The relation between emotion and rationality is assessed by reviewing empirical findings from multiple disciplines. Two types of emotional phenomena are examined—incidental emotional states and integral emotional responses—and three conceptions of rationality are considered—logical, material, and ecological. Emotional states influence reasoning processes, are often misattributed to focal object...

Purpose This paper seeks to determine whether family ties and structure correlate with the ethical moral values that are important underpinnings of economic activities. Design/methodology/approach The analysis uses data from World Values Survey (WVS). Given multilevel nature in a cross-country setting, utilizes linear mixed-effects model maximum likelihood estimation. Findings Families strong t...

This essay reviews ethical aspects of computer and information security and privacy. After an introduction of ethical approaches to information technology , the focus is first on ethical aspects of computer security. These include the moral importance of computer security, the relation between computer security and national security, the morality of hacking and computer crime, the nature of cyb...

Adults report that moral characteristics—particularly widely shared moral beliefs—are central to identity. This perception appears driven by the view that changes to widely shared moral beliefs would alter friendships and that this change in social relationships would, in turn, alter an individual’s personal identity. Because reasoning about identity changes substantially during adolescence, th...

Moral psychology has long focused on reasoning, but recent evidence suggests that moral judgment is more a matter of emotion and affective intuition than deliberate reasoning. Here we discuss recent findings in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including several studies that specifically investigate moral judgment. These findings indicate the importance of affect, although they allow that ...

The current research tested the hypothesis that the abilities for understanding other people's minds give rise to the cognitive biases that underlie supernatural beliefs. We used structural equation modeling (N=2789) to determine the roles of various mentalizing tendencies, namely self-reported affective and cognitive empathy (i.e., mind reading), actual cognitive and affective empathic abiliti...

There is a large tradition of work in moral psychology that explores the capacity for moral judgment by focusing on the basic capacity to distinguish moral violations (e.g., hitting another person) from conventional violations (e.g., playing with your food). However, only recently have there been attempts to characterize the cognitive mechanisms underlying moral judgment (e.g., Blair 1995, Gold...

A major obstacle for the design of rigorous, reproducible studies in moral psychology is the lack of suitable stimulus sets. Here, we present the Socio-Moral Image Database (SMID), the largest standardized moral stimulus set assembled to date, containing 2,941 freely available photographic images, representing a wide range of morally (and affectively) positive, negative and neutral content. The...