Moral psychology biases toward individual, not systemic, representations

Abstract

We expand Chater & Loewenstein's discussion of barriers to s-frames by highlighting moral psychological mechanisms. Systemic aspects of moralized social issues can be neglected because of (a) the individualistic frame through which we perceive moral transgressions; (b) the desire to punish elicited by moral emotions; and (c) the motivation to attribute agency and moral responsibility to transgressors.

Many societal ills are rooted in deep systemic causes that nonetheless operate through the behavior of individuals. This leaves ambiguity as to where the responsibility lies, and Chater & Loewenstein (C&L) propose that people resolve this ambiguity with a bias toward overrepresenting the role of individual behavior compared to systemic factors. They describe this bias as arising from several psychological mechanisms, including the fundamental attribution error, a present-biased emotional system that is not adapted to a systemic analysis of problems, functional fixedness, and so on. Missing from this predominantly cognitive list, however, are mechanisms related to morality. Without disputing the contributions of more cognitive processes, we contend that the emerging science of moral psychology implies additional pathways that explain why people overemphasize the role of individuals in the most pressing issues of our time.

The relevance of morality is inherent to a great many of these issues: Questions of police brutality, sexual harassment, the redistribution of wealth, and the rights of non-citizens, to name a few, evoke moral values of harm, justice, and group loyalty. But morality can also become attached to social issues that seem on their surface morally neutral (Rhee, Schein, & Bastian, 2019), if these arouse certain moral emotions, such as guilt, anger, outrage, and disgust (Clifford, 2019; D'Amore, van Zomeren, & Koudenburg, 2022; Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999; Wisneski & Skitka, 2017). For example, in the lab, people who were made to feel disgusted by or guilty about their meat consumption later moralize this issue (Feinberg, Kovacheff, Teper, & Inbar, 2019).

If social issues frequently take on moral significance, any analysis of how people respond to them must take into account moral psychology, whose primary function is to enable people to distinguish between individuals who are trustworthy and reliable and those who might exploit or harm them (Goodwin, Piazza, & Rozin, 2014). In fact, most documented reactions to moral violations focus on the level of individuals and attributions of responsibility internal to those individuals.

This individual lens is apparent as soon as people encounter a moral violation. When a person witnesses, for example, a police shooting of an unarmed Black man, a case of sexual harassment, or workers being exploited, his mind sees a vulnerable patient being harmed and automatically seeks to complete the picture by identifying an intentional moral agent to shoulder the blame (Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012). This dyadic template leaves little room to conceive of the role of broader systems, because the agentic member of the dyad must, by definition, have “the capacity to intend and to act (e.g., self-control, judgment, communication, thought, and memory)” (Gray et al., 2012). Mindless systemic forces like institutionalized racism, cultural misogyny, or capitalism may not spring to mind; instead, the person witnessing the violation is likely to blame the officer who pulled the trigger, the sexual harasser, or the stingy employer.

The individual lens is also apparent in the present-oriented and punitive nature of the actions that moral emotions compel, once the dyadic template is in place. The specific combination of an intentional agent causing substantial harm to a patient uniquely evokes moral outrage (Ginther, Hartsough, & Marois, 2022). In turn, the proximate function of moral outrage is to enforce moral standards: Moral outrage motivates people to punish the perpetrator (Ginther et al., 2022; Konishi, Oe, Shimizu, Tanaka, & Ohtsubo, 2017), thus satisfying an immediate and visceral pull. Even if our witness managed to identify the system as the perpetrator, their drive to punish would have nowhere to go: Although it is at least in theory possible to punish an individual police officer, sexual harasser, or employer, it is not so clear how one could punish structural institutions like racism, sexism, or capitalism. The long and arduous task of systemic reform often requires going beyond gratifying one's immediate and intuitively appealing urge to punish.

This drive to punish likely leads people to further deemphasize situational and systemic causes for social ills. When seeking to punish an individual they have identified as a perpetrator, people will try to maximize that individual's moral responsibility. Whether this means downplaying additional causes for the violation or external constraints on the individual's actions (Clark et al., 2015; Cushman, Knobe, & Sinnott-Armstrong, 2008; Kominsky, Phillips, Gerstenberg, Lagnado, & Knobe, 2015; Young & Phillips, 2011), or elevating philosophical beliefs in free will (Clark et al., 2014), they adopt perceptions that justify punitive action. In other words, when people are most morally outraged and motivated to punish, they may push aside important systemic factors in the heat of the moment, so they can hold individual actors to account and mete out punishment without hesitation.

To summarize, representations of societal issues that center individual perpetrators tend to be inherently appealing because they align with our moral psychology and satisfy our immediate emotional needs. This tendency to individualize the causes of issues likely translates into preferences to correct (perhaps most often punish) individual behavior, rather than address the manifold structural imbalances at the root of the problem. As C&L suggest, this bias among the general public may affect policy decisions, both because policy-makers themselves are vulnerable to it, and because they are motivated to appeal to the majority. Advocates for system-oriented policies seeking to gain public support will need to confront not only the cognitive obstacles blocking their path, but also the moral ones too.