Moral THREAT

Moral and ethical aspects of the self are especially important to most people. Hence, the threat to the moral self (i.e., to the idea that we have about ourselves as moral and ethical persons) is especially delicate and has particularly powerful effects. One of our research objectives is to delve into the study of how this moral threat materializes and what its consequences are. To date, we have approached this question from a very specific angle, focusing on the study of what we have called the "moral expectations" that members of the majority group develop about socially stigmatized or disadvantaged groups. We have found that people tend to expect members of stigmatized groups (e.g., people with achondroplasia or people with homosexual orientation) to be particularly fair and respectful towards other minorities, more so than members of non-stigmatized social groups. When it turns out that members of disadvantaged groups are not more moral, then when they behave in a discriminatory way they suffer an especially severe evaluation by majority group members for their amoral behavior. We have described this phenomenon as an extra burden on the shoulders of stigmatized minorities (Fernández et al., 2014). Along this same vein, we have found that, in general, we expect disadvantaged minorities to develop a greater commitment to social justice, that is, we expect members of socially disadvantaged groups to be more aware of social inequalities and injustice and, because of that, we expect them to be more committed with the fight for equality. We have found this expectation of a greater commitment to social justice, not only to the extent that it affects the benefit of the minority itself (i.e., not only because minorities are expected to commit themselves with social justice for its own benefit) but also in the form of an expected broader ethical and moral commitment in favor of social justice in general. The logic behind these stereotypical beliefs would lie in the fact that members of the majority group perceive disadvantaged minorities as groups with a long tradition of fighting inequality (Saguy et al., 2020). We could say, for simplicity, that we expect members of disadvantaged minorities to be "better people" by virtue of having suffered social inequality in their own flesh. This stereotypical perception has implications for minorities, for example, with regard to expecting them to be particularly suited to perform tasks and jobs related to social justice.

Beyond the study of moral expectations about minorities, we are currently concentrating our research on a new line of work into the moral threat posed by the stereotypical perception that people with a liberal ideology have for people with a conservative and/or liberal ideology. In this sense, we are studying if the stereotypes and meta-stereotypes agree with our hypothesis that liberals threaten the moral self of conservative people and also what consequences this threat would have on intergroup relations.