How Morality Affects Our Self Image

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We tend to trust people who are dantological thinkers or actors at the personal level, maybe not the leadership level. Here's where I think that we are really stuck with how our culture talks and thinks about morality. It is deeply, deeply important to be seen as moral by other people. We know that memory is really integrable to our sense of identity. And getting excluded from the group is, you know, deadly,. In our ancestral environment, it was literally deadly.

Most of us strive to be good, moral people. When we are doing that striving, what is happening in our brains? Some of our moral inclinations seem pretty automatic and subconscious. Other times we have to sit down and deploy our full cognitive faculties to reason through a tricky moral dilemma. I talk with psychologist Molly Crockett about where our moral intuitions come from, how they can sometimes serve as cover for bad behaviors, and how morality shapes our self-image.

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Molly J. Crockett received her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge. She is currently Associate Professor of Psychology and University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.

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