Beliefs About the True Self Explain Asymmetries Based on Moral Judgment
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23323136 |
|---|---|
| Authors | George E Newman (0000-0003-0498-6746, Yale School of Management Yale University, corresponding author), Julian De Freitas (0000-0003-4912-1391, Department of Psychology Yale University), Joshua Knobe (0000-0003-0733-3775, Program in Cognitive Science and Department of Philosophy Yale University) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 39 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 96-125 |
| Publication date | 2015-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cognitive Science (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0364-0213 • E-ISSN: 1551-6709 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/cogs.12134 |
| PMID | 25039306 |
| OpenAlex | W2142172437 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 71 |
| References cited | 47 |
Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about (a) what a person values, (b) whether a person is happy, (c) whether a person has shown weakness of will, and (d) whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend critically on whether participants themselves find the agent's behavior to be morally good or bad. To date, however, the origins of these asymmetries remain unknown. The present studies examine whether beliefs about an agent's “true self” explain these observed asymmetries based on moral judgment. Using the identical materials from previous studies in this area, a series of five experiments indicate that people show a general tendency to conclude that deep inside every individual there is a “true self” calling him or her to behave in ways that are morally virtuous. In turn, this belief causes people to hold different intuitions about what the agent values, whether the agent is happy, whether he or she has shown weakness of will, and whether he or she deserves praise or blame. These results not only help to answer important questions about how people attribute various mental states to others; they also contribute to important theoretical debates regarding how moral values may shape our beliefs about phenomena that, on the surface, appear to be decidedly non‐moral in nature.
Blame · Epistemology · Moral psychology · Praise · Emotions and Moral Behavior · Free Will and Agency · Philosophy · Psychology · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment · Social Psychology
The Reciprocal Relationship Between Perceptions of Moral Goodness and Knowledge of Others’ True Selves
The true self and existential structure? Unexpected effects of mortality salience and personal need for structure on belief in a true self
Feeling certain
Identification Is the Opposite of Alienation
Non-psychological weakness of will
Good Selves, True Selves
Up the moral pedestal
The Ordinary Concept of True Love
Debunking Arguments in Ethics
The Architecture of Blame and Praise
Authenticity
Intentional or Negligent Homicide? Evidence for Juror Decision Making
The Future of Moral Responsibility and Desert
Multi-level effects of authentic leadership on self-actualization at work – the mediating roles of authentic followership and basic psychological need satisfaction
Getting Out of Blame
Is this real? Cocreation of value through authentic experiential augmented reality
Blame mitigation
Consider the tumor
Virtues disunited and the folk psychology of character
The effects of a defendant's childhood physical abuse on lay support for sentencing
The Effect of True Self-Attributions on the Endorsement of Retributive and Restorative Justice
Implicit Theories of Happiness
People See Political Opponents as More Stupid Than Evil
My True Self is Better Than Yours
The Authentic Self Is the Self-Enhancing Self
Why Do God and Humans Punish? Perceived Retributivist Punishment Motives Hinge on Views of the True Self
One
Happiness and desire satisfaction
Is it good to feel bad about littering? Conflict between moral beliefs and behaviors for everyday transgressions
Why do evaluative judgments affect emotion attributions? The roles of judgments about fittingness and the true self
One strike and you’re a lout
Dimensions of identity-representing belief
On the matter of essence
The pervasive impact of ignorance
Not the same same
What makes Voldemort tick? Children's and adults' reasoning about the nature of villains
Taking the Morality Out of Happiness
Pundits and Possibilities
The Rational Dynamics of Implicit Thought
Autonomous Vehicles and the Attribution of Moral Responsibility
Disassociating the Agent From the Self
Beliefs about genetic influences on prosocial and antisocial behavior in a U.S. sample
Essentialist beliefs about the self predict psychological well-being
Goal completion moderates the association between immoral behavior and self-perceived authenticity
The spirit is noble, but the flesh is corrupt
Perceiving persons and their purposes
I Just Need to Say Something
Moral fixedness
Undoing harm
Does conscious perception render agents more responsible? A study of lay judgments
The True Self
The Inauthentic Online Self
Introducing Discord
Do we think others are truly good
Folk teleology drives persistence judgments
Intellectual autonomy, epistemic dependence and cognitive enhancement
The influence of essentialist and social constructionist notions on perceptions of “realness”
The true “me”—Mind or body
What makes us “we”? The positivity bias in essentialist beliefs about group attributes
Optimality bias in moral judgment
Promiscuous condemnation
Deep down my enemy is good
The authentic catch-22
Incremental mindsets and the reduced forgiveness of chronic failures
Moral thin-slicing
Belief in a Just World Promotes Youth Intergenerational Altruism by Increasing Subjective Well‐Being
Psychological essentialism and the structure of concepts
Dual character concepts
Asymmetrical genetic attributions for prosocial versus antisocial behaviour
The automatic influence of advocacy on lawyers and novices
The Impostor Syndrome from Luxury Consumption
The Essential Child
Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development
A Multicomponent Conceptualization of Authenticity
Ideals, central tendency, and frequency of instantiation as determinants of graded structure in categories.
The Evolving Concept of Subjective Well-Being
Dual character concepts and the normative dimension of conceptual representation
Value Judgments and the True Self
The evolving concept of subjective well-being
Asymmetry in Judgments of Moral Blame and Praise
Feeling Like You Know Who You Are
Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person
Asymptotic and resampling strategies for assessing and comparing indirect effects in multiple mediator models
False-Positive Psychology
Free Agency
How Quick Decisions Illuminate Moral Character
Weakness of will, reasonability, and compulsion
Being accepted for who we are
Mental state attributions and the side-effect effect
The person-positivity bias
Inferences About the Authentic Self
The dynamic interplay between perceived true self-knowledge and decision satisfaction
Thine own self
| Unique citing works | 71 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 5,92 |
| Citation span | 2014 - 2026 (13) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 64 |