RESEARCH
How does moral decision-making work? Is it different from other types of decision-making?
Morality and Decision Making
“A passenger in an airplane does not want to sit next to a Muslim passenger, and so he tells the stewardess the passenger must be moved to another seat” …Well, people generally tend to see such kind of acts as morally wrong, but our question was how quickly people change their minds about a situation they initially judged as morally unacceptable when they were prompted to think about alternative possibilities.
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Related publication
Tepe, B., & Byrne, R. M. (2022). Cognitive processes in imaginative moral shifts: How judgments of morally unacceptable actions change. Memory & Cognition, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-022-01315-0
Morality and Social Relationships
How do perceptions of immorality occur?
How do social relationships determine what is perceived as immoral?
If your dog dies after being hit by a car, is eating the meat of that dog for dinner morally wrong? Let’s say yes, then is it wrong because the behavior is harmful, or is it wrong because the behavior is impure? With this paper, we argue that perceptions of morality are not based entirely on the harmfulness or impurity of the acts in question, but that violations of relational motivations, as proposed by Rai and Fiske (2011) in their Relationship Regulation Theory (RRT), might underlie the perception of the moral wrongness of harmful or impure behaviors.
Related publication
Tepe, B., & Aydinli-Karakulak, A. (2019). Beyond harmfulness and impurity: Moral wrongness as a violation of relational motivations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 117(2), 310. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000169
Morality and Emotions
How much do emotions affect moral decision-making?
Replicating Haidt et al.'s (1993) work, we addressed how much emotions play a role in moral decision-making across harmless taboo violations, how people justify their moral judgments across moral ethics, and whether people from different political and religious orientations differ in their responses.
Related publication
Tepe, B., Piyale, Z. E., Sirin, S., & Sirin, L. R. (2016). Moral decision-making among young Muslim adults on harmless taboo violations: The effects of gender, religiosity, and political affiliation. Personality and Individual Differences, 101, 243-248. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.06.012
How do emotions act complementary in response to relationship violations?
Consonant with a functional view of moral emotions, we argue that morality is best analyzed within
relationships rather than in individuals, violations in different relationships will arouse different intensities of other-blaming emotions (anger, contempt, and disgust) in both observers and victims, together with different intensities of self-blaming emotions (shame and guilt) in perpetrators.
Related publication
Sunar, D., Cesur, S., Piyale, Z.E., Tepe, B., Biten A.F., Hill, C. & Koc, Y. (2020). People respond with different moral emotions to violations of different relational models: A cross-cultural comparison. Emotion, 21 (4), 693-706. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000736
Morality and Religion
A watching god vs. third person:
Which agent does effectively lowers the likelihood of immoral behaviors?
With this paper, we argue that people expect others to refrain more strongly from acting immorally when they believe God is watching them compared to a third person. However, this may change across the type of moral transgressions, would this effect be more pronounced for impure transgressions compared to harmful transgressions?
Related publication
Tepe, B. & Karakulak, A (2022). Lay perceptions of being watched either by god or a third person: Which agent lowers the perceived likelihood of harmful and impure behaviors? Social Cognition, 40 (4), 336–363. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2022.40.4.336
Expanding Moral Circle
Which relational motivations drive individuals’ socially responsive COVID-19 behaviors (e.g., physical distancing)?
Unity, hierarchy, equality, or proportionality? We argue that a stronger concern for unity might predict performing socially responsive Covid-19 behaviors. Because people will judge the others who behave socially unresponsive in the pandemic context, such as people who ignore physical distancing or authorities sharing false information, or food hoarders. They are all wrong because they are all violations of relational motivations. We addressed which of those motivations drive individuals to behave socially responsive?
Related publication
Tepe, B. & Karakulak, A. (2021). Linking Judging Moral to Acting Moral: A Relational Motivations Approach to Judging and Practicing Covid-19 Behaviors. Psychological Reports. https://doi.org/10.1177/00332941211061077
How does self vs. other-oriented concerns interact with governmental trust to promote COVID-19 preventive behaviors?
Self-oriented concerns, such as fear of Covid-19, promote COVID-19 preventive behaviors (e.g. physical distancing, hand hygiene), well… other-oriented concerns, such as empathy, also promote those behaviors. We argue that individuals’ governmental trust might moderate this relationship. In a large, cross-cultural sample of 12,758 individuals from 34 countries, we showed that self-concerns predict individuals’ COVID-19 preventive behaviors when the governmental trust was low and other-oriented concerns predict those behaviors when the governmental trust was high.
Related publication
Karakulak, A., Tepe, B., et al. (under review). Empathy, fear of disease and support for Covid-19 containment behaviors: Evidence from 34 countries on the moderating role of governmental trust. Nature Communications Psychology.
Ongoing Projects
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Nadira Faber and Beyza Tepe currently work on a research project that addresses how justice is maintained in close relationships.
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Arzu Karakulak and Beyza Tepe currently work on a research project that addresses how forgiveness perceptions vary across relational motivations.