Who Am I? Investigating the Moral Self

Abstract

Emerging research suggests a crucial link between the self and morality; that is, we define our-selves less by our personality, memory, or agency than by our moral values. Although this work indicates an association between morality and the self, it reveals little about how this association works, and thus the goal of our project is to provide answers to key questions related to respon-sibility, motivation, recognition, and the psychological implementation of the moral self. To explore these questions we intend to use a range of innovative psychological methods, includ-ing: causal modeling of participants’ responses, field research on patients with severe amnesia, and tools from cognitive psychology—such as increased cognitive load—to manipulate attributions of identity, We expect our studies to provide insight both into the mechanisms that lead people to define the self in terms of moral traits and into the relationships between this moral self and other important normative concepts, such as responsibility. In particular we predict that moral identification mediates attributions of responsibility, that the link between the self and identity is dependent on online cognitive processes, and that identification with some set of values increases moral motivation.