Моральдық психология: философия мен психологияның тоғысуы

Field of study in both philosophy and psychology
Moral psychology is a field of study in both philosophy and psychology. Historically, the term "moral psychology" was used relatively narrowly to refer to the study of moral development. Moral psychology eventually came to refer more broadly to various topics at the intersection of ethics, psychology, and philosophy of mind. Some of the main topics of the field are moral judgment, moral reasoning, moral sensitivity, moral responsibility, moral motivation, moral identity, moral action, moral development, moral diversity, moral character (especially as related to virtue ethics), altruism, psychological egoism, moral luck, moral forecasting, moral emotion, affective forecasting, and moral disagreement. Today, moral psychology is a thriving area of research spanning many disciplines, with major bodies of research on the biological, cognitive/computational and cultural basis of moral judgment and behavior, and a growing body of research on moral judgment in the context of artificial intelligence.

The origins of moral psychology can be traced back to early philosophical works, largely concerned with moral education, such as by Plato and Aristotle in Ancient Greece, as well as from the Buddhist and Confucian traditions. Empirical studies of moral judgment go back at least as far as the 1890s with the work of Frank Chapman Sharp, coinciding with the development of psychology as a discipline separate from philosophy. Since at least 1894, philosophers and psychologists attempted to empirically evaluate the morality of an individual, especially attempting to distinguish adults from children in terms of their judgment, but these efforts failed because they "attempted to quantify how much morality an individual had—a notably contentious idea—rather than understand the individual's psychological representation of morality". In most introductory psychology courses, students learn about moral psychology by studying the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, who proposed a highly influential theory of moral development, developed throughout the 1950s and 1960s. This theory was built on Piaget's observation that children develop intuitions about justice that they can later articulate. Kohlberg proposed six stages broken into three categories of moral reasoning that he believed to be universal to all people in all cultures. The increasing sophistication of justice based reasoning was taken as a sign of development. Moral cognitive development, in turn, was assumed to be a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for moral action. But researchers using the Kohlberg model found a gap between what people said was most moral and actions they took. In response, Augusto Blasi proposed his self model that links ideas of moral judgment and action through moral commitment. Those with moral goals central to the self concept are more likely to take moral action, as they feel a greater obligation to do so. Those who are motivated will attain a unique moral identity. Following the independent publication of a pair of landmark papers in 2001 (respectively led by Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene), there was a surge in interest in moral psychology across a broad range of subfields of psychology, with interest shifting away from developmental processes towards a greater emphasis on social, cognitive, affective and neural processes involved in moral judgment.

Philosophers, psychologists and researchers from other fields have created various methods for studying topics in moral psychology, with empirical studies dating back to at least the 1890s. neuroimaging, and studies of natural language use.

According to Haidt,). A substantial amount of research in recent decades has focused on the evolutionary origins of various aspects of morality. In Unto Others: the Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (1998), Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson demonstrated that diverse moralities could evolve through group selection. Tim Dean has advanced the more general claim that moral diversity would evolve through frequency dependent selection because each moral approach is vulnerable to a different set of situations which threatened our ancestors (see also ).

Moral identity refers to the importance of morality to a person's identity, typically construed as either a trait like individual difference, or set of chronically accessible schemas. Moral identity is theorized to be one of the key motivational forces connecting moral reasoning to moral behavior,

In 2004, D. Lapsley and D. Narvaez outlined how social cognition explains aspects of moral functioning. Their social cognitive approach to personality has six critical resources of moral personality: cognition, self processes, affective elements of personality, changing social context, lawful situational variability, and the integration of other literature. Lapsley and Narvaez suggest that moral values and actions stem from more than our virtues and are controlled by a set of self created schemas (cognitive structures that organize related concepts and integrate past events). They claim that schemas are "fundamental to our very ability to notice dilemmas as we appraise the moral landscape" and that over time, people develop greater "moral expertise".

The triune ethics meta theory (TEM) has been proposed by Darcia Narvaez as a metatheory that highlights the relative contributions to moral development of biological inheritance (including human evolutionary adaptations), environmental influences on neurobiology, and the role of culture. TET proposes three basic mindsets that shape ethical behavior: self protectionism (a variety of types), engagement, and imagination (a variety of types that are fueled by protectionism or engagement). A mindset influences perception, affordances, and rhetorical preferences. Actions taken within a mindset become an ethic when they trump other values. Engagement and communal imagination represent optimal human functioning that are shaped by the evolved developmental niche (evolved nest) that supports optimal psychosocial neurobiological development. Based on worldwide anthropological research (e. g., Hewlett and Lamb's Hunter Gatherer Childhoods), Narvaez uses small band hunter gatherers as a baseline for the evolved nest and its effects.

Moral development and reasoning are two overlapping topics of study in moral psychology that have historically received a great amount of attention, even preceding the influential work of Piaget and Kohlberg. Moral development refers more broadly to age related changes in thoughts and emotions that guide moral beliefs, judgments and behaviors.

Jean Piaget, in watching children play games, noted how their rationales for cooperation changed with experience and maturation. He identified two stages, heteronomous (morality centered outside the self) and autonomous (internalized morality). Lawerence Kohlberg sought to expand Piaget's work. His cognitive developmental theory of moral reasoning dominated the field for decades. He focused on moral development as one's progression in the capacity to reason about justice. Kohlberg's interview method included hypothetical moral dilemmas or conflicts of interest (most notably, the Heinz dilemma). He proposed six stages and three levels of development (claiming that "anyone who interviewed children about dilemmas and who followed them longitudinally in time would come to our six stages and no others). At the Preconventional level, the first two stages included the punishment and obedience orientation and the instrumental relativist orientation. The next level, the conventional level, included the interpersonal concordance or "good boy – nice girl" orientation, along with the "law and order" orientation. Lastly, the final Postconventional level consisted of the social contract, legalistic orientation and the universal ethical principle orientation. According to Kohlberg, an individual is considered more cognitively mature depending on their stage of moral reasoning, which grows as they advance in education and world experience. Critics of Kohlberg's approach (such as Carol Gilligan and Jane Attanucci) argue that there is an over emphasis on justice and an under emphasis on an additional perspective to moral reasoning, known as the care perspective. The justice perspective draws attention to inequality and oppression, while striving for reciprocal rights and equal respect for all. The care perspective draws attention to the ideas of detachment and abandonment, while striving for attention and response to people who need it. Care Orientation is relationally based. It has a more situational focus that is dependent on the needs of others as opposed to Justice Orientation's objectivity. However, reviews by others have found that Gilligan's theory was not supported by empirical studies since orientations are individual dependent. In fact, in neo Kohlbergian studies with the Defining Issues Test, females tend to get slightly higher scores than males.

Aner Govrin's attachment approach to moral judgment proposes that, through early interactions with the caregiver, the child acquires an internal representation of a system of rules that determine how right/wrong judgments are to be construed, used, and understood. By breaking moral situations down into their defining features, the attachment model of moral judgment outlines a framework for a universal moral faculty based on a universal, innate, deep structure that appears uniformly in the structure of almost all moral judgments regardless of their content.

In looking at the relations between moral values, attitudes, and behaviors, previous research asserts that there is less correspondence between these three aspects than one might assume. In fact, it seems to be more common for people to label their behaviors with a justifying value rather than having a value beforehand and then acting on it. There are some people that are more likely to act on their personal values: those low in self monitoring and high in self consciousness, due to the fact that they are more aware of themselves and less aware of how others may perceive them. Self consciousness here means being literally more conscious of yourself, not fearing judgement or feeling anxiety from others. Social situations and the different categories of norms can be telling of when people may act in accordance with their values, but this still isn't concrete either. People will typically act in accordance with social, contextual and personal norms, and there is a likelihood that these norms can also follow one's moral values. Though there are certain assumptions and situations that would suggest a major value attitude behavior relation, there is not enough research to confirm this phenomenon.

Building on earlier work by Metcalfe and Mischel on delayed gratification, Baumeister, Miller, and Delaney explored the notion of willpower by first defining the self as being made up of three parts: reflexive consciousness, or the person's awareness of their environment and of himself as an individual; interpersonal being, which seeks to mold the self into one that will be accepted by others; and executive function. They stated, "[T]he self can free its actions from being determined by particular influences, especially those of which it is aware". The three prevalent theories of willpower describe it as a limited supply of energy, as a cognitive process, and as a skill that is developed over time. Research has largely supported that willpower works like a "moral muscle" with a limited supply of strength that may be depleted (a process referred to as Ego depletion), conserved, or replenished, and that a single act requiring much self control can significantly deplete the "supply" of willpower. Additional research has been conducted that may cast doubt on the idea of ego depletion.

In 2001, Jonathan Haidt introduced his social intuitionist model which claimed that with few exceptions, moral judgments are made based upon socially derived intuitions. Moral intuitions happen immediately, automatically, and unconsciously, with reasoning largely serving to generate post hoc rationalizations to justify one's instinctual reactions.

Moral emotions are a variety of social emotion that are involved in forming and communicating moral judgments and decisions, and in motivating behavioral responses to one's own and others' moral behavior. While moral reasoning has been the focus of most study of morality dating all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, the emotive side of morality was historically looked upon with disdain in early moral psychology research.

Moralization, a term introduced to moral psychology by Paul Rozin, refers to the process through which preferences are converted into values. Relatedly, Linda Skitka and colleagues have introduced the concept of moral conviction, which refers to a "strong and absolute belief that something is right or wrong, moral or immoral." According to Skitka's integrated theory of moral conviction (ITMC), attitudes held with moral conviction, known as moral mandates, differ from strong but non moral attitudes in a number of important ways. Namely, moral mandates derive their motivational force from their perceived universality, perceived objectivity, and strong ties to emotion. Perceived universality refers to the notion that individuals experience moral mandates as transcending persons and cultures; additionally, they are regarded as matters of fact. Regarding association with emotion, ITMC is consistent with Jonathan Haidt's social intuitionist model in stating that moral judgments are accompanied by discrete moral emotions (i. e., disgust, shame, guilt). Importantly, Skitka maintains that moral mandates are not the same thing as moral values. Whether an issue will be associated with moral conviction varies across persons. One of the main lines of IMTC research addresses the behavioral implications of moral mandates. Individuals prefer greater social and physical distance from attitudinally dissimilar others when moral conviction was high. This effect of moral conviction could not be explained by traditional measures of attitude strength, extremity, or centrality. Skitka, Bauman, and Sargis placed participants in either attitudinally heterogeneous or homogenous groups to discuss procedures regarding two morally mandated issues, abortion and capital punishment. Those in attitudinally heterogeneous groups demonstrated the least amount of goodwill towards other group members, the least amount of cooperation, and the most tension/defensiveness. Furthermore, individuals discussing a morally mandated issue were less likely to reach a consensus compared to those discussing non moral issues.

Some research shows that people tend to self segregate based on moral and political views, exaggerate the magnitude of moral disagreements across political divides, and avoid exposure to the opinions of those with opposing political views.

Researchers have begun to debate the implications (if any) moral psychology research has for other subfields of ethics such as normative ethics and meta ethics. For example Peter Singer, citing Haidt's work on social intuitionism and Greene's dual process theory, presented an "evolutionary debunking argument" suggesting that the normative force of our moral intuitions is undermined by their being the "biological residue of our evolutionary history." John Michael Doris discusses the way in which social psychological experiments—such as the Stanford prison experiments involving the idea of situationism—call into question a key component in virtue ethics: the idea that individuals have a single, environment independent moral character. As a further example, Shaun Nichols (2004) examines how empirical data on psychopathology suggests that moral rationalism is false. Additionally, research in moral psychology is being used to inform debates in applied ethics around moral enhancement.

At the intersection of moral psychology and machine ethics, researchers have begun to study people's views regarding the potentially ethically significant decisions that will be made by self driving cars. Mohammad Atari and his colleagues recently examined the moral psychology of the famous chatbot, ChatGPT. These authors asked in their title, "which humans?" — rhetorically pointing out that people should not ask how "human like" machine morality is, but to which humans it resembles. These authors discovered that Large Language Models (LLMs), especially ChatGPT, tend to echo moral values endorsed by Westerners, as their training datasets originate predominantly from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. This study points out that compared to the global average, people from WEIRD societies are more inclined toward individualism and impersonal prosocial behaviors while showing less traditionalism and group loyalty. The authors further highlighted that societies less aligned with these WEIRD moral values tend to experience greater misalignment with the moral values and outputs of ChatGPT.