Good versus evil? It's not just the oldest story in the book—it's a theme philosophers and, later, psychologists have pondered throughout history. Even before psychologists officially got in the game, Plato, Aristotle and other big thinkers were making all kinds of psychological assumptions—"what people are capable of, what they desire, how they learn and how emotions work," says Jonathan Haidt, PhD, a social psychologist at New York University.
Now the field of moral psychology is coming into its own, helping to flesh out our understanding of human morality with insights from developmental psychology, neuroscience and many other disciplines. Unlike moral philosophers, though, the psychology crowd isn't fundamentally concerned with deciding what's right and what's wrong. Rather, the goal for psychologists is to understand how other people think about and make moral decisions.
"There's the question of how to define morality from a philosophical point of view. And then there's the psychological question, which is: What's the scope of moral thinking and moral action?" says Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom, PhD.
Moral foundations
One of the most prominent psychologists to take a stab at those questions was the late Lawrence Kohlberg, PhD, who pioneered a cognitive-developmental model of morality. In his view, humans are born without an innate moral framework, but develop one through six distinct stages, from simply avoiding punishment to internalizing moral social standards to developing and acting on a personal set of moral principles, which may or may not be in line with the law.
For years after Kohlberg began advancing his theory in the 1960s, moral psychology remained in the domain of cognitive development, says David Pizarro, PhD, a social psychologist at Cornell University. "It was almost a cottage industry." But in the last two decades, moral psychology has expanded its reach, he says.
For example, while Kohlberg believed morals only developed as children's reasoning skills matured, modern experiments suggest otherwise. Bloom, in collaboration with psychologist Karen Wynn, PhD, and psychologist Kiley Hamlin, PhD, has explored moral understanding in infants. A typical study involves showing babies short plays that feature characters helping or hindering one another. Then, the researchers watch the reactions.
"As young as you can test them, babies like good guys and don't like bad guys," Bloom says. "This suggests some sort of nascent moral understanding very early on."
Bloom likens that understanding to the building blocks of human language. "There's some evidence we start with rudimentary language capacity, but languages across the world differ in all sorts of ways," he says. "Obviously, culture matters."
Other psychologists, meanwhile, have tried to understand why morality varies from culture to culture, while retaining some common themes. Haidt's moral foundations theory proposes that there are at least six (and likely more) systems that provide a foundation of morality: care/harm; fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion; sanctity/degradation; and liberty/oppression.
According to this model, these underlying systems are universal. But some people and groups place more or less emphasis on a given foundation, as Haidt describes in his book "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion." In the United States, for instance, political liberals emphasize the care/harm category above all others, while political conservatives are more likely to create a morality drawing from all six foundations.
But while the moral foundations theory has plenty of supporters, not everyone is convinced. Kurt Gray, PhD, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, for instance, suggests that all of morality can be boiled down to one essential issue: perceived harm. "The question is, who or what is capable of causing or receiving harm? On that question hinges most of moral judgment," he says.
Gray's theory of dyadic morality, as he calls it, suggests we all share a moral template based on two perceived minds—an agent who causes harm, and a patient who suffers from it (Psychological Inquiry, 2012). As Gray describes in his 2016 book with Daniel Wegner, PhD, "The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why it Matters," moral disagreements often come down to one's perceptions of intention and suffering.
Gray argues that the problem with the moral foundations theory is its premise that different moral values each have distinct mechanisms—a module for loyalty, another for fairness, and so on. "But the thing is, there's no evidence for these kinds of specialized mechanisms," he says. "Instead, acts of disloyalty or unfairness are best understood as varieties of perceived harm."
Yet Haidt counters that his moral foundations theory doesn't require special neural networks. "Moral foundations is a theory of how innate social knowledge could have evolved, and how it develops in culturally variable ways," he explains. "I've never suggested that moral foundations are localizable mechanisms, or spots in the brain."
Morality as auto mechanics
If you want to find moral mechanisms in the brain, Joshua Greene, PhD, is your guy. Greene is a professor of psychology and director of the Moral Cognition Lab at Harvard University, and he's conducted numerous studies using behavioral experiments and fMRI to study moral thinking.
He's found that morality uses the same cognitive functions that people use for everyday decisions. Moral problems involve reason, emotion, motivation, mental simulations and many other humdrum faculties that people draw on when deciding what they want to have for breakfast or how they feel about a new boss or co-worker.
"People often talk about a special moral faculty like there's this glowing portal in our brains that goes 'woo woo' and emits moral judgments," Geene says. But the neuroscience just doesn't back that up.
While some people might be reluctant to let go of the idea that morality is a unique and distinctive capacity, Greene sees a silver lining in the finding.
"If we can understand moral judgment as just the same old brain circuits doing the same old kinds of things but in a different context, that really demystifies moral judgment," he says. That could give people the distance to consider the limitations of their own moral judgments. "It becomes a kind of auto mechanics instead of in the realm of transcendence."
And considering those limitations, says Greene, is exactly how psychology can offer something in the way of moral guidance.
Most moral psychologists agree that psychology's role is not to decide what moral decisions are the right ones. While psychologists will have an opinion on moral values, so, too, will farmers and fishers and computer programmers, says Patricia Churchland, PhD, a philosopher at the University of California, San Diego, who studies the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy. "Moral wisdom isn't the property of any one profession," she says.
"Often, scientists do have facts that are relevant, and you want to take those facts into account," she adds. But for deciding what's right, and what our laws are? "Then we have to come together, listen, negotiate and try to come to a consensus."
Moral progress
In a best-case scenario, psychology can identify processes that can help a person learn to make better moral choices. "You can become more moral. That's part of what development is about," says Anne Colby, PhD, a psychologist and consulting professor at Stanford University.
In her book "The Power of Ideals: The Real Story of Moral Choice," co-authored with William Damon, PhD, Colby argues that psychological research has focused too much attention on the immoral, with an overabundance of experiments tempting lab volunteers with opportunities to lie, cheat and steal. The field needs to spend much more time considering the aspirational angle, she says.
"People aren't just pawns of their culture. They have the capacity to think about the cultural norms and pressures, and the moral creativity to say,
This isn't the way it should be,'" Colby says. "They can say, 'I'm going to try to change the cultural norms around some issues, or change the system.'"
Indeed, if individuals can become more moral, so, too, can systems and societies. And many psychologists argue that when it comes to morality, the human race is on an upward climb. In his 2011 book "The Better Angels of Our Nature," Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker, PhD, laid out the case that the world has steadily become less violent and more principled.
"Our morality isn't just different from the way it was 500 years ago—it's better," says Bloom. "It's better in the sense that it's consistent, it makes the world a better place and it increases the sum total of human flourishing."
Many psychologists say the field can help keep that forward march going, by helping people understand how we arrive at moral decisions—and how other people get there, too.
Finding common threads in human morality could, in theory, give people a place to meet in the middle when they are debating moral issues about which they disagree, such as abortion, same-sex marriage and capital punishment, for example. "If psychology can help explain that ultimately people root their moral judgments in the same things—like loving their families and wanting to protect their children—then we can appreciate (if only intellectually) the fact that other people are acting for what they see as moral," says Gray.
Psychological research on morality can also help us consider our own moral judgment process with a more critical eye. If we understand the unconscious biases and thought processes that influence our moral decision-making, we're better equipped to decide if we're reaching our decisions in a valid way.
While psychologists, philosophers and others are still fitting together the pieces of the morality puzzle, it's not too soon to apply the existing knowledge to solving real problems, Greene says.
"The psychology actually matters a lot because it's telling us what's going on under the hoods of own minds," says Greene. "When we understand what's going on there, that might actually change our attitudes about some of the things we're doing."
