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Moral Judgment as Categorization (MJAC).

Cillian McHugh1,2,3, Marek McGann4, Eric R Igou1,2,5

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Limerick.

Perspectives on Psychological Science : a Journal of the Association for Psychological Science
|July 15, 2021
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Moral judgment as categorization (MJAC) explains complex moral judgments by viewing them as learned skills. This approach accounts for context and habitualization, offering new research avenues.

Keywords:
categorizationcategory formationmoral judgmentsmorality

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Moral Philosophy
  • Social Psychology

Background:

  • Existing theories struggle to explain the variability and complexity of moral judgments.
  • There is a need for a more comprehensive framework to understand moral decision-making.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To introduce a novel perspective on moral judgment using categorization principles.
  • To propose Moral Judgment as Categorization (MJAC) as a skill-formation account.
  • To address limitations of current moral judgment approaches.

Main Methods:

  • Incorporating principles from category formation research.
  • Developing a skill-formation account of moral categorization.
  • Highlighting the role of context and goal-directed activity.

Main Results:

  • MJAC explains how individuals develop context-relevant moral categorizations.
  • The model accounts for the habitualization of moral judgments through repetition.
  • It acknowledges the influence of various contextual factors on moral categorization.

Conclusions:

  • MJAC provides greater explanatory power for the complexity of moral judgments.
  • This novel perspective opens up new research questions in moral psychology.
  • It offers a robust framework for understanding the development and application of moral reasoning.