Tag: morality

  • Moral Licensing and How Good Deeds Make Us Do Bad Deeds

    Be stingy with praise for moral behaviour, Robin Hanson suggests, as by doing so people will strive to be more moral to win more difficult-to-obtain praise. In support of this “stingy school of thought on moral praise”, Hanson points to studies of contradictory behaviour known as “moral licensing”: these studies show how small, seemingly moral…

  • The Macbeth Effect and Moral Colours

    The Macbeth effect is the tendency for people who have acted or thought in an immoral or unethical manner to want to clean themselves physically as a kind of surrogate for actual moral cleansing. Researchers looking at this effect wondered about other interesting characteristics of moral psychology which led them to devising a test for…

  • Moral Psychology and Innate Lying/Honesty

    We have based our society on the assumption that deciding to lie or to tell the truth is within our conscious control. But […] this assumption may be flawed and […] honesty may instead be the result of controlling a desire to lie (a conscious process) or of not feeling the temptation to lie in…