Moral psychology

Moral psychology is the study of how we process moral ideas, how we become moral beings, and how our brains handle moral issues. We can use a four-category framework to understand how people make moral judgements. These are: Evaluations, Norm judgements, Wrongness judgements and Blame judgements.

It takes less than two seconds of seeing an action with a moral dimension to make a basic judgement on whether it was good or bad, morally wrong or not, and who to blame for it. Some of these quick decisions will be wrong because we rely on preexisting biases and insufficient information. The four-category framework can help us understand that moral situations can be viewed from different perspectives. Holding opposing views on an issue can be natural.