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Morality is a social process by which a person deems thoughts, intentions, choices or actions as either good (or right) or bad (or wrong). It can be based on a personal and/or a population's code of conduct or values.
Hopp et al. probe the neural (dis)unity of moral foundations theory and report that each moral foundation recruits domain-general mechanisms of social cognition but also has a dissociable neural signature malleable by sociomoral experience.
Punishing offenders gives victims a sense of justice and increases willingness to reconcile, owing to both a sense of victim empowerment and a sense that the villain has been rehabilitated.
Emotions such as empathy and disgust might be at the root of morality, but psychologists should also study the roles of deliberation and debate in how our opinions shift over time, argues Paul Bloom.
The finding that religion scarcely influences moral intuition undermines the idea that a godless society will be immoral, says Philip Ball. Whether it 'explains' religion is another matter.
