A commonly used excuse for prejudice/discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals often sounds something like this: “I have no problem with them personally, but that kind of lifestyle just goes against my moral values.” But which moral values are those? After all, there are several moral values one could think of: compassion, selflessness, fairness, and so on. A series of studies by Monroe and Plant (2019) sought to determine which of these moral values lead to more, or less prejudice directed towards LGBTQ+ individuals. They narrowed it down to two types of moral value: sanctity and care. Sanctity relates to punishing and dehumanizing wrongdoers (for the sake of justice and safety). Care, on the other hand, is about limiting the amount of undue pain other people experience (empathy). They also stated that people can’t have both high sanctity and high care- they must choose one or the other, in a “sanctity/care tradeoff”. In their first study, they tested participants to see whether their support of sanctity increased dehumanization towards a hypothetical gay man, as compared to members of other groups: such as a person with AIDS, a white man, an African American man, and an obese man. They found that people who believed in sanctity were more likely to dehumanize the gay man and the man with AIDS, but not the other groups. In their second study, they built off these results. They tested to see whether the unique moral foundations of conservatism/liberalism leaned towards sanctity or care, and to what extent this leaning also predicted dehumanization and prejudice towards sexual minorities. They found that liberals tended to prioritize “fairness” and “care” more than conservatives. Conservatives prioritized “sanctity”, “loyalty”, and “authority” more. Having increased sanctity and decreased care tended to result in dehumanization of both the hypothetical gay man and the hypothetical man with AIDS. The relationship between high sanctity/low care and prejudice/discrimination was fully explained by the dehumanization factor.
So, what does this kind of research tells us? It implies that people can not only make specific moral decisions such as “This thing is good” or “This thing is bad”, it also says that people’s general moral values have an impact on what kind of attitudes/behavior they display to sexual minorities. Moral judgment and moral disgust (Buck et. al., 2013; Pirlott & Cook, 2018) have been used in other studies as a variable which often coincides with prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behavior. However, general systems which enforce certain values of morality (politics here, religious fundamentalism in MacInnis and Hodson, 2012) can also encourage forms of prejudice/discrimination.
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