A good person shouldn't feel this way: Moralized attitudes, identity, and self-esteem
Moralized attitudes are the attitudes that people construe as matters of right and wrong. In this study, we examine how moralized attitudes influence how people perceive and evaluate themselves using the Attitudes, Identities, and Individual Differences (AIID) dataset—a survey of over 200,000 individuals asked to report their attitudes in one of 95 domains. In exploratory analyses of a subset of the AIID dataset, we found that the specific attitudes that people moralize differ greatly from individual to individual, and that moralized attitudes are more central to one’s identity than non-moralized attitudes. We also found tentative evidence that participants reported lowered feelings of self-worth when they experienced mental conflict between attitudes that were central to their identity and their gut feelings toward the objects of those attitudes. With future access to the remainder of the AIID dataset, we will conduct confirmatory analyses that put these findings together. Do people experience lower self-esteem when their moralized attitudes and gut feelings are in conflict? If so, is that because of moralized attitudes’ identity centrality? Our findings will clarify the role that morality plays in self-perception and whether people think less of themselves when they fall short of the people they aspire to be.