台大心理系

Existing research has revealed various cross-sectional differences in moral ideologies, but has paid less attention to their cross-temporal differences—changes in moral ideologies. Here, we tested whether morality is redefined—renovated—when the society undergoes widespread social events, in the way the redefined ideology would better serve the society. Using a U.S. President’s congressional addresses (Study 1), longitudinal social media data (Study 2), and multi-wave surveys (Study 3), we show the natural experiments created by the 2001 9/11 attack (Study 1), the 2007 global Great Recession (Study 2), and the 2016 U.S. presidential election (Study 3) induced the proposed moral renovation among Americans (Studies 1 and 3) and a multinational online community (Study 2). We address three alternative explanations—participants became conservative under threat, desired to justify the status quo, or experienced general moral hyper-activation—and discuss the findings in terms of the functional malleability of morality.