Sonya Sachdeva

Sinning Saints and Saintly Sinners The Paradox of Moral Self-Regulation

The question of why people are motivated to act altruistically has been an important one for centuries, and across various disciplines. Drawing on previous research on moral regulation, we propose a framework suggesting that moral (or immoral) behavior can result from an internal balancing of moral self-worth and the cost inherent in altruistic behavior. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to write a self-relevant story containing words referring to either positive or negative traits. Participants who wrote a story referring to the positive traits donated one fifth as much as those who wrote a story referring to the negative traits. In Experiment 2, we showed that this effect was due specifically to a change in the self-concept. In Experiment 3, we replicated these findings and extended them to cooperative behavior in environmental decision making. We suggest that affirming a moral identity leads people to feel licensed to act immorally. However, when moral identity is threatened, moral behavior is a means to regain some lost self-worth.

Psychology out of the laboratory: the challenge of violent extremism.

The idea that people inevitably act in accordance with their self-interest on the basis of a calculation of costs and benefits does not constitute an adequate framework for understanding political acts of violence and self-sacrifice. Recent research suggests that a better understanding is needed of how sacred values and notions of self and group identity lead people to act in terms of principles rather than prospects when the two come into conflict. Perhaps the greatest challenge is to better understand how sacred causes and moral imperatives diffuse through a population and motivate some (usually small) segment of it to commit violent actions. The challenge to psychology is to adopt an interdisciplinary focus drawing on a range of research methods and to become bolder in its choices of study populations if it is to be relevant to real-world problems.

Culture and the quest for universal principles in moral reasoning

The importance of including cultural perspectives in the study of human cognition has become apparent in recent decades, and the domain of moral reasoning is no exception. The present review focuses on moral cognition, beginning with Kohlbergs model of moral development which relies heavily on peoples justifications for their judgments and then shifting to more recent theories that rely on rapid, intuitive judgments and see justifications as more or less irrelevant to moral cognition. Despite this dramatic shift, analyses of culture and moral decision-making have largely been framed as a quest for and test of universal principles of moral judgment. In this review, we discuss challenges that remain in trying to understand crosscultural variability in moral values and the processes that underlie moral cognition. We suggest that the universalist framework may lead to an underestimation of the role of culture in moral reasoning. Although the field has made great strides in incorporating more and more cultural perspectives in order to understand moral cognition, theories of moral reasoning still do not allow for substantial variation in how people might conceptualize the domain of the moral. The processes that underlie moral cognition may not be a human universal in any simple sense, because moral systems may play different roles in different cultures. We end our review with a discussion of work that remains to be done to understand cultural variation in the moral domain.

Analyzing Political Rhetoric in Conservative and Liberal Weblogs Related to the Construction of the “Ground Zero Mosque”

ABSTRACT We use different text-processing algorithms to gain insight into the political rhetoric used in conservative and liberal weblogs. We specifically focus on the online debate regarding the issue of the “Ground Zero Mosque,” which has been one of the most controversial political issues in U.S. politics in the last several years. Overall, our results show that there are significant differences in the use of various linguistic features related to sentiments of collective identity, moral concerns, and emotional dynamics between liberals and conservatives, thus highlighting the differences between the ideological and moral frameworks of these two groups.

Moral kinematics: the role of physical factors in moral judgments.

Harmful events often have a strong physical component—for instance, car accidents, plane crashes, fist fights, and military interventions. Yet there has been very little systematic work on the degree to which physical factors influence our moral judgments about harm. Since physical factors are related to our perception of causality, they should also influence our subsequent moral judgments. In three experiments, we tested this prediction, focusing in particular on the roles of motion and contact. In Experiment 1, we used abstract video stimuli and found that intervening on a harmful object was judged as being less bad than intervening directly on the victim, and that setting an object in motion was judged as being worse than redirecting an already moving object. Experiment 2 showed that participants were sensitive not only to the presence or absence of motion and contact, but also to the magnitudes and frequencies associated with these dimensions. Experiment 3 extended the findings from Experiment 1 to verbally presented moral dilemmas. These results suggest that domain-general processes play a larger role in moral cognition than is currently assumed.

Consequences are far away: Psychological distance affects modes of moral decision making.

Much of the work on deontological and consequentialist moral choices assumes that these modes of decision making are rooted in individual differences or cognitive capacities. We examine the idea that whether a person focuses on actions or outcomes while making moral choices depends on the psychological distance from the moral situation. When the situation is perceived as far off, whether in time or space, consequentialist considerations loom larger. In the first four studies in this paper, we establish that psychological distance from an event decreases deontological judgments and increases consequentialist choices. This effect holds across two distinct paradigms. Finally, in Experiment 5 we use Construal Level Theory to suggest that deontology and consequentialist reasoning may be linked to how information is represented at near and far distances. This work implies that decision makers have several distinct strategies when making moral choices but the selection of those strategies is far from fixed, and may depend on factors such as psychological distance.

The Role of Self-Sacrifice in Moral Dilemmas

Centuries’ worth of cultural stories suggest that self-sacrifice may be a cornerstone of our moral concepts, yet this notion is largely absent from recent theories in moral psychology. For instance, in the footbridge version of the well-known trolley car problem the only way to save five people from a runaway trolley is to push a single man on the tracks. It is explicitly specified that the bystander cannot sacrifice himself because his weight is insufficient to stop the trolley. But imagine if this were not the case. Would people rather sacrifice themselves than push another? In Study 1, we find that people approve of self-sacrifice more than directly harming another person to achieve the same outcome. In Studies 2 and 3, we demonstrate that the effect is not broadly about sensitivity to self-cost, instead there is something unique about sacrificing the self. Important theoretical implications about agent-relativity and the role of causality in moral judgments are discussed.

Chapter 5 Attending to Moral Values

Abstract There has been an upsurge of interest in moral decision making, which appears to have some distinctive properties. For example, some moral decisions are so strongly influenced by ideas about how sacred entities are to be treated, that they seem to be relatively insensitive to the costs and benefits entailed (e.g., “do not allow companies to pollute the earth for a fee, even if pollution credits reduce pollution”). One interpretation of such decisions is that sacred values motivate rigid decision processes that ignore outcomes. This, however, seems paradoxical in that those who are most offended by acts of pollution, for example, likely care more about pollution than others do. Our analysis of the literature on moral decision making (including our own studies) suggests a framework based on a “flexible view,” where both actions and outcomes are important, and where attentional processes are intimately involved in how the decision maker conceptualizes the problem, how actions and outcomes are weighted, and how protected values are translated into judgments. We argue that understanding the cognitive processes underlying morally motivated decision making offers one method for solving the puzzle of why such deeply entrenched commitments (the rigid view) vary widely in their expression across contexts (the flexible view).

Social media approaches to modeling wildfire smoke dispersion: spatiotemporal and social scientific investigations

ABSTRACT Wildfires have significant effects on human populations, economically, environmentally, and in terms of their general well-being. Smoke pollution, in particular, from either prescribed burns or uncontrolled wildfires, can have significant health impacts. Some estimates suggest that smoke dispersion from fire events may affect the health of one in three residents in the United States, leading to an increased incidence of respiratory illnesses such as asthma and pulmonary disease. Scarcity in the measurements of particulate matter responsible for these public health issues makes addressing the problem of smoke dispersion challenging, especially when fires occur in remote regions. Crowdsourced data have become an essential component in addressing other societal problems (e.g., disaster relief, traffic congestion) but its utility in monitoring air quality impacts of wildfire events is unexplored. In this study, we assessed if user-generated social media content can be used as a complementary source of data in measuring particulate pollution from wildfire smoke. We found that the frequency of daily tweets within a 40,000 km2 area was a significant predictor of PM2.5 levels, beyond daily and geographic variation. These results suggest that social media can be a valuable tool for the measurement of air quality impacts of wildfire events, particularly in the absence of data from physical monitoring stations. Also, an analysis of the semantic content in people’s tweets provided insight into the socio-psychological dimensions of fire and smoke and their impact on people residing in, working in, or otherwise engaging with affected areas.

Up on The 606: Understanding the Use of a New Elevated Pedestrian and Bicycle Trail in Chicago, Illinois

The 606 is the world’s first multiuse elevated trail, extending for 2.7 mi (4.35 km) through diverse neighborhoods whose per capita of open space is one of the lowest in Chicago. The trail connects six ground-level parks and is managed for recreation, but it also serves as a cross-town transportation connector and was funded partially with transportation dollars. Managers sought information about trail use to maintain a safe and harmonious experience for users, to plan operations and maintenance, and to document the benefits of trail development. The use of The 606 was examined during the first 6 months of 2016, and on the basis of those results, its use for the entire year was projected. Automated traffic monitoring with active infrared counters followed procedures in the FHWA Traffic Monitoring Guide. Screenline calibration tests revealed relatively high rates of occlusion owing to user type and traffic volume, yielding an adjustment factor of 1.239. Most users were pedestrians, but proportions varied by day of the week and time of day. Average daily traffic volumes between January 1 and June 30 at counters near the east and west ends of the trail were 3,500 and 3,000, respectively, with peak daily traffic exceeding 10,000. A regression model using weekdays and weekends, location on the trail, and temperature variables explained 80% of the daily use variation. Model extrapolation with historical weather averages estimated annual traffic volumes at 1.46 million and 1.3 million for the two sites, and a combined total annual miles traveled of 3.7 million (5.95 million km). Management implications and future research directions are highlighted.