How is it that some people or social groups find a particular action to be righteous and worthy of praise, while others find the same action to be wrong and abhorrent? Our research argues that extreme diversity and disagreement in morality are genuine - people have competing moral values that lead to disagreement even when everyone agrees on the facts at hand (Rai & Fiske, 2011). These values are grounded in patterns of social relations that vary across cultures and socio-historical contexts (Nettle, Rai, & Fiske, 2011; Rai, 2017). Current projects focus on the cultural evolution of competing patterns of social relations and moral diversity. 

Many psychological approaches assume that when people hurt or even kill each other it must be because something has broken down in the moral psychology of the perpetrator.  In contrast, our research argues that much violence occurs because of the activation of our moral psychology. People hurt and kill because they feel they are justified, obligated, and virtuous in doing so. Our ongoing projects ask how the relationships between violence and psychological processes shift once we reconceptualize aggression as emerging from the presence of morality rather than its absence. So for example, we've found that moralistic aggressors may actually humanize their victims (Rai et al., 2017), exert more self-control (Rai, 2019), and respond irrationally to material incentives (Rai, 2022). Current projects focus on the role of moralistic aggression in cooperation, victims' experiences, social bonding, and the search for a meaningful life.

One approach to conflict resolution is to try to alleviate anger, improve civility, reduce polarization, and find common ground. However, these efforts may dampen motivation to alleviate social injustice. Our lab begins from the assumption that anger is not an impulse to be avoided, but rather a motivation to be harnessed. Drawing on the social change and corporate violence literatures, this future line of research focuses on developing ways to cultivate moralistic anger to promote social justice in conflicts.