Religion, morality, mandates, and conflict: Exploring the Moral Mandate Effect as a predictor of religious conflict
Abstract
Research on individually held moral mandates reveals a pattern of increased desire for social and physical distance from people with different moral beliefs and outcome justice oriented reasoning when issues of morality are involved. Research on moral outrage, people's reactions to offenses against their moral beliefs, shows that it causes increased political intolerance. Taken together, these findings suggest that differences in morality can lead to problematic political and interpersonal dynamics. Two experiments consider the Moral Mandate Effect (MME) as a potential force behind religious conflict. This relation is addressed through tests of three hypotheses. The hypotheses are that (a) religious and political mandates have political and inter-group repercussions similar to the interpersonal MME, (b) religious mandates have greater political and inter-group repercussions than political mandates, and (c) that a match between people's political or religious mandates and an attack to those mandates will intensify the participants' political and inter-group reactions. The results reveal limited evidence for each of these hypotheses. Several directions for future research are proposed to address the theoretical and methodological limitations of these experiments.
Subject Area
Social psychology
Recommended Citation
Shaw Noskin, Moira Pacifica Parvanih, "Religion, morality, mandates, and conflict: Exploring the Moral Mandate Effect as a predictor of religious conflict" (2007). ETD Collection for University of Texas, El Paso. AAI1449734.
https://scholarworks.utep.edu/dissertations/AAI1449734