Moral conviction
Moral conviction refers to the perception that one's feelings about a given attitude are based on one's beliefs about right and wrong. Holding an attitude with moral conviction means that a person has attached moral significance to it.
Description
A conviction is an unshakable belief in something without needing proof or evidence. Moral conviction, therefore, refers to a strong and absolute belief or attitude that something is right or wrong, moral or immoral. Moral convictions have a strong motivational force.This is an important topic of research because moralization has the potential to both inspire activism and change and also to instigate divisiveness and great destruction.
Studies in social psychology indicate that moralization converts preferences into values, which act as moral imperatives, decreasing tolerance of differing opinions. This can lead to an increased willingness to accept violent solutions to conflicts. Moralized attitudes and opinions are more rigid than social conventions.
Characteristics of moral conviction
People who hold moral convictions tend to perceive them as objectively true and universal in the sense that these should apply everywhere irrespective of the geographical location of time in history.Moral convictions are often authority and peer-independent. People are less likely to be influenced by normative and majority influences. They are particularly resistant to conformity. Behavioral research in social psychology demonstrates that individuals who have a moral basis for their attitude or opinion are more likely to react against the group norm, or counter-conform. For instance, one study examined the reactions to a Supreme Court case that upheld states’ ability to decide whether to legalize physician-assisted suicide . It was found that people's strength of moral conviction about physician-assisted suicide, and not their prior perceptions of the Supreme Court's legitimacy and fairness, was the strongest predictor of their perceptions of fairness and acceptance of the Court's decision in this case. Regardless of how legitimate they thought the Supreme Court was at baseline, morally convicted opponents of physician-assisted suicide perceived the decision to be unfair and nonbinding, whereas morally convicted opponents perceived the reverse.