morality

S.T. Masty writes:

Years ago, an elderly British civil engineer sat at the bar in Peshawar, Pakistan, near the foothills of the Khyber Pass, and I have no idea if what he told me was true.

At the end of the 19th Century, he said, when the Germans invented the diesel engine, the weakest part was the governor and when it broke the engine ran ever faster until it exploded, injuring or even killing the driver. The metallurgists lacked the technology to strengthen the governor, so the mechanical engineers were made to design structural flaws into the engine block in order to, after the governor malfunctioned, make it crack and release the surplus energy safely. This irritated the mechanical engineers grievously, upsetting their German traditions of perfectionism and their justifiable professional pride. They complained that, were there any justice in this world, the metallurgists would be made to overcome their failure ruthlessly in order to spare the mechanical engineers the indignity of building intentional flaws into their near-perfect portion of the device.

When people wonder how to restore communities and renew values, is it possible that hyper-efficient economics and technology lead inexorably to social explosion? Are we as the lab rats that kept pressing the apparatus, sending electric shocks into the pleasure centres of their brains until they neglected to even eat or sleep? Have we a broken governor and no flaw built into the social engine block, as our own mounting economic bounty entices us to destroy our societies and then ourselves?
 

Read the whole thing.

Imagine a runaway trolley on a course to kill five people and you can prevent this from happening by hitting a switch, veering the trolley onto another track where it will kill only one. Now imagine that, instead of hitting a switch, you had to push a man off a bridge into the trolley's path. In both cases, would you kill the one person to save five? In moral philosophy, this is what's known as the trolley problem. It turns out that most people are fine with flipping the switch, but they refuse to push over the man.

But what if some of the people about to get hit by the trolley were members of a group you felt strongly tied to, whose goals and purpose were closely tethered to your own? Would it change your decisions? A team of psychologists did some interesting research on that question. Specifically, they wanted to see whether people whose personal identity is "fused" with their group identity—such that the two are completely overlapping—would choose differently than those who draw a sharp distinction between the two. In other words, would these fused people be so loyal to their group that they'd be willing to die for it?

The researchers changed the trolley problem up a bit. First, they asked a bunch of Spaniards, some fused and some not, whether they would sacrifice themselves to save five other Spaniards. The majority of fused Spaniards—75 percent—said they would, while 76 percent of nonfused Spaniards said they wouldn't. Then the researchers added a third option: What if they could either sacrifice themselves, one Spaniard, or five Europeans? It turns out 63 percent of fused Spaniards would still choose themselves, while the same percentage of nonfused Spaniards would let the Europeans die.

But when the choice was sacrifice themselves for either five Europeans or five Americans, not one person chose to save the Americans.

Yet perhaps the most intriguing finding is this: Asked whether they would jump off a bridge to divert a trolley so that it would kill five terrorists when there was another Spaniard ready to jump, 63 percent of fused Spaniards said they would push the other person aside so that they could jump themselves (96 percent of nonfused Spaniards said they'd let the other guy jump).

As the researchers write in their paper:

Repeatedly, fused people expressed an eagerness to translate their moral imperatives into action. Indeed, fused people manifested an unusually strong moral compass that compelled them to do the “right” thing—even when it meant sacrificing their own lives and even when someone else was prepared to accomplish the same ends. In an era in which the act of sacrificing one’s own life for the group has had world-altering consequences, it is critical for future researchers to learn more about the psychological underpinnings of such activity.

As with most big “why” questions in social science, why men and women differ has two possible answers: nature and nurture. The differences might be biological (nature), but there are also strong differences in what parents, peers, and media model or expect for boys versus girls (nurture). Most of us conform to these expectations or gender roles. Nature and nurture can also interact, but in the case of morality, it might be just gender roles.

But let me step back and mention that there are probably more gender similarities than differences. Also, most of the well-known differences (not counting anatomical ones) are smaller than most people realize. However, a book titled Men Are From Mars and So Are Women is probably not going to sell as many copies as Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. Most of us think less about similarities.

That said, there are of course meaningful differences between males and females, including what I found in my research about making mistakes. I drew from previous work that suggests we feel better about our mistakes if many others behave the same way. Well, even if most others do not behave the same way, we like to believe they do. In general, we overestimate the number of others who are guilty of our own misbehavior. We might say things like, “I’m not the first person who has done this,” “I’m only human,” or “Everybody makes mistakes.” In my research, after reading common sayings such as “Everybody makes mistakes,” “Nobody’s perfect,” and “Live and learn” (compared with a control condition), men but not women reported less regret, hypocrisy, and stupidity over particular mistakes (unsafe sex, wasting water during a drought, and stealing a car). Moreover, these sayings seemed to lead men but not women to trivialize the mistakes.

These findings do not mean that women are unaffected by social support. Indeed, women tend to seek more social support than men in times of stress. However, people’s own mistakes or bad behaviors seem to involve a different process. Peer-influenced bad behaviors are most likely among groups of boys (see Companions in Crime by Mark Warr). Warr suggested that there is peer pressure for both boys and girls to misbehave but that girls’ stronger “moral disapproval” of such behaviors acts as a stronger “barrier to peer influence.”

Thus, men’s immorality might be more influenced by peers than women’s because women are generally more opposed to immoral behaviors in the first place. My data (and other research) indicate that women do see such misbehaviors as more serious than men do. Why women show greater opposition could be due to gender roles. For example, it is more acceptable for boys to misbehave or to show aggression (“boys will be boys”). Similarly, some research on moral development suggests that boys and girls might develop different types of morality, where girls tend to develop a “care” perspective (caring about relationships and others’ pain). My mistake scenarios involved hurting others (at least disappointed parents), which might have raised women’s opposition. The care-perspective researchers suggest that this perspective is caused by the female gender role and girls’ identification with mothers who are usually the primary caregivers.

Another possible cause of my study’s gender difference is that men and women differ in their responses to ego threat. In other words, when men and women make mistakes, they try to feel better in different ways. Although the research is somewhat mixed, many studies show that men are more likely to use externalizing defenses such as projection, in which they project their own unacceptable impulses onto others. Some social psychologists have cited this male defense to suggest that men care more about peer-based norms in misbehaving. The ego-defense researchers again point to gender roles as the cause.

Although some gender roles can be influenced by biology, I suggest that how boys versus girls are typically raised to behave and see themselves underlies the differing use of peers in moral reasoning.

Dan Stalder is a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.