Moralisation and its cognitive consequences: three studies

Dr. Antoine Marie (Aarhus University)

The projects I will present explore the cognitive consequences of moralisation. A) In the first one (https://osf.io/twq3y/), conditionally accepted at PNAS Nexus, we find that moralising an issue (gun control, abortion) and having an extreme attitude on it, increase intentions to share both true and fake news touching on the issue. We also find that those effects are robust to various manipulations, such as sharing the news to political friends vs. foes, and interventions message warning against the reputational costs of sharing pro-attitudinal fake news. B) In a second project (https://osf.io/guw6v/), we find that moralising gender equality makes people more likely to accept both rigorous experimental demonstrations, and fallacious inferences, of hiring discrimination against women in academia as convincing. I will then review work done with M.B. Petersen at Aarhus University. C) One project reports the counter-intuitive finding that moralising epistemic rationality makes people more likely to share hostile and fake news — but that intellectual humility reduces belief and sharing of such news (https://osf.io/k7u68/). D) If time allows, I will end by quickly presenting theoretical work on the strategic social functions of endorsing and sharing conspiracy theories and threat-oriented ideological narratives (e.g., anti-racism), and of censoring critiques of those narratives—i.e., mobilizing the ingroup, and doing signalling (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101440).

Ce séminaire aura lieu en présentiel ainsi que dans notre salle de réunion virtuelle.