What We Owe to Family: The Impact of Special Obligations on Moral Judgment

Abstract

Although people often recognize the moral value of impartial behavior (i.e., not favoring specific individuals), it is unclear when, if ever, people recognize the moral value of partiality. The current studies investigated whether information about special obligations to specific individuals, particularly kin, is integrated into moral judgments. In Studies 1 and 2, agents who helped a stranger were judged as more morally good and trustworthy than those who helped kin, but agents who helped a stranger, instead of kin were judged as less morally good and trustworthy than those who did the opposite. In Studies 3 and 4, agents who simply neglected a stranger were judged as less morally bad and untrustworthy than those who neglected kin. Study 4 also demonstrated that the violation (vs. fulfillment) of perceived obligations underlaid all judgment patterns. Study 5 demonstrated boundary conditions: When occupying roles requiring impartiality, agents who helped a stranger instead of kin were judged as more morally good and trustworthy than agents who did the opposite. These findings illuminate the importance of obligations in structuring moral judgment.

Keywords

morality obligation prosocial behavior impartiality open data open materials preregistered

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bartels

D. M.

Bauman

C. W.

Cushman

F. A.

Pizarro

D. A.

McGraw

A. P.

(2016). Moral judgment and decision making. In Keren

(Eds.), The Wiley Blackwell handbook of judgment and decision making (pp. 478–515). Chichester, England: Wiley.

Bloom

(2011). Family, community, trolley problems, and the crisis in moral psychology. The Yale Review, 99(2), 26–43.

Brysbaert

Stevens

(2018). Power analysis and effect size in mixed effects models: A tutorial. Journal of Cognition, 1(1), Article 9. doi:10.5334/joc.10

Burnstein

Crandall

Kitayama

(1994). Some neo-Darwinian decision rules for altruism: Weighing cues for inclusive fitness as a function of the biological importance of the decision. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 773–789.

Chalik

Dunham

(2020). Beliefs about moral obligation structure children’s social category-based expectations. Child Development, 91, e108–e119.

Cottrell

C. A.

Neuberg

S. L.

N. P.

(2007). What do people desire in others? A sociofunctional perspective on the importance of different valued characteristics. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 208–231.

Curry

O. S.

Chesters

M. J.

Van Lissa

C. J.

(2019). Mapping morality with a compass: Testing the theory of ‘morality-as-cooperation’ with a new questionnaire. Journal of Research in Personality, 78, 106–124.

Curry

O. S.

Mullins

D. A.

Whitehouse

(2019). Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies. Current Anthropology, 60, 47–69.

DeScioli

Kurzban

(2009). Mysteries of morality. Cognition, 112, 281–299.

10.

DeScioli

Kurzban

(2013). A solution to the mysteries of morality. Psychological Bulletin, 139, 477–496.

11.

Dungan

J. A.

Young

Waytz

(2019). The power of moral concerns in predicting whistleblowing decisions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 85, Article 103848. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2019.103848

12.

Everett

J. A. C.

Faber

N. S.

Savulescu

Crockett

M. J.

(2018). The costs of being consequentialist: Social inference from instrumental harm and impartial beneficence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 79, 200–216.

13.

Goodwin

G. P.

(2015). Moral character in person perception. Psychological Science, 24, 38–44.

14.

Goodwin

G. P.

Piazza

Rozin

(2014). Moral character predominates in person perception and evaluation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106, 148–168.

15.

Graham

Nosek

B. A.

Haidt

Iyer

Koleva

Ditto

(2011). Mapping the moral domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101, 366–385.

16.

Greitemeyer

Rudolph

Weiner

(2003). Whom would you rather help: An acquaintance not responsible for her plight or a responsible sibling? The Journal of Social Psychology, 143, 331–340.

17.

Haidt

Baron

(1996). Social roles and the moral judgment of acts and omissions. European Journal of Social Psychology, 26, 201–218.

18.

Hamilton

W. D.

(1964). The genetical evolution of social behaviour: I. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, 1–16.

19.

Henrich

Heine

S. J.

Norenzayan

(2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, 61–83.

20.

Hughes

Creech

J. L.

Strosser

G. L.

(2016). Attributions about morally unreliable characters: Relationship closeness affects moral judgments. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 38, 173–184.

21.

Hughes

J. S.

(2017). In a moral dilemma, choose the one you love: Impartial actors are seen as less moral than partial ones. British Journal of Social Psychology, 56, 561–577.

22.

Jeske

(1998). Family, friends, and special obligations. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 28, 527–556.

23.

Judd

C. M.

Westfall

Kenny

D. A.

(2012). Treating stimuli as a random factor in social psychology: A new and comprehensive solution to a pervasive but largely ignored problem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103, 54–69.

24.

Kleiman-Weiner

Saxe

Tenenbaum

J. B.

(2017). Learning a commonsense moral theory. Cognition, 167, 107–123.

25.

Kurzban

DeScioli

Fein

(2012). Hamilton vs. Kant: Pitting adaptations for altruism against adaptations for moral judgment. Evolution and Human Behavior, 33, 323–333.

26.

Lee

Holyoak

K. J.

(2020). “But he’s my brother”: The impact of family obligation on moral judgments and decisions. Memory & Cognition, 48, 158–170. doi:10.3758/s13421-019-00969-7

27.

MacFarquhar

(2015). Strangers drowning: Grappling with impossible idealism, drastic choices, and the overpowering urge to help. New York, NY: Penguin.

28.

Madsen

E. A.

Tunney

R. J.

Fieldman

Plotkin

H. C.

Dunbar

R. I. M.

Richardson

McFarland

(2007). Kinship and altruism: A cross-cultural experimental study. British Journal of Psychology, 98, 339–359.

29.

Marshall

Bloom

(2019). Children’s and adult’s reasoning about prosocial obligations in relational contexts. Manuscript in preparation.

30.

Miller

J. G.

Bersoff

D. M.

(1992). Culture and moral judgment: How are conflicts between justice and interpersonal responsibilities resolved? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 541–554.

31.

Niemi

Wasserman

Young

(2018). The behavioral and neural signatures of distinct conceptions of fairness. Social Neuroscience, 13, 399–415.

32.

Olson

K. R.

Spelke

E. S.

(2008). Foundations of cooperation in young children. Cognition, 108, 222–231.

33.

Rai

T. S.

Fiske

A. P.

(2011). Moral psychology is relationship regulation: Moral motives for unity, hierarchy, equality, and proportionality. Psychological Review, 188, 57–75.

34.

Schulz

J. F.

Bahrami-Rad

Beauchamp

J. P.

Henrich

(2019). The church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation. Science, 366(6466), Article eaau5141. doi:10.1126/science.aau5141

35.

Shaw

Barakzai

Keysar

(2019). When and why negative reciprocity is more fair than positive reciprocity. Cognitive Science, 43(8), Article e12773. doi:10.1111/cogs.12773

36.

Shaw

Choshen-Hillel

Caruso

E. M.

(2018). Being biased against friends to appear unbiased. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 78, 104–115.

37.

Sommers

(1986). Filial morality. The Journal of Philosophy, 83, 439–456.

38.

Tepe

Aydinli-Karakulak

(2019). Beyond harmfulness and impurity: Moral wrongness as a violation of relational motivations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 117, 310–337.

39.

Tomasello

(2019). The moral psychology of obligation. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Advance online publication. doi:10.1017/S0140525X19001742

40.

Waytz

Dungan

Young

(2013). The whistleblower’s dilemma and the fairness–loyalty tradeoff. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49, 1027–1033.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.58 MB