicized collective identification affects individuals’ reactions towards others. We hypothesized that a strong politicized identity tends to be accompanied by a moral conviction about the politicized cause, which in turn determines how the politicized respond to those less committed to their cause. Consistent with this, Study 1 showed that politicized (feminist) identification is associated with lower identification with women who place moderate (vs. high) moral value on gender equality. Study 2 showed that politicized identification was associated with negative emotions towards people who disagree with this cause and this was mediated by the extent to which participants saw supporting the activist goal as morally obligatory. Study 3 showed that politicized identification, to the extent to which it implied holding a moral conviction about the activist cause, is associated with a desire for more social distance to an attitudinally dissimilar other, but not from an attitudinally similar other.

Moralized Rationality: Relying on Logic and Evidence in the Formation and Evaluation of Belief Can Be Seen as a Moral Issue

In the present article we demonstrate stable individual differences in the extent to which a reliance on logic and evidence in the formation and evaluation of beliefs is perceived as a moral virtue, and a reliance on less rational processes is perceived as a vice. We refer to this individual difference variable as moralized rationality. Eight studies are reported in which an instrument to measure individual differences in moralized rationality is validated. Results show that the Moralized Rationality Scale (MRS) is internally consistent, and captures something distinct from the personal importance people attach to being rational (Studies 1–3). Furthermore, the MRS has high test-retest reliability (Study 4), is conceptually distinct from frequently used measures of individual differences in moral values, and it is negatively related to common beliefs that are not supported by scientific evidence (Study 5). We further demonstrate that the MRS predicts morally laden reactions, such as a desire for punishment, of people who rely on irrational (vs. rational) ways of forming and evaluating beliefs (Studies 6 and 7). Finally, we show that the MRS uniquely predicts motivation to contribute to a charity that works to prevent the spread of irrational beliefs (Study 8). We conclude that (1) there are stable individual differences in the extent to which people moralize a reliance on rationality in the formation and evaluation of beliefs, (2) that these individual differences do not reduce to the personal importance attached to rationality, and (3) that individual differences in moralized rationality have important motivational and interpersonal consequences.