The Impact of Beliefs on our Behavior and Morality

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Our beliefs about others and our culture greatly influence how we behave, along with our innate instincts for empathy and altruism. Research shows that as we grow older, we tend to show favoritism towards helping family and friends over strangers. However, this preference is not innate but learned from our cultural upbringing.

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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