MORAL FOUNDATIONS AND MORAL EXCLUSION AS DETERMINANTS OF OUTGROUP HELPING AND MORAL COURAGE

Date

2024-4

Author

Coşkun, Muhammet

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Helping and moral courage as prosocial behaviors are the cornerstones of a society with harmonious social relationships. However, little attention is devoted to intergroup prosociality, and even less is known about specific types of prosocial behaviors like moral courage. Moreover, the related literature mostly relies on self-reported prosocial intention measures, limiting generalizability of findings to real-life behaviors. The current dissertation consists of 3 studies addressed towards these gaps through examining moral predictors (moral foundations and moral exclusion) of helping intention and moral courage (intention and actual behavior) toward Syrian refugees in Türkiye. Across all studies, individualizing moral foundations was consistently related to expanded moral circle beyond ingroup boundaries, which in return predicted increased helping intention, moral courage intention, and moral courage behavior. Intergroup threat, however, played just the opposite role compared to individualizing foundations. Furthermore, intention-based studies (Studies 1 and 2) failed to find significant associations related to binding moral values. Yet, Study 3, which was the behavior-based study, revealed how endorsing binding values was related to aggravated moral exclusion and silence against outgroup racism, emphasizing intention-behavior gap in socially desired behaviors. Differences between two university samples in binding foundations supported this role of binding moral values. Albeit being consistent across all studies, but intergroup contact was also associated with decreased moral exclusion and enhanced prosocial behavior. There were also gender differences indicating higher moral sensitiveness of women, but it disappeared in when actual behavior, instead of intention, was measured. Prosocial peacebuilding endeavors should consider moral values in outgroup prosocial behavior while related research should consider intention-behavior gap in socially desirable behaviors.

Subject Keywords

Moral courage, Helping, Moral exclusion, Intergroup threat, Intergroup contact

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/109163

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis