People frequently condemn harmless sexual taboo behaviours. Based on self-affirmation theory, we predicted that providing an opportunity to self-affirm decreases the tendency to morally condemn harmless sexual taboos. In Experiment 1, we found evidence that self-affirmation decreases the moral condemnation of harmless sexual taboos and ruled out that this was due to a decrease in how disgusting...

Individuals with different political attitudes attribute their political tendencies to different sources of moral authority. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between moral authority sources, political attitude and authoritarianism. A total of 128 subjects from two universities participated in this study by completing the Moral Authority Test-Revised (MAS-R) and the Authoritarian...

Positioning moral motivations within the framework provided by Schwartz’ (1992) values theory, we ran three dictator game studies (total N = 256) investigating moral integrity and moral hypocrisy. We adapted Batson’s (et al., 1997; et al., 1999; et al., 2002) landmark research design into the experimental economics laboratory (Study 1), and showed that the behavioral inconsistency – out of 64 d...

Given renewed interest in teaching moral philosophy in schools, especially in Australia, perhaps it is time to reconsider its place in teacher education and revisit the longstanding universality/cultural diversity dichotomy in moral development theory. Put simply, does a child’s morality develop in a universal way through invariant stages as Kohlberg argued and, if so, how can we explain differ...

This paper examines the root of unethical dicisions by identifying the psychological forces that promote self-deception. Self-deception allows one to behave self-interestedly while, at the same time, falsely believing that one’s moral principles were upheld. The end result of this internal con game is that the ethical aspects of the decision “fade” into the background, the moral implications ob...

The present study examined the relation between disengagement of moral self–sanctions and support of military force. The modes of moral disengagement included moral sanctioning of lethal means, disavowal of personal responsibility for detrimental effects accompanying military campaigns, minimization of civilian casualties, and attribution of blame and dehumanization of one’s foes. The responden...

Recent efforts to partition the space of morality have focused on the descriptive content of distinct moral domains (e.g., harm versus purity), or alternatively, the relationship between the perpetrator and victim of moral violations. Across three studies, we demonstrate that harm and purity norms are relevant in distinct relational contexts. Moral judgments of purity violations, compared to ha...

INTRODUCTION To follow the progress of technology and increasing domain of nurses' duties, ethical challenges can be observed more than ever. Therefore, the growing and dynamic system of nursing requires nurses with professional and ethical competence who can provide optimal care. The aim of the present study was to define and explain dimensions of moral competency among the clinical nurses of ...

The virtues that constitute medical professionalism have been aptly described in multiple position statements from professional organizations and individuals. These professional virtues depend on particular moral community traditions to undergird and sustain them. Attempts to ground these virtues in narratives intrinsic to medical practice--in the moral consensus of physicians or patients, in t...

Across four experimental studies, individuals who were depleted of their self-regulatory resources by an initial act of self-control were more likely to ‘‘impulsively cheat’’ than individuals whose self-regulatory resources were intact. Our results demonstrate that individuals depleted of self-control resources were more likely to behave dishonestly (Study 1). Depletion reduced people’s moral a...