Investigating the Moral Self

Abstract

Our team has been investigating the bounds and mechanism of the moral self effect—the finding that morality makes the greatest contribution to personal identity in the folk imagination (Strohminger & Nichols, 2014). First, we have just published a paper showing that positive and negative moral change causes greater diachronic identity discontinuity than memory loss or altered agency (Prinz & Nichols, 2016). On the question of mechanism, we have identified a moderating variable for the strength of the moral self effect: psychopathy. Those who score higher in a subclinical measure of psychopathy show a reduced or even eliminated preference for weighting moral information over other types of cognitive information when judging personal identity. We will present data from an ongoing project testing whether the moral self effect is more intuitive (System I) or deliberative (System II). We have also been gathering evidence on the broader reach and implications of the moral self effect. For instance, we have shown that improvements to moral values (as opposed to behavioral changes) lead to greater willingness to parole prisoners for the same violent crime. After presenting these completed and ongoing studies, we will conclude by mapping out our research plans for the coming year.