JZ, In your last post you talk about the political divide in morality in terms of the groundbreaking Moral Foundations Theory, which demonstrates that political liberals place greater emphasis on the values of fairness and harm avoidance whereas political conservatives place greater emphasis on purity, respect for authority, and loyalty. This pattern of differing preferences [...]

AW – You mention two practices that are widespread today but might be viewed as morally offensive in the future: boxing and ageism. I want to think about another one: our treatment of the environment.  A recent meta-analysis confirms what lots of us already know, which is that scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports an anthropogenic—or man-made—model [...]

JZ, It took me all week to think of an answer to the question you posed in the previous post, “what practices are banal today, but in 100 years will seem unspeakably immoral?”  My gut response was to say boxing.  I figured that we are becoming increasingly sensitive to acts of bodily harm of all [...]

AW – This is a fun line of thinking!  I think many people hold the intuition that their sense of right and wrong—unlike, for instance, their way of dressing—is deeply engrained and not subject to the tides of historical fashion.  In essence, we expect aesthetics, but not ethics, to change over time. How wrong we [...]

JZ, You raise some questions about what “counts” as moral behavior in your last post, which got me thinking about a related question that changes the conversation a bit: What counts as a moral issue?  I ask this because in the past few months, I have read and heard arguments suggesting that watching Django Unchained, [...]

AW, The question you ask—when do acts of charity produce “slacking” later on?—connects nicely with a classic debate about altruism.  Dan Batson is a strong partisan for one side of this debate, but describes both sides well in a classic paper.  On the one hand, people might truly care about the welfare of others: a [...]

JZ,

AW – You describe a tension that a lot of scientists (myself included) wonder about, but few have addressed head on.  The implications here are huge: in encouraging moral behavior, should we encourage people to think about the moral acts in which they’ve already engaged, or nudge them away from this type of humble-bragging?  I [...]

JZ, As much as I want to offer a thoughtful response to your point on science and communication in the last post, I really have nothing else to add because I think you nailed it.  Let’s get into content. I really appreciate that you brought up the Hobbes-Rousseau debate.  A related tension in the literature [...]

INTRODUCTORY NOTE: Welcome!  We are Adam Waytz (AW) and Jamil Zaki (JZ), professors and psychologists who study morality, empathy, and prosocial behavior.  Through our years as colleagues and friends, we’ve long discussed the world (or universe) of moral psychology.  In this blog, we continue this dialogue, in the form of an informal exchange between the [...]