The Psychology of Belief, Part 3: Moral Conviction

Reader note: Just so you know where I'm going, I'm painting a dark picture of religion in these early posts of this series. After these posts I'm eventually going to make a turn to more positive "solutions." But before solutions, I want to paint the "problems" of belief as honestly as I can.

In the last post I concluded that most of the violence in this world, from genocide to simple rudeness, is, in the minds of the perpetrators, reasonable and justified. As I discussed last post, most perpetrators actually consider themselves to be the victimized.

So, today I want to talk about the psychology of those reasons and those justifications. I want to talk about the psychology of moral conviction and how it can cause us problems.

I guess most of us think that moral convictions are a good thing. I bet most of us think that what this world really needs is MORE moral conviction. Perhaps. What I want to talk about are the dangers of moral convictions.

The psychologist Linda Skitka has done some very interesting research on moral convictions (to start in this literature see: Skitka, L., Bauman, C.W., & Sargis, E.G. 2005. Moral conviction: Another contributor to attitude strength or something more?. Journal of personality and social psychology, 88, 895-917.) Skitka and colleagues define a moral conviction as "a strong and absolute belief that something is right or wrong, moral or immoral" (p. 896). Further, moral convictions are not just another kind of strongly held belief. Moral convictions are very different from other beliefs. Specifically, they posses three features other attitudes do not share.

First, moral convictions have a feature called UNIVERSALISM. That is, if you hold a moral conviction, you believe that this conviction as to what is right vs. wrong is not mere personal preference. You believe that EVERYBODY must conform to the criterion you believe in. To illustrate this point, Skitka et al. (2005, p. 896) cite a quote from psychologists Haidt, Rosenberg, and Hom:

"If one says, 'I value gender equality, but others need not value gender equality,' then gender equality is a matter of personal taste. If one says, 'We in our culture value gender equality, but people in other cultures need not value gender equality,' then one is treating gender equality as a social convention. However, if one sees gender equality as a moral good or a moral truth, then one is committed to saying, 'I value gender equality, and everyone else should too, even in other cultures.'"

When the moral issue is one like gender equality, we might not have much problem with moral conviction. But what if someone holds a moral conviction we're not so attracted to? Even though we disagree, that person is convinced that we need to conform to their vision of right and wrong.

The second feature of moral conviction is that moral convictions are experienced as FACTS about the world. That is, people experience moral convictions, valuations of good and bad, much as they do scientific judgments. Good and bad are seen as objective features of the world. In short, good and bad is just plain OBVIOUS. Thus, by implication, if you disagree with me, then either you are stupid or dishonest or evil (In my classes at ACU I call it the three D's: People who disagree with us are either dumb, dishonest, or demonic). But what is strange about these moral facts is that they also produce a strong motivational component. That is, these "facts" carry the judgment that things "ought to be" or "ought not to be" a certain way. Thus, if someone violates a moral conviction of mine, I have a justification for trying to stop them.

The third and final feature of moral conviction is EMOTION. That is, moral convictions involve very strong affect and emotion in both defending and protecting the moral standard. This strong affect can both blind reason and motivate impulsive behavior.

So, to summarize this research, moral convictions are very different from other kinds of strongly held attitudes or beliefs. Moral convictions are universalizing, are experienced as facts, and elicit strong emotion. Thus, should someone violate my moral conviction, I'm not just simply going to "agree to disagree" with them. No, a much more visceral and emotional confrontation is going to take place.

My point is that religion is where most people get their collections of moral convictions. And, since these convictions are universalizing facts eliciting emotion, religious people are primed to be upset with all kinds of people. This goes back to my last post on Roy Baumeister's work on evil. Specifically, Baumeister notes that, historically, the single biggest cause of human violence and cruelty is religion. And now we see why this is so more clearly: Moral convictions. Thus, Sam Harris' point (see first post in this series) is well taken: Religions deploy a wide variety of moral convictions and, given the psychology of moral convictions, blood is going to spill.

Now, I know most of you are saying (because I'm saying this to myself), "Not me." Well, all I'd like to remind us about is that violence can vary on a continuum. 99.9999999% of us are not going to shoot the people who violate our moral convictions. But there are other kinds of violence. Subtle kinds of psychological "killings" done only in the privacy of our own hearts. Of which I'll talk more about tomorrow.