Morality cut both ways: The role of cognition and emotion in attitude moralization and demoralization

Moralized attitudes motivate social change, political participation, and charitable giving, but at the same time, hinder compromise, conformity, and acceptance of procedural solutions to conflict. Although considerable research has explored the consequences of moralized attitudes, the processes that lead to attitude moralization and demoralization are less clear. Across six studies (N = 4,464), we contrasted the moralization of attitudes about male circumcision (typically viewed as a matter of preference or convention in the United States) with the demoralization of attitudes about female circumcision (a practice most Americans see as immoral). For male circumcision, stronger negative emotional reactions consistently mediated the association between exposure to evocative information and stronger moral conviction, even when accounting for participants' underlying levels of support or opposition. For female circumcision, demoralization was observed but less consistently across studies, and mediational evidence emerged only under stronger informational "pushes": No individual piece of information was potent enough to predict demoralization on its own when participants chose which information to read, but weaker negative emotional reactions fully mediated the effect of information exposure on reduced moral conviction when participants were randomly assigned to read all (vs. no) information. These findings suggest that although negative emotion plays a central role in both moralization and demoralization, demoralization is harder to achieve and may require more extensive information exposure. In other words, attitudes may acquire their moral significance more readily than they lose it. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).