Abstract
The vignette is a mainstay of contemporary psychological research on morality. However, many commonly used moral vignettes depict situations that people are unlikely to encounter in their daily lives. In this exploratory investigation, we sought to develop a series of moral vignettes that more closely resemble everyday life. In Study 1, our aim was to assemble an inventory of common situations that arouse people’s moral concerns. Participants read 70 vignettes and indicated whether the behaviors depicted therein were morally relevant. In Study 2, we compared the “most immoral” vignettes from Study 1 to a series of vignettes from the moral psychology literature. As expected, participants rated the behaviors depicted in our vignettes as being less morally wrong but more typical than those depicted in existing stimuli. These findings indicate that many everyday events arouse people’s moral concerns and suggest that stimuli like our everyday moral transgressions may be of great utility to researchers studying the psychology of morality.
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Data availability
The data and R code for both studies can be found at https://github.com/ZacharyHimmelberger/everyday-moral-transgressions.
Notes
Aside from our own internal review process and the feedback from the undergraduate research assistants, we did not subject our vignettes to any tests of readability or comprehensibility prior to conducting Study 1.
Specifically, participants were given a research ID at the end of the pre-test survey that they were asked to provide in subsequent studies. As noted, many participants failed to provide their research ID, instead providing other sorts of information (e.g., student ID, name).
Exploratory analyses revealed significant associations between these individual differences in moral judgment and other meaningful variables (e.g., age). See Supplementary Material for the full results.
Bellevue students who participated in Study 1 were not permitted to participate in Study 2.
Most of our participants had no missing values (n = 204) or were only missing two or fewer values (n = 53). Thus, most participants (95%) had complete or nearly complete data. Only 13 participants had missing data for three or more items (up to the missing data cutoff of 20). Of those 13 participants, only two skipped more than eight items.
Preliminary analyses indicated that this effect was moderated by institution. Because the pattern of means was similar across institutions, and there was no moderation for typicality, we collapsed across samples in the main analyses. See Supplementary Material for full details.
We conducted a separate set of analyses using only the data provided by non-traditional students (n = 48) whose mean age was 34.35 (median = 32.50, min = 23, max = 58). The results of those analyses were similar to those of the full sample, both for the main analyses and the subset comparisons.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Jay Barrow, Pero Brittz, David Steele, Sara Skibbie, Mary Elizabeth Shore, and Abby Laymance for their help evaluating the vignettes that we created for Study 1.
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The authors did not receive support from any organization for the submitted work.
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J. Dean Elmore – Conceptualization; Investigation; Methodology; Project Administration; Resources; Writing – Original Draft Preparation; Writing – Review & Editing. Jerome A. Lewis – Conceptualization; Investigation; Resources; Writing – Original Draft Preparation; Writing – Review & Editing. Zachary M. Himmelberger – Data Curation; Formal Analysis; Methodology; Validation; Writing – Original Draft Preparation; Writing – Review & Editing. Jefferson A. Sherwood – Resources; Writing – Review & Editing.
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The methodology and materials for Study 1 were approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Bellevue University. The methodology and materials for Study 2 were approved by the IRBs at both Bellevue University and Benedictine College. All participants completed informed consent procedures prior to their participation.
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Elmore, J.D., Lewis, J.A., Himmelberger, Z.M. et al. Everyday moral transgressions (EMTs): Investigating the morality of everyday behaviors. Curr Psychol 43, 10484–10493 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-05114-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-05114-x