Moral judgments soften with time and distance, UCLA-led study shows

New research suggests that the human mind is disturbingly flexible about moral judgments. An international team led by UCLA anthropology professor Daniel Fessler studied members of seven disparate societies, from rural New Guinea to urban California. They found that, regardless of where they were from, people judged acts like lying, theft and assault to be wrong — but less wrong if those acts happened far away or long ago, or if an authority figure suggested the acts were acceptable. “This troubling finding helps explain why a blind eye is often turned to atrocities that occur abroad or are sanctioned by influential individuals,” said Fessler, the study’s lead author. Courtesy of Daniel Fessler Daniel Fessler The study, published August 5 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, pitted two competing ideas about morality against each other: Are people “moral universalists” who stick to their principles or “moral parochialists” who relax their principles when the local stakes are lower? “Nowhere did we find people to be staunch universalists,” Fessler said. “It’s not just Americans who are complacent about events far away. It’s everyone. That’s the way our minds are designed.” Fessler and his team wanted to ensure that the results reflected more than the byproduct of cultural similarities, so they examined both large-scale societies with state-level systems of social control as well as small-scale societies with egalitarian or clan-based governan...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news