scholarly journals Moral Foundations Theory and Attitudes Towards the Punishment and Criminalisation of Drug Offenders

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Campbell Fargher

<p>Research on punitive attitudes has generally found some level of consensus on the relative seriousness of different offence types. However, how to approach the issue of drug offending is often a heavily debated issue, with some portions of society supporting harsh punishments for drug offenders, and others arguing for no sanctions at all. The current study, using both a student and general population sample, aimed to identify the underlying moral reasons behind these attitudes. Participants completed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, a scale measuring the factors that influence a person’s moral judgment, as well as numerous other scales that measured their punishment responses towards a variety of drug, harm, and ‘taboo’ sexual offences and practices. The endorsement of binding moral foundations, those relating to group-based moral concerns, was found to be a predictor of increased overall levels of punitiveness, while the endorsement of the foundation of purity was found to predict punitive attitudes towards drug offences and ‘taboo’ sexual practices, but not harm offences. Additionally, there were significant links between participants’ levels of moral outrage, their preference for punishment, and their support for the criminalisation of the various offences. The results of this study suggest that punishment responses towards both drug offences and ‘taboo’ sexual practices rely on a similar moral reasoning process, one that relies on perceptions of impurity to inform the wrongfulness of an offence.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Campbell Fargher

<p>Research on punitive attitudes has generally found some level of consensus on the relative seriousness of different offence types. However, how to approach the issue of drug offending is often a heavily debated issue, with some portions of society supporting harsh punishments for drug offenders, and others arguing for no sanctions at all. The current study, using both a student and general population sample, aimed to identify the underlying moral reasons behind these attitudes. Participants completed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, a scale measuring the factors that influence a person’s moral judgment, as well as numerous other scales that measured their punishment responses towards a variety of drug, harm, and ‘taboo’ sexual offences and practices. The endorsement of binding moral foundations, those relating to group-based moral concerns, was found to be a predictor of increased overall levels of punitiveness, while the endorsement of the foundation of purity was found to predict punitive attitudes towards drug offences and ‘taboo’ sexual practices, but not harm offences. Additionally, there were significant links between participants’ levels of moral outrage, their preference for punishment, and their support for the criminalisation of the various offences. The results of this study suggest that punishment responses towards both drug offences and ‘taboo’ sexual practices rely on a similar moral reasoning process, one that relies on perceptions of impurity to inform the wrongfulness of an offence.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (8) ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jun Du

Moral foundations theory is claimed to be universally applicable and is classified into 5 foundations of morality: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, respect/subversion, and purity/degradation. This theory has not been tested in the Eastern cultural context. Therefore, in this study I addressed this lack in the context of China, where there are people of a number of different ethnicities. I adopted the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, which was completed by 761 Chinese of Han, Uygur, and Tibetan ethnicity. The results show that there was no gender difference in morality foundation scores, but the differences among ethnic groups were significant: Tibetans scored lower than did Han and Uygur in care and fairness, and Uygur scored higher than Han and Tibetans did in loyalty, respect, and purity. The interactions between gender and ethnic group were significant for care, fairness, and respect. These findings suggest that moral foundations theory is applicable to China, that the Moral Foundations Questionnaire can also be partially applied to Chinese, and that ethnicity is an influential factor when people make moral judgments.


2020 ◽  
pp. 003329411989990
Author(s):  
Burcu Tekeş ◽  
E. Olcay Imamoğlu ◽  
Fatih Özdemir ◽  
Bengi Öner-Özkan

The aims of this study were to test: (a) the association of political orientations with morality orientations, specified by moral foundations theory, on a sample of young adults from Turkey, representing a collectivistic culture; and (b) the statistically mediating roles of needs for cognition and recognition in the links between political orientation and morality endorsements. According to the results (a) right-wing orientation and need for recognition were associated with all the three binding foundations (i.e., in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity); (b) right-wing orientation was associated with binding foundations also indirectly via the role of need for recognition; (c) regarding individualizing foundations, left-wing orientation and need for cognition were associated with fairness/reciprocity, whereas only gender was associated with harm/care; and (d) left-wing orientation was associated with fairness dimension also indirectly via the role of need for cognition. The cultural relevance of moral foundations theory as well as the roles of needs for cognition and recognition are discussed.


AERA Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 233285842110285
Author(s):  
Tom Rosman ◽  
Samuel Merk

We investigate in-service teachers’ reasons for trust and distrust in educational research compared to research in general. Building on previous research on a so-called “smart but evil” stereotype regarding educational researchers, three sets of confirmatory hypotheses were preregistered. First, we expected that teachers would emphasize expertise—as compared with benevolence and integrity—as a stronger reason for trust in educational researchers. Moreover, we expected that this pattern would not only apply to educational researchers, but that it would generalize to researchers in general. Furthermore, we hypothesized that the pattern could also be found in the general population. Following a pilot study aiming to establish the validity of our measures (German general population sample; N = 504), hypotheses were tested in an online study with N = 414 randomly sampled German in-service teachers. Using the Bayesian informative hypothesis evaluation framework, we found empirical support for five of our six preregistered hypotheses.


2021 ◽  
pp. 104225872098547
Author(s):  
Frank M. Fossen ◽  
Levent Neyse ◽  
Magnus Johannesson ◽  
Anna Dreber

The 2D: 4D digit ratio, the ratio of the length of the second finger to the length of the fourth finger, is often considered a proxy for testosterone exposure in utero. A recent study reported, among other things, an association between the left-hand 2D:4D and self-employment in a sample of 974 adults. In this preregistered study, we replicate the 2D:4D results on a sample of more than 2100 adults from the German Socioeconomic Panel-Innovation Sample (SOEP-IS). We find no statistically significant associations between 2D:4D and self-employment.


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