Citation in APA format: Zaki, J., & Stellar, J. E. (2025). Moral emotions. In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, E. J. Finkel, & W. B. Mendes (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (6th ed.). Situational Press. https://doi.org/10.70400/MWKI4223

Moral Emotions 

Jamil Zaki, Stanford University 

Jennifer E. Stellar, University of Toronto 

In March 16th, 1968, Army major Hugh Thompson Jr. witnessed fellow American soldiers massacring unarmed Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai.  He landed his helicopter between a group of survivors and the advancing platoon, ordering his own troops to shoot any American who intended to do further harm.   

In 2005, rescue efforts following hurricane Katrina stalled because officials could not traverse New Orleans’ flooded streets.  Hundreds of amateur boaters heard this and formed an informal flotilla, saving thousands of victims.  The “Cajun Navy” went on to perform similar rescue efforts around the country for years.   

In 2011, after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster, workers were called in to clean up the plant, awash in harmful radiation.  Yasuteru Yamada, a 72-year-old retired engineer, felt it was wrong for young people to take on the risk of cancer and early death.  He quickly assembled the “skilled veterans core:” doctors, engineers, cooks, and singers—all over 60 years old—to take young workers’ place.  

The world over, people help one another and uphold values sacred to them.  Moral ideals vary across cultures and sub-cultures (Graham et al., 2013; Sachdeva et al., 2011), but some values—such as sacrificing for the common good—are thought of as core tenets of moral behavior (Tomasello, 2016) and praised as moral around the world (Curry et al., 2019).  Throughout history, moral acts have been described as the sine qua non of our species, vital to our success as a hyper-social animal.  For just as long, philosophers and scholars have disagreed on what exactly morality is, its psychological sources, and how we can inspire it in people.   

Perennial questions in this conversation surround the role that emotions should and do play in guiding moral actions.  Emotions are physiological and psychological responses to situations that a person experiences as positive or negative, and that hold some importance to them.  Unlike moods, emotions are typically short-lived and about something (Beedie et al., 2005): the steak in front of you, the loud noise behind you, the yearly bonus you just received, or how much smaller than expected it was.   

Moral emotions are a subset of affective responses that involve concepts of right and wrong.  In particular, these states often arise in response to people’s role in creating suffering and flourishing for other living things, and in their adherence to or flouting of cultural norms.  The lump in your throat when you see a scared and hungry child, your goosebumps when someone helps that child, and the flush in your face after someone betrays you are all signs of moral emotions.   

Emotion has a long history within psychology and has been a staple of The Handbook of Social Psychology, most recently including chapters by Zajonc (1998); Keltner and Lerner (2010); and Niedenthal, Neta, and Wood (2023).  By contrast, morality, and by extension moral emotions, are surprisingly new arrivals. The first four editions of The Handbook included chapters on religion (Dittes, 1954), prosocial (Batson, 1998) and antisocial behavior (Geen, 1998), and justice (Tyler & Smith, 1998), but it was not until the fifth edition that The Handbook published a chapter on morality (Haidt & Kesebir, 2010). Since the fifth edition, however, moral psychology has exploded.  That is represented in this sixth edition, which also features chapters on moral cognition (Cushman, 2024) and moral behavior (Marsh, 2024). Like the phenomena they describe, these chapters interlock to provide a fuller picture of human moral life.   

What place do emotions have in the broader landscape of our moral lives?  Depending on who (and when in history) one asks, there are vastly different answers to this question.  Some believe that emotions are the heart of morality, clarifying what we believe is right and inspiring us to act on those beliefs.  Others see them more like its tailbone, a vestigial holdover from our past that has little function for modern morality.  A minority claim that they are more like a virus that infects our moral machinery, and which we must overcome to pursue our ideals.   

This chapter will briefly trace the contours of these debates, focusing on two key questions: What role does emotion really play in our moral lives, and what role should it ideally play?  Philosophers and scientists have explored and argued over these issues for centuries, but often under outdated premises. For instance, one scholar might argue that moral emotions help people make better choices, while another claims that they impede decision-making, both working under the faulty assumption that affect and reason are fundamentally distinct.   

By now, modern affective science has overwritten this dichotomy, and produced a fundamentally integrated view of affect and cognition.  This, in turn, has paved the way for a modern science of moral emotion, which rests on at least three pillars.  First, moral emotions are a type of reasoning, in that they follow from appraisals of situations that people find morally meaningful.  Second, affect plays a functional role in moral life, but can “misfire” and lead to decisions most people would find immoral.  Third, moral emotions are malleable, in that they can be learned and regulated in ways that fit or depart from a culture’s standards of right and wrong.  After establishing this framework, we apply it to a set of discrete moral emotions—outrage, guilt, compassion, and awe.  Each exemplifies the three pillars of moral affective science, and together they demonstrate the diversity of experiences that populate moral behavior.     

PART I: CLASSIC DEBATES ABOUT MORAL EMOTIONS 

How Much Do Emotions Guide Moral Life? 

For millennia, brilliant people have grappled with the role emotions play in moral life. In Phaedrus, Plato arranged the mind into three parts: logos (reason), thymos (spiritedness), and eros (desire). Logos was the seat of knowledge, whereas thymos inspired aggression and eros sought sensual pleasure.  Virtue occurred when logos ruled over the other two, like a charioteer commanding two horses. “Rationalist” enlightenment philosophers—most notably, Immanuel Kant—furthered this logic, characterizing morality as a set of imperatives to be reasoned out and universally applied, irrespective of context or individual feelings. In Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant (1785/1993) argued that people should “act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”  

Not everyone agreed. Western “sentimentalist” philosophers including Adam Smith (1853) and David Hume (1751) viewed emotions such as sympathy as crucial forces in moral decisions and experience. Outside the West, philosophers championed more relational forms of morality that were built upon emotions (Bell & Metz, 2011). The Confucian philosopher Mencius aptly described emotions as the ‘sprouts’ of virtue, considering compassion the sprout of benevolence and reverence the sprout of filial piety (xiao 孝) and respect for elders (ti 梯) (Nichols, 2011). Similarly, Ubuntu—an African philosophy that guides moral and social reasoning, suggested that emotions were crucial to helping people decide on appropriate ways of interacting with others (Ewuoso & Hall, 2019; Mugumbate & Chereni, 2020; Ogude, 2018).     

Modern (Western) moral psychology was born in the 20th century and took its cues almost exclusively from the rationalist school. Fittingly, two developmental psychologists, Piaget (1932) and Kohlberg (1958; Kohlberg, Levine, & Hewer, 1983), helped usher moral psychology out of its infancy. Heavily influenced by rationalist models, Piaget proposed that children’s moral sensibilities grew along with their capacity for reasoning. Younger children judged actions as moral or immoral based on their consequences, whereas older ones considered more nuanced information, such as an actor’s intentions.  

Kohlberg put Piaget’s theory through its empirical paces. He asked a sample of young boys to reason through similar moral dilemmas every three years over two decades (Kohlberg, 1984). In one such dilemma, a man named Heinz is faced with the predicament of whether to steal an expensive drug that would save his wife’s life.  What should Heinz do, and why? Rather than focusing on which choice the boys made—to steal or not to steal—Kohlberg rigorously coded their reasoning, like a math teacher checking students’ work. Much as Piaget had predicted, this coding revealed six distinct stages of moral development. Young children arrived at moral choices through simplistic reasoning, grounded in avoiding punishment and pursuing their own interests. Older boys thought in more complex terms, for instance incorporating the needs of others and larger concerns about social order. Over the years, some of the boys arrived at a nearly Kantian moral framework, grounding their choices in universal principles of justice and equality. These children achieved straight A’s in moral development according to Kohlberg, whereas others were held back a grade or never graduated at all—failures chalked up to insufficient reasoning.    

If development is something like evolution in fast-forward, Piaget and Kohlberg believed children became fully moral beings through the application of complex abstract reasoning.  Moral development was cognitive development—implying that morality is a cognitive affair. In this way, 20th century moral models fit neatly with psychology’s cognitive revolution and its view of the human mind as an optimized information processor.   

This dominant theory was not without its challengers. From a feminist perspective, Carol Gilligan (1993) argued that Kohlberg’s stages of moral reasoning failed to adequately represent relational aspects of morality, such as an “ethics of care,” which she argued are prioritized more heavily by women. Kohlberg’s model, problematically, predicted that fewer women would reach the most advanced stages of moral development.[1]

A second challenge came from evolutionary theory.  Rationalist models centered morality in the differences between animal instincts and human reason, but people who studied non-human animals balked at the notion of a bright line between species. Other species may lack complex human reasoning, but many nonetheless exhibit moral behaviors including cooperation, prosociality, and rejection of injustice (Bartal et al., 2011; de Waal, 2006, 2008; Fletcher, 2008; Trivers, 1971). These animals also express emotions, which in some cases seem to animate their moral behavior (Darwin, 1872/1965; Ekman & Friesen, 1975/2003). Why shouldn’t humans bear this inheritance?   

The most devastating threat to rationalist models was an avalanche of data suggesting that moral judgments do not neatly follow principles of pure reasoning. In a classic example, most people judged it as morally justified to save five people’s lives by sacrificing one when that sacrifice is relatively impersonal (flipping a switch that diverts a train towards the single victim), but not when it is relatively personal (manhandling the single victim; Greene, 2013; Greene et al., 2009). In another, more than 80% of people blamed an agent as immoral when their actions had harmful side effects, such as a company’s new program incidentally harming the environment, but less than 30% credited the agent as moral when they produced accidental benefits (Feltz, 2007; Knobe, 2003). This work challenged the notion that pure reason can explain moral choices.     

Around the same time, neuroimaging studies revealed that brain systems associated with emotion were more activated when people were confronted with personal moral dilemmas, such as manhandling one person to save five (Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001), than with impersonal ones. This brain activity further tracked people’s “irrational” choice to favor impersonal sacrifices over personal ones.  Further, individuals with damage to affective circuits in the brain, and those with psychopathy, distinguished less often between these types of dilemmas (Bechara et al., 2000; Koenigs et al., 2012; Koenigs et al., 2007; Marsh & Cardinale, 2014; Martins et al., 2012).   

Much of this research was correlational: A person’s feelings were measured through self-report or physiological means, their moral choices were tallied, and the two were related to each other. These data leave open the possibility that moral emotions accompany, but do not directly drive, decisions about right and wrong—less like the engine of moral life and more like its exhaust fumes. More compelling answers about emotion’s role would require directly changing how someone feels, without engaging cognitive reasoning systems, and demonstrating its impact on moral judgment and behavior.   

This is a tall order for psychologists, who faced both practical and ethical challenges when trying to create strong emotions in participants. Nonetheless, researchers have succeeded in doing so, and cataloged resulting effects on judgment, decision-making, and behavior. In early work, people were induced to feel angry or sad using video clips, and then asked to judge unrelated social scenarios.  Anger caused people to focus more on individual agency when drawing attributions, whereas sadness caused them to focus more on situational forces (Keltner et al., 1993).     

Scientists quickly carried this approach to the moral domain. For instance, people who watched positive video clips became less averse to manhandling one victim to save five, presumably because happiness buffered them from the emotional fallout of those situations (Valdesolo, & DeSteno, 2006). Importantly, happiness failed to alter more impersonal moral choices that did not typically engage emotions in the first place, like pulling a lever that killed one person to save five.  Over time, emotion inductions grew cleverer, and more targeted. Inducing anger focused people on concerns about justice, rights, and autonomy (Horberg, Oveis. Keltner, 2011). Inducing disgust by exposing participants to unpalatable smells (Schnall et al., 2008) or tastes (Eskine, Kacinik, & Prinz, 2011), or through the use of hypnotic suggestion (Schnall et al., 2008; Wheatley & Haidt, 2005), harshened moral judgment.   

This evidence converged in Haidt’s (2001, 2007) social intuitionist view of morality, which came to dominate moral psychology for at least a decade.  It was a dramatic swing of the pendulum.  Where rationalist theories put emotions on the sidelines of morality, social intuitionists put it in the driver’s seat. Drawing less from rationalists like Kant and more from sentimentalists like Hume, Haidt and others argued that emotion was the primary source of moral judgments.  In The Handbook’s previous edition, Haidt and Kesebir (2010) wrote that moral decisions “always involve at least a trace of ‘evaluative feeling.’” Emotions, in other words, guided the cognitive, physiological, and behavioral machinery that produced moral judgment and action. Reason joined the process late in the game, often as a post hoc means to explain moral judgments or decisions a person already made for emotional reasons.  

Pendulums are not built to remain on one side or the other for long, and neither are most grand debates about human psychology. Over the last several years, the intuitionist view has come into question on multiple fronts. First, along with other priming research, studies examining emotion priming and morality, especially the effects of gustatory disgust on moral judgment (Ghelfi et al., 2020), have failed to replicate calling the larger effect of priming disgust, and emotion more generally, into question (Landy & Goodwin, 2015). Careful re-examination of these effects suggests they are likely weaker and more questionable than previously expected.   

Second, the research paradigms that support the intuitionist approach have been called into question (Helion & Pizarro, 2015; Kahane et al., 2018). For instance, willingness to sacrifice one victim to save five in a trolley dilemma often fails to track utilitarian moral preferences in other domains (Everett & Kahane, 2020).  

Third, researchers have argued that “irrational” moral judgments hew to rational moral principles, even if judges cannot always explain those principles explicitly (Huebner et al., 2009; Pizarro & Bloom, 2003; Stanley et al., 2019).  Most people have never been confronted the dilemma of killing one person to save five. The intuitionist model often relies on novel moral transgressions that could be considered “victimless,” but nonetheless invoke moral reactions. Consider studies of so-called “moral dumbfounding.”  In this work, participants learn about a person who breaks a taboo, for instance by committing consensual incest. Participants are assured the individual took sensible precautions and has not harmed anyone, but judge them harshly regardless.   

Haidt and colleagues offer dumfounding as a quintessential demonstration of irrational, affect-driven moral decisions (Haidt et al., 2000). But in later work, Stanley and colleagues (2019) found that readers nonetheless perceived that actors in these scenarios could have caused harm, and rational assessment of these counterfactuals led to their judgments. In other words, though emotion could play a part in these decisions, dumbfounding in no way disqualified reason from having a crucial role as well.    

In sum, though rationalist and sentimentalist models of morality have jockeyed for primacy and popularity over the decades, neither cognition nor emotion alone clearly dominates moral life (De Sousa, 2001; Malle, 2021; Saunders, 2016).  

How Much Should Emotions Guide Moral Life? 

Beyond the descriptive question of how emotions guide morality lies the prescriptive issue of how much they should guide it in an ideal world. On this second question, two major camps of philosophers and researchers again produced very different answers. The first might best be called the affect-as-impediment view of morality.  The ancient Stoics were standard bearers for this model, and again, so was Kant. Though he died 162 years before Star Trek first aired, it is a fair bet to say he would have been a fan of Spock, the show’s Vulcan first officer, who applied impartial logic to every decision, no matter how personal or momentous. In Metaphysics of Morals, Kant (1785/1993) wished aloud that people might be more Spock-like. “The principle of apathy—namely that the wise man must never be in a state of affect… is an entirely correct and sublime moral principle,” he wrote.   

Unlike rationalists, affect-as-impediment thinkers need not deny the role of emotions in moral life, or the tug of ancient instincts on our minds. They recognize that inherited passions loom large in our morality, but also contend that living a truly moral life requires stamping out these instincts. The biologist T.H. Huxley made this point, here referring to evolved instincts in interstellar terms: “…let us understand, once and for all, that the ethical progress of society depends not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it” (Huxley, 1894, pg. 83). 

Kant, Huxley, and other affect-as-impediment thinkers find support in contemporary research. When emotions drive morality, they often guide it right off the rails—towards choices few people would find defensible (Bloom, 2017a). For instance, when people are induced to feel compassion for a patient in need of an organ transplant, they are more likely to favor moving that person up on the transplant list, despite this being a clear violation of fairness principles (Batson et al., 1995). Disgust can drive exclusionary moral judgments, such as prejudice against sexual minority groups (Kiss et al., 2020). Through true crime podcasts and reality television dramas, audiences gawk at the many ways lust and rage cloud people’s sense of right and wrong. The implication is that emotions can intensify our moral judgments, but also make them more unstable, self-centered, and biased.   

Other thinkers instead viewed emotions as a crucial component of an optimal moral life. We call this second view affect-as-signal, because it argues that emotions drive us towards morally appropriate decisions and behaviors. Again, this model finds root among philosophers around the world.  In Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle argued that virtue emerges from well-aimed passion (more on this below). In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume (1751) wrote that passions were the primary source of praiseworthy moral action. For instance, sympathy guides people towards the “natural virtue” of selflessness through care for others. And Confucian scholars pointed out that self-conscious emotions like shame motivated commitment to a group’s moral norms (Seok, 2017).  

The affect-as-signal model is also supported by modern research. Emotions often increase, rather than decrease, people’s adherence to moral principles. Gratitude motivates reciprocity of others’ prosocial acts, reduces cheating, and prompts conservation of shared resources (Bartlett & DeSteno, 2006; DeSteno et al., 2019; Kates & DeSteno, 2020). Outrage prompts “altruistic punishment” of moral transgressions (Lotz et al., 2011), which cost punishers while protecting victims and communities. Nor does emotion seem to be simply along for the ride.  In one study, people were induced to remember an event from their lives that made them angry and then watched while people acted fairly or unfairly in an economic game.  Individuals induced to feel anger engaged in more altruistic punishment of unfair players (Gummerum et al., 2016).  

Such punishment is one example of the many splits between “rational” and moral action. Homo economicus, the value-maximizer conceived of by the economist John Kells Ingram in 1888, is perfectly rational, but most people wouldn’t want him as a friend or partner (Persky, 1995).  From an economic perspective, rationality often coincides with selfishness. As such, irrational instincts, including emotion, can drive positive deviance from self-interested calculations. Lay people seem to realize this.  In one set of studies, players in a public goods game learned that their partners had made decisions about how much to contribute either “based on reason” or “based on emotion.” They predicted that emotional decision-makers would contribute more. They happened to be right, as people who reported emotion during the task were in fact more generous (Levine et al., 2018). However, in other work, people induced to feel fear and disgust contributed less to public goods than people who felt neutral, demonstrating that emotions do not always push people towards cooperative action (Nguyen & Noussair, 2022). Ultimately, the usefulness of emotions to moral decisions likely depend on the both the type of affect someone feels and the moral context in which they feel it. 

A final piece of evidence for the affect-as-signal model emerges from people who receive no such signals. Several conditions, including frontotemporal dementia and psychopathy, create Vulcan-like lack of emotion in patients.  Far from rendering these individuals moral, people endowed with Kant’s “apathy” often transgress and harm others with impunity (Mendez et al., 2005; Strikwerda-Brown et al., 2021). These deficits further appear to track an inability to integrate emotional information into moral decisions (Baez et al., 2016). Thus, even if emotions sometimes drive morality off the rails, in other cases they appear to provide a much-needed braking system.    

PART II: A CONTEMPORARY FRAMEWORK: INTEGRATION, FUNCTION, AND CHANGE  

A rationalist model supposes that logic drives our moral lives, with emotion along for the ride. Sentimentalists reverse that seating chart. An affect-as-impediment model suggests that when emotions are in charge, people and their choices fare worse. An affect-as-signal model counters that feeling is indispensable to guiding many moral choices.   

Highlighting conflicts between theories can help philosophers sharpen their arguments and researchers generate testable hypotheses. But as with almost any big, dichotomous question about human nature, the answer often lies somewhere in the middle. Decades of moral psychology and affective science now converge on a more integrative model. The consensus from scholarship and research is that emotion and cognition play complementary roles in guiding moral life, and both can produce adaptive and less adaptive choices. That contemporary middle ground rests on three pillars.    

Pillar 1: Moral Affect and Cognition Are Deeply Intertwined  

Dual-system theories die hard, and so do the metaphors they inspire.  Plato gave us the chariot, pulled by the wild horses of passion, governed by the charioteer of human reason.  Haidt (2001) shrunk that assemblage into a dog representing moral emotions, dragging its rational tail along.   

But if modern affective science can be whittled down into one core idea, it would be this: emotion and cognition are far more intertwined than originally thought, and more than some dual-system frameworks can withstand.  This is because emotions, far from being mere passions or impulses, arise from interpretations, or cognitive appraisals, of a situation and its relevance.   

This insight is not new.  The stoic Epictetus wrote, “When you are feeling upset, angry, or sad… your condition is the result of your own opinions and interpretations.”  Shakespeare agreed through Hamlet, who proclaims “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”  Contemplative traditions around the world have trained people to control their thoughts to center their emotional lives.  By 1970, the affective scientist Magda Arnold already referred to dualistic views as a “perennial problem” in understanding how emotion works.  Psychological science would be more accurate and productive, she argued, if researchers acknowledged that, “since the appraisal of the situation produces the emotion, and emotions can lead to action, the emotion will be organized according to the evaluation that produced it” (Arnold, 1970).   

Arnold, along with several others, pioneered appraisal theory, which puts interpretation at the center of human emotional life (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984; Schachter & Singer, 1962; Scherer et al., 2001).  In more contemporary research, Barrett and colleagues have laid out a constructivist model of emotion, in which affective experiences comprise a combination of signals from the body and interpretations of those signals based on context and language (Barrett, 2017a, 2017b; Barrett et al., 2007).   

In other words, emotions are built from thoughts, such that thinking differently can shape our emotional lives.  In clinical psychology, cognitive therapists see maladaptive beliefs as a core source of depression and anxiety.  To improve symptoms, they help patients challenge and replace negative beliefs with more adaptive ones (Beck, 1991).  Empirically, Gross and colleagues have repeatedly demonstrated that altering appraisals shifts emotion experience and expression (Gross, 1998; Gross, 2015; Gross & Barrett, 2011; Gyurak et al., 2011).   

On the other hand, emotion serves as a central input into cognitive processes, such that changing how one feels changes how one thinks.  Feeling sadness, for instance, decreases people’s willingness to take risks, and increases their tendency to process information slowly and systematically.  Happiness, by contrast, increases risk taking and reliance on heuristic thinking (Forgas, 1995; Storbeck & Clore, 2007).  Brain imaging data, likewise, have evolved towards convergence.  Earlier work in this field highlighted separate systems for affect—especially subcortical structures in the limbic system—and cognition—including areas related to attention and control in frontal cortex.  But increasingly, research points to widespread interactions between these systems, both in generating emotions and regulating them (Buhle et al., 2014; Ochsner et al., 2012; Wager et al., 2008).   

The implications for affect and morality are clear.  As Nussbaum (2008) describes, many moral emotions arise from a process of interpretation: about events and their relation to human well-being, suffering, and principles people find morally relevant.  Those emotions, in turn, reinforce and guide moral cognition.   One need not choose reason or emotion as the single force primarily driving moral life, because they are not in competition at all, but rather in partnership.   

Later in this chapter, accounts of particular moral emotions will highlight this partnership, examining the appraisals that cause those emotions, and how each in turn affects judgment and thinking.   

Pillar 2: Affect Serves a Functional, but Noisy, Role in Moral Life   

A second pillar of the contemporary study of moral emotion pertains to their function.  Far from being an impediment to moral reasoning, emotions promote adaptive outcomes (Keltner & Gross, 1999; Levenson, 1999). This functional approach is grounded within a larger evolutionary perspective.  Darwin (1872/1965) argued that emotions and their expressions draw organisms towards “serviceable associated habits,” actions that would serve them in each context.  Anger, by causing an animal to bare its teeth, would prepare it for conflict.  Fear, by widening its eyes, would let more information in.  Disgust, by narrowing its nose, would keep pathogens out.  

Modern functional approaches liken emotions to “superordinate programs” on a computer (e.g., opening Word), which orchestrate subprograms (e.g., spell check; Cosmides & Tooby, 2000).  Fear will deactivate lower order physiological processes like digestion, train attention on possible sources of threat, and activate motivations and goals such as reaching safety.  This model also recognizes the power of culture to shape the utility and expression of emotions (e.g., Frijda & Mesquita, 1994).  For instance, in Japan, strong norms about hierarchy dictate that anger is an appropriate way to express authority.  As a result, Japanese individuals who are higher (versus lower) in status express anger more freely.  By contrast, Americans often use anger to vent frustration, such that this emotion is expressed disproportionately by American individuals who are lower in social status (Park et al., 2013).   

Some of the affective states most important to social life, such as gratitude, outrage, and awe, act as moral amplifiers that zoom people in on acts of help or harm, or principles that are upheld or broken (Horberg et al., 2011; Keltner & Haidt, 1999). For instance, gratitude guides people’s attention to the benefits they receive from others and encourages reciprocation of those good deeds.  This emotion also serves an important social signaling function.  When people’s positive acts are met with gratitude, they are more likely to continue them (McCullough, Kilpatrick, & Emmons, 2001).  

A functionalist approach to moral emotions highlights the utility of these emotions in facilitating moral behavior or deterring immoral behavior—in line with the affect-as-signal model.  But not every signal a person receives is worth listening to.  Moral emotions can send signals that lead to inefficient, imprecise, or indefensible actions—some of which are discussed later in this chapter.   

These “misfires” in moral emotion could provide ammunition for the affect-as-impediment model, but a modern functionalist approach complicates this black-and-white thinking in three ways.  First, there is no guarantee that replacing affect with reason will always produce more adaptive moral outcomes.  When people do their best to think through problems of right and wrong, they often arrive at conclusions that are biased or self-serving.  For instance, perpetrators of harm re-interpret the world to rationalize their actions, a process known as moral disengagement (Bandura, 2016; Bandura et al., 1996).  In one striking example, death workers who performed executions of inmates in the American South used cognitive gymnastics—such as dehumanizing inmates or minimizing their agency—to minimize their accountability in the process of execution, especially if they were personally involved in it (Osofsky et al., 2005).      

Second, even when moral emotions misfire, people’s aim can be thrown off not by the affect they feel, but the how they interpret it: the appraisals that help build emotions. For instance, envy serves the function of lessening status differences between people (Lange & Crusius, 2015). But what is the best way to even people’s standing?  It depends on one’s perceptions of that imbalance.  “Malicious envy” focuses people's attention on the undeservingness of another’s accomplishments and motivates them to restore balance by bringing that person down, in other words reducing their status (van de Ven, Zeelenberg, & Pieters, 2011).  The workplace saboteur and online troll regularly wield this type of envy.  “Benign envy” occurs when someone perceives another person’s achievements as deserved, and yet greater than one’s own.  This appraisal more often produces a desire for self-improvement among an envious individual.   

Third, human mistakes often reveal not flaws, but rather fundamental principles of our minds. In the famous checker shadow illusion (Adelson, 1993), for example, an object casting a shadow on one square makes it appear lighter than an equally colored square under no cover of shadow.  This error does not point to a brokenness in color perception, but rather the functions the human visual system is built to accomplish—including taking context cues into account when inferring color properties.  Likewise, misfires in moral emotions can help researchers better understand the core function these states serve, by highlighting contexts in which their typical operations stop working.   

Pillar 3: (Moral) Emotions Are Learnable  

Thus far, we have reviewed two pillars of modern affective science that integrate previous models of morality: (1) emotion and cognition pervasively interact to guide experiences and choices; and (2) emotions serve evolutionarily preserved functions, though they can misfire in certain instances.   

These insights, together, raise a key question: can emotions be “shaped” over time, such that they serve moral outcomes more effectively, and misfire less often?  As with so many questions in morality, this one has been discussed for thousands of years by people around the world.  Aristotle believed an ideal moral life didn’t look like a Vulcan lack of emotions, or like a sentimentalist rule of feeling over logic.  Instead, he argued it came from sharpening one’s passions to match cultural and moral values:  

Both fear and confidence and appetite and anger and pity and in general pleasure and pain may be felt both too much and too little, and in both cases not well; but to feel them at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motives, and in the right way, is what is both intermediate and best, and that is characteristic of virtue. (Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, see Ameriks & Clarke, 2000) 

Aristotle went on to argue that well-tempered emotions could guide people towards upholding justice, for instance through their anger at a perpetrator of wrongdoing.  Of course, the “right” time to feel an emotion, or target towards which to feel it, might vary across people, cultures, and time.  Aristotle believed that moral education entailed matching instincts and emotions to those norms and contexts, as soldiers modulate their fear to feel neither too much nor too little during battle.    

The Confucian philosopher Mencius provided a similar perspective, arguing that virtue shapes emotions to match appropriate cultural standards.  Like Aristotle, he viewed moral education as a process of facilitating that match (Im, 1999).  A modern Confucian scholar summarizes Mencius’s thinking about moral “taste” as follows:  

Mencius requires a method and program for the cultivation of moral taste.  Just as I might cultivate a taste for fine wine by some sensible and judicious drinking… so I heighten my moral sensibility and my readiness to act, by doing the right things, and savoring the satisfaction that follows.  The feedback effect strengthens the disposition, so that next time I am able to do something that would have been too difficult for me to do before in the right way—that is, wanting to, and not simply ordering myself to.  (Nivison, 1979) 

These arguments extend the developmental work of Piaget and Kohlberg, who found that children’s moral cognitions evolve over time.  Aristotle and Mencius’s perspective questions the notion that this evolution is merely a matter of sharpening cognition.  Instead, moral development might also signal a shift in people’s emotional landscapes.   

Contemporary affective science dovetails with this proposition.  As children grow, their judgments of right and wrong change, but so do their feelings about morally relevant events.  They express greater concern for the suffering of others, increasing gratitude towards people who act kindly, and growing guilt over their own transgressions.  The shaping of these sentiments, in turn, scaffolds children’s early social behaviors, including upholding cooperation, prosociality, and fairness (Davidov et al., 2013; Knafo et al., 2008; Vaish & Hepach, 2020).   

Moreover, this shaping occurs not just through natural development, but through a child’s particular social context.  Compassion is stunted in children who are raised institutionally, but revived when they are brought to foster homes (Humphreys et al., 2015).  Children in highly unequal communities are more tolerant of intergroup competition and violence, as are children experimentally induced to think about competition for scarce resources between groups (Rhodes & Brickman, 2011).  In other words, children appear to match their emotions to the “right” targets and experiences based on the context around them—an integration of appraisal, culture, and affect.  Such development likely undergirds at least some cross-cultural differences in emotion.   

Thus, moral development represents a sort of emotional education, in which children acquire tastes that in turn guide their moral lives.  Adults, too, continue to tune their moral emotions in response to new experiences.  Empirical evidence on this remains somewhat scarce, but several lines of inquiry and research intersect to support this idea.   

For millennia, billions of people have participated in varied spiritual practices, such as prayer and confession, many designed to evoke awe, compassion, gratitude, and other moral emotions. These activities constitute our species’ most well-worn efforts at the education of virtue (DeSteno, 2021).  Do such practices develop moral emotions as Aristotle and Mencius might suggest?  Research examining variance across people and experiences across time finds that regular spiritual practice correlates with more regular and intense experience of positive moral emotions such as gratitude and awe, which in turn predicts greater engagement in religious practice—what Van Cappellen and colleagues (2021) term an “upward spiral” of spirituality and affect (Hardy et al., 2014). 

Much of the data on spiritual life and moral emotion remain correlational, but a more intensive body of research has focused on specific contemplative practices in the Buddhist tradition, such as loving kindness meditation (LKM).  LKM has proven an especially effective target for research because it cleanly targets a particular moral emotion—compassion—and because it is amenable to relatively short (e.g., 8-week) training “programs,” which can then be examined for causal effects of LKM on emotion and behavior.  Such work has found that LKM training positively affects prosocial behavior, self-reported compassion, and brain and physiological measures of compassion (Jazaieri et al., 2013; Luberto et al., 2018; Singer & Klimecki, 2014; Weng et al., 2013)—converging evidence for sharpened moral emotion through learning.  Notably, these effects appear weaker when compared to active, versus wait-list, control groups (Kreplin et al., 2018), but evidence still points to a general effect of LKM.   

Sacred experiences thus appear to shape our moral emotions.  So do secular ones.  For instance, people who undergo personal or collective hardship, including war, severe illness and injury, and natural disasters, often exhibit greater prosocial behavior afterwards (Drury et al., 2019; Staub & Vollhardt, 2008; Vollhardt, 2009; Zaki, 2020).  This is accompanied by a shift in their emotional lives.  In particular, an individual’s life history of adversity tracks their levels of compassion and guilt (Greenberg et al., 2018; Lim & DeSteno, 2016; Lim & DeSteno, 2022), and this emotional tuning, in turn, mediates hardship-related increases in prosociality.  In other words, suffering might tune people’s moral emotions towards the pain of others, in turn shifting their actions.   

The school of hard knocks might sharpen human moral emotions, but few people would willingly attend it.  Thankfully, a wellspring of data suggests that volitional, secular practices can also shape emotions.  One approach, drawing from Stoicism, cognitive therapy, and affective science, uses reappraisal to help people reinterpret, and thus change, their affective responses.  Most reappraisal studies occur over a single session, but newer, longitudinal experiments demonstrate that when people repeatedly practice cognitive regulation techniques, their emotional reactions and brain activity in response to negative images diminishes over time (Denny et al., 2015; Denny & Ochsner, 2014).  

Reappraisal has seldom been used to target long-term change in moral emotions, but it appears to shape some morally relevant outcomes.  In one study, Israelis were trained in reappraisal and then presented with information on the Israel-Palestine conflict that could induce anger.  Compared to a control group, participants who learned reappraisal techniques expressed less aggression towards outgroup members, and a greater desire for peace-positive actions (Halperin et al., 2013).  In another study, after 16 weeks of reappraisal training, individuals expressed less desire for vengeance following conflict in their personal lives (Barlett & Anderson, 2011).  In the above cases, people learn more adaptive behavior by cooling their emotions—education in virtue that would make proponents of the affect-as-impediment model proud.   

In other cases, people can make more adaptive and cooperative choices by turning up their emotions.  Emotion focused therapy, or EFT, is predicated on helping people become more aware of their affective states and where those states come from.  A major goal of this approach is “changing emotion with emotion” (Greenberg, 2004).  That is, in the face of negative experiences, EFT therapists not only encourage patients to rethink their experiences, but also to marshal positive states such as empathy and gratitude to fight affective fire with fire (Greenberg, 2011). Outside the clinic, researchers document long-term benefits of leaning into feelings, including moral emotions.  The most well-explored techniques in this space are gratitude interventions, in which people regularly note positive aspects of their days, social interactions, or lives.  After participating in gratitude interventions, people report being happier, and also engage in more prosocial behavior than before (Lomas et al., 2014; Wong, 2023).

If moral emotions can be shaped, they can also be misshapen by people’s experiences.  Religious practice can motivate an upward spiral of positive moral emotions and prosociality, but especially in the case of fundamentalism, it also tracks prejudice and aggression against people from other creeds (Hunsberger & Jackson, 2005; Kanol, 2021).  Secular experiences can also dull moral emotions.  For instance, some research finds that attaining power, privilege, and status blunts compassion for those who lack them (Kraus et al., 2012; Stellar, Manzo, Kraus, & Keltner, 2012; Van Kleef et al., 2008).  Medical students experience lower levels of empathy over time, reductions that can contribute to inadequate and care, dehumanization of patients, and racial bias in treatment (Haque & Waytz, 2012a; Neumann et al., 2011; Nunes et al., 2011).  Crucially, however, training in compassion—including using LKM as described above—can mitigate such bias (Drwecki et al., 2011).   

In other words, not all forms of education in virtue teach people what they might want to learn.  Moral emotions change over time and, without direction, can run off course.  From an applied perspective, this drives home the point that individuals can be the stewards of their own emotional lives.  Their ship has set sail across a choppy moral and emotional landscape.  Even if they can’t stop it, they can steer it—in this case, by matching their emotional experiences to deeper goals and values.   

In Sum 

Rationalists and sentimentalists, affect-as-impediment and affect-as-signal—these models offer dichotomies about how emotion does and should shape human moral life.  But as with many major topics in contemporary psychology, the data fall in the middle.  Here, we offer three core pillars for a modern, integrative view of emotion and morality: (1) emotion and cognition pervasively interact; (2) emotions serve important, but noisy, functions; and (3) emotions can be sharpened through learning, in ways that harmonize them with moral principles and actions. We now apply these principles in describing several discrete moral emotions.   

PART III: CASE STUDIES IN MORAL EMOTION 

We may feel disgusted by a politician’s duplicitous statements or grateful for the support of a friend in a time of need, experiences related to our moral lives.   We might also feel disgust after biting into an expired egg salad sandwich, and grateful when it doesn’t make us sick—a decidedly non-moral situation.  What, then, makes an emotion moral?  And are moral emotions a special class, fundamentally separated from other types of affect?  Different answers to these two questions motivate contrasting approaches to the study of moral emotions.  

A domain-general approach claims that emotions become moral by virtue of the context, or more precisely, the perception of a moral value or norm.  Disgust, in particular, has long served as an example of domain-general moral affect (Rozin, McCauley, & Imada, 1997).  Early research on this emotion focused on sensory contact with physically offensive objects: spoiled sandwiches, foul scents, or communicable illness.  Researchers then isolated cases in which this same feeling arises from morally offensive acts or people (Giner-Sorolla & Chapman, 2016), especially those that damage norms of divinity or purity such as breaking sexual taboos like incest or ignoring culturally or religious norms like failing to clean one’s body before prayer (Horberg, Oveis, Keltner, & Cohen, 2009).  The presence and relevance of these values is thought to transform disgust into a moral emotion.  A key tenet of this approach is that moral emotions are not qualitatively different from non-moral affect, because any emotion can take on moral characteristics when relevant values and norms are activated.  

In contrast, a domain-specific approach considers moral emotions a special class of feelings that are preferentially elicited by morally-relevant events and motivate morally-relevant actions (Stellar et al., 2017). Gratitude, for example, can occur in non-moral contexts, but is primarily elicited when someone receives or witnesses others’ prosocial acts.  Gratitude, in turn, prompts the person feeling it to engage in prosocial behavior of their own (Wood et al., 2008).  

Within a domain-general approach, researchers tend to taxonomize moral emotions along dimensions that include their valence, targets, and functions.  Negative moral emotions are grouped into two broader categories: self-conscious emotions (guilt, shame, embarrassment) whose function is to monitor and deter one’s own unethical behavior, and other-critical emotions (anger, contempt, disgust), which serve to deter others’ immorality (Haidt, 2003).  Positive moral emotions are often categorized as other-praiseworthy (gratitude, elevation, inspiration) and other-suffering (compassion) emotions, which often stem from witnessing moral virtue and can promote moral behavior towards others. In addition, researchers have also mapped some of these emotions onto different sociomoral concerns such as purity of body and mind (e.g., disgust), harm and care of others (e.g., compassion; Horberg et al., 2011).  

As with the larger debates described previously, empirical evidence falls in between these two views.  It is true that most morally relevant emotions can be experienced in non-moral contexts.  It is also true that many moral emotions are preferentially (though not exclusively) elicited by moral situations.  A more precise account might focus not on black and white questions about whether classes of emotion fundamentally differ from each other, but rather on the appraisals that drive moral emotions and the functions they serve.   

This section will apply this lens to four emotions, two that are considered domain-general and two that are domain-specific: outrage, awe, guilt, and compassion.  The goal in selecting these four emotions is not to offer a comprehensive overview of moral emotions, but rather to illustrate the three pillars identified previously with a range of emotional “case studies.” Some of these represent more traditional moral emotions, while others have only recently gained traction in the field of affective science and psychology more broadly. Collectively, they motivate a diverse set of moral behaviors, from paying back a personal favor to fulfilling a patriotic duty to preserving the climate for future generations. These emotions can help us reflect on our own moral action (e.g., guilt), respond to the needs or behaviors of another person (e.g., compassion), engage with other groups (e.g., outrage), and connect us to humanity as a whole (e.g., awe).   

For each case study below, we characterize the emotion in a way consistent with the three pillars we outlined above.  First, we discuss how emotion and cognition are intertwined, by identifying cognitions or appraisals that produce each moral emotion (see summary Table 1).  Second, we explore these emotions’ adaptive role and occasionally maladaptive misfires, by considering their noisy moral functions.  Third, we contemplate whether these moral emotions can be learned and developed, and where there is evidence, describe the experiences that build and tune each moral emotion.   

Table 1: Case Studies of Emotions Across Three Key Pillars 

Outrage  

Outrage dots our emotional landscape, following traffic jams, spousal tiffs, and lost website passwords.  But when a moral principle someone holds dear is violated, that outrage takes on a moral flavor, and is sometimes referred to as moral outrage (O’Mara, Jackson, Batson, & Gaertner, 2011).  Recent work suggests moral outrage can be distinguished from domain-general anger, and that moral outrage represents a mix of anger and disgust (Salerno & Peter-Hagene, 2013).   

Further, outrage can operate at multiple levels.  People can become outraged at slights and injustices that affect them personally, but also on behalf of the larger groups to which they belong. One might be a tuba player, mother, Ohioan, and Sikh; each of those identities carries a tribe that, when harmed, can generate a group-based form of moral outrage. Whereas personal emotions track with how much a person is affected by an event, group based emotions can arise in response to events that do not materially affect an individual at all (Smith, 1993), making them well-suited to responding to the violations of more abstract moral principles.  Although related, these personal and group-based emotions are distinct.  They are only weakly correlated (Smith et al., 2007), and the intensity of group-based emotions directly tracks people’s level of identification with the group that is harmed or implicated in a morally relevant event.  Group-based moral outrage fits this pattern (Smith & Mackie, 2015), and inspires different actions and outcomes from personal and interpersonal experiences of it (Hechler & Kessler, 2018).  This section will consider moral outrage at both individual and group levels.    

Appraisals

Outrage may be stereotyped as blind, but in many cases, it is more calculative.  In particular, it rises along with several key appraisals.  The first is that harm has occurred.  In one of many studies like it, researchers presented people with scenarios in which one person’s action resulted in damage to another person, ranging from trivial to fatal.  Outrage scaled linearly with the scope of the harm (Ginther et al., 2022; see also Hechler & Kessler, 2018).  Likewise, group-based outrage tracks the inference that people have been harmed specifically because of their membership to a particular social category (Gordijn et al., 2001; Mackie et al., 2000).   

A second appraisal that drives outrage is the intention behind a harm.  Natural disasters are tragic, but barring vengeful local gods behind them, are not considered moral violations.  Instead, outrage arises when people interpret suffering to be the result of human intention.  Ginther and colleagues (2022) found that outrage rose along with harm suffered by a victim, but did so more steeply when someone caused it purposefully, rather than through accidental or reckless actions (see also Hechler & Kessler, 2018).  People also experience an “outrage blind spot” for algorithmic harm, such as gender or race-based bias produced by artificial intelligence.  Though algorithms can and will continue to cause immense amounts of harm, people (at least for now) infer artificial agents to have little agency and intention, dampening their outrage (Bigman et al., 2022).  

In the case of group-based outrage, appraisals of harm and intention combine with information about whether a group is one’s own or not.  Individuals who belong to a group that has done harm tend to downplay the intentionality behind it, whereas individuals who are harmed do not (Bilali et al., 2012; Rotella & Richeson, 2013).  Differences in appraisals of harm can lead to deep—and potentially explosive—mismatches between the outrage that feels appropriate depending on which side of a conflict one stands.  Group-based outrage tracks inferences about which group a person belongs to, but also how identified with that group they are.  People who experience their identity as “fused” with a group—for instance, reporting that their sense of self highly overlaps with that category—report a willingness to go to far greater lengths to protect other group members, including resorting to violence (Swann et al., 2009). For instance, following the attacks of September 11th, Americans’ identification with their nation tracked their anger at terrorist threats (Mackie et al., 2004), and priming or reminding people of their group membership intensifies their outrage when that group is harmed (Kuppens et al., 2013; Seger et al., 2009). 

Noisy Moral Functions

In his 1967 address to the American Psychological Association, Martin Luther King, Jr. discussed our field’s preoccupation with being “well-adjusted.”  When people fail to thrive, we tend to locate those problems within the individual, who is encouraged to better fit their circumstances.  But as King argued, there are many aspects of our society to which maladjustment is the only sane response:   

We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. We must never adjust ourselves to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence. (King Jr, 1967) 

Negative emotions such as sadness and disgust motivate us to flee their causes, but outrage inspires approach behaviors—and in particular attempts to rectify unfair situations (Carver & Harmon-Jones, 2009).  As a result, though outrage feels bad, it might produce good (Spring, Cameron, & Cikara, 2018).  At an individual level, this emotion directly predicts people’s pursuit of justice.  In one type of task, people observe as one player in a game theoretic task treats the other unfairly—and are then given a chance to pay to rectify the situation, either through “third party punishment” of the offender, or compensation of the victim.  An observer’s sense of outrage predicts their willingness to engage in both sorts of restitution (Bastian et al., 2013; Thulin & Bicchieri, 2016).  

At a group level, outrage can serve as a spark for social change.  The entrepreneur Lee Iacocca summarized this view in patriotic terms, saying, “Our nation was born when 56 patriots got mad enough to sign the Declaration of Independence. We put a man on the moon because Sputnik made us mad at being number two in space.  Getting mad in a constructive way is good for the soul—and the country.”[2]

Evidence for Iacocca’s view comes in two forms.  First, a lack of negative emotion in the face of inequality and injustice can render people less likely to act.  Members of historically low-power groups, such as Black Americans and Palestinians, are less inclined to advocate for social change when they feel warmth towards people in high power groups, and when they are encouraged to seek intergroup harmony (Dixon et al., 2010; Hasan-Aslih et al., 2019; Saguy et al., 2016; Saguy et al., 2009).  And, following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, Democrats who regulated their emotions felt less negative, but also reported reduced intentions to take part in political action (Ford et al., 2019). 

Had he known about these findings, Dr. King might have connected these studies to “negative peace.”  In Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he describes this state as “the absence of tension” rather than the presence of justice (King, 1964).  He might further describe group-based outrage as an antidote to complacency.  And indeed, outrage does seem to raise people’s willingness to challenge the status-quo and agitate for change (Spring et al., 2018).  For instance, group-based, but not individual, outrage motivates women to engage in collective action against objectification (Shepherd & Evans, 2020) and sexism (Becker & Wright, 2011).  Outrage can also motivate people to protect groups to which they do not belong, even including other species.  After the high-profile poaching of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe, collective outrage motivated support for conservation efforts, especially among people who identified strongly with the cause (Buhrmester et al., 2018).   

However, especially in online contexts, group-based outrage can easily boil over into animus and even hatred (Brady & Crockett, 2019).  Angry observers are more likely to make confident, trait-level attributions about transgressors (Lerner & Tiedens, 2006; Salerno & Peter-Hagene, 2013).  Judgments of outgroup members are commonly inaccurate and extreme, and interfere with cooperation and support of democratic norms (Lees & Cikara, 2020; Mernyk et al., 2022).  To the extent that outrage causes people to further “morally typecast” rivals, it could further lock in conflict.  And though outrage can motivate action, in other cases it can reduce support for social change.  In a study by Sawoka and Monin (2018), people read offensive posts about race or gender, along with outraged criticisms of that post.  When the offense was accompanied by numerous outraged replies—typical of social media “pile-ons,” onlookers judged commenters more harshly and ironically sympathized more with the initial offenders.  Outside the lab, extreme protests, which often include expressions of deep outrage, can decrease popular support for political action and movements (Feinberg et al., 2020; Wasow, 2020).  

In other words, group-based outrage stimulates desire for change among the people who feel it and makes it more likely they’ll act accordingly.  But change requires not only motivation, but the creation of common ground and a broad support base.  Outrage can ironically make it harder to achieve those goals, and thus stand in the way of the very progress it motivates.   

Building and Tuning Outrage

Aristotle would argue that anger is useful or harmful depending on the context, and that moral development requires learning to be angry at the right time, towards the right people, for the right reasons.  Little research points to the development and “tuning” of group-based outrage, but there are some intriguing clues.  First, sensitivity to injustice appears to arise early, in both evolution and development.  In one famous study, capuchin monkeys diligently completed tasks to earn tokens, which they exchanged for cucumbers.  However, when another monkey earned a sweeter prize of grapes for the same task—or even less fairly, for doing nothing at all—capuchins angrily went on strike.  Similar effects have been found in other species and other tasks (Brosnan & de Waal, 2014; Engelmann et al., 2017), suggesting the appraisals that undergird outrage are older than our species.   

Young children, too, quickly grow sensitive to betrayal, unfairness, and harm, and their anger in response to moral violations predicts prosocial behavior later in development (Strayer & Roberts, 2004; Whitesell & Harter, 1996; Xiao et al., 2019).  Children also quickly differentiate between groups, developing biases for their own and against other groups.  A parent’s biases strongly predict those of their child (Degner & Dalege, 2013), suggesting these attitudes are learned.  Such attitudes are also shaped by social and moral violations; for instance children expressing more negative attitudes towards a group that rejects them (Nesdale et al., 2009). 

Among children and adults alike, there is some evidence that people “train” their outrage towards perpetrators indirectly, through empathy for victim groups.  Books such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle famously catalyzed compassion for slaves and the working poor, which in turn generated outrage towards the people who oppressed them, and eventually energy for social change (Appiah, 2010).  And exposure to the suffering of farmed animals “moralizes” meat eating in part by shaping people’s emotional reactions, though this operates more through guilt and disgust than outrage (Feinberg et al., 2019).  

This brings us to an intriguing speculation.  Oftentimes, “tuning” of group-based outrage might not entail becoming angrier at an outgroup, but rather learning when it’s appropriate to be outraged at their own group’s transgressions.  It comes naturally to adults and even children to rail against inequality that favors others at our community’s expense, but aversion to advantageous inequity—that is, being unhappy when one’s own group unfairly benefits—requires more reflection and development (Heck et al., 2022).  At least some evidence suggests that outrage can fast-track the process of addressing advantageous inequity.  In one study, Americans’ anger at their own country’s invasion of Iraq predicted their desire to compensate victims and withdraw from the war (Iyer et al., 2007); another found that anger at ingroup transgressions motivated people to punish their own group (Piff et al., 2012).  In these cases, anger at one’s group also might provide people with moral insurance coverage—outrage indicates that the person experiencing it is not the same as their group members who committed harm.  This work suggests that in order to motivate social change, the “right person” towards whom to point outrage might sometimes look a lot like ourselves.    

Awe  

When astronauts travel to space and catch a glimpse of the pale blue dot that houses us all, they often are filled with a sense of the vastness of the universe and the interconnectedness of all human beings. Researchers have called this feeling the “overview effect,” but its origin lies in awe, an emotion that we also feel when we look out over a beautiful landscape, hear music that brings us to tears, or witness acts of extreme courage, kindness, or sacrifice (Yaden et al., 2016).   

Awe may not initially come to mind as a moral emotion, but many contexts can imbue this emotion with moral significance. When participants offered up examples of their own experiences of awe, the most common origin of this emotion was the “moral beauty” or inspiring action of another person (Keltner, 2023).  Whether it is the self-sacrifice of Mother Teresa, the courage of Neil Armstrong, or even a romantic partner who showed incredible strength in the face of adversity, moral beauty was a prevalent theme in awe narratives from across the globe. In addition, even awe induced by non-moral experiences—such as art and nature—can be a catalyst for moral action (Stellar et al., 2017).   

Awe’s moral origins lie in ancient religious texts where this emotion inspired submission to omnipotent God(s) and to the moral edicts of religion.  Even in these earliest instantiations, awe elevated humans out of their profane existence to experience something grander than themselves (e.g., Otto, 1917/1923).  Rudolph Otto (1917/1923) summarized this feeling well: “It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of- whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures” (p. 13). Kant (1785/1993) was among the first modern Western philosophers to explore awe as a secular moral phenomenon, through his examination of the sublime.  An object or person could be described as sublime when it possessed the qualities of being vast, powerful, and magnificent beyond understanding (Burke, 1757).  Later, it was artists who revived discussions of awe during the romanticism and transcendentalism movements, this time in response to nature.  Awe took on moral qualities in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1836/2009) and Victor Frankl (1969), both of whom argued that that this powerful emotion could diminish self-focus, promote humility, and create a sense of connection with other people, nature, and the spiritual realm.  

Appraisals

Two key appraisals drive awe.  The first is a sense of incomprehensibility. Borrowing from Piaget and Inhelder (1966/1972) researchers call this appraisal the “need for accommodation,” which refers to experiences that fail to neatly fit within our existing schemata of the world.  In order to accommodate this new information and experience, people are forced to alter their thinking.  This may be one reason that people often report experiences of awe to be profound and ones that shake the foundation of their worldviews (Bonner & Friedman, 2011).  The need for accommodation is a dynamic process in which emotion and cognition interplay, with an awe-inspiring entity always laying beyond one’s capacity for understanding and, as a result, continuing to elicit awe.  

The second related appraisal is the perception of vastness (Keltner & Haidt, 2003).  Vastness can be physical in terms of size or number, like the number of stars in the night’s sky or the size of an ancient Sequoia.  Appraisals in response to the natural universe are not inherently moral.  But a sense of vastness can also be more figurative, taking the form of unimaginable virtue or competence—in Gandhi, who led a non-violent movement against India’s colonial oppressors at great personal risk, or Einstein, who applied his superhuman intellect to understand the physical laws of the universe.  The frequency with which people report awe in response to moral beauty suggests that this form of vastness—and appraisals of it—commonly drive awe experiences. 

Noisy Moral Functions

Awe signals the limits of people’s knowledge and perspective, which in turn can dislodge them from well-worn patterns of thinking to see the world in a new way.  Numerous studies suggest awe is related to openness. In one study, the dispositional tendency to feel awe strongly correlated with self- and peer-reported measures of openness at levels of .49 and .22, respectively (Shiota, Keltner, & John, 2006). This openness can impact how we engage with others who hold different moral values (e.g., Stancato & Keltner, 2021).  For instance, inducing awe reduced people’s moral convictions on topics like capital punishment and their perceptions of polarization, leaving them more open to opposing viewpoints and outparty members.  

As a person experiences the vast natural world, or the depth of human virtue, they often also deeply feel how miniscule they are against the grand scale of it all.  Rather than being the center of their idiosyncratic universe, awe drives home each individual’s role as one part of a much greater whole (Stellar et al., 2017).  This “small self” experience serves numerous social functions, including reducing one’s sense of self-importance and power (Bai et al., 2017) and increasing humility (Stellar et al., 2018).  In one of many studies, inducing awe through videos of the universe led participants to recast their personal accomplishments, not just as signs of their own skill, but also as the result of outside forces such as supportive family members, luck, and even God. 

By shrinking the self, awe carves out more space to care about others, creating a deeper sense of interconnection with humanity and beyond (Piff, Dietze, Feinberg, Stancato, & Keltner, 2015; Shiota, Keltner & Mossman, 2007).  People who regularly experience awe act more generously in economic games, and experimentally inducing this feeling—for instance, by having participants stand amidst a grove of tall trees—increased their later tendency to help others (Piff et al., 2015).  In other work, after people watched awe-inspiring clips from the BBC series Planet Earth, they were more likely to donate time and money to strangers (Guan et al., 2019; see also Prade & Saroglou, 2016; Yaden et al., 2017).  Notably, however, some studies have failed to find prosocial effects of awe (e.g., Joye & Bolderdijk, 2015; Rudd et al., 2012; Ejova et al., 2021), suggesting important and yet unidentified moderators. 

Paradoxically, the self shrinks, but also expands to include others, creating a sense of interdependence and larger circle of moral concern.  Perlin and Leon (2020) call this the we identity with we concerns.  And indeed, textual analysis of awe narratives has found that people experiencing this emotion tend to frequently use the first-person plural (Darbor et al., 2015).  In experimental work, people were more likely to classify themselves using superordinate categories like human or person after recalling awe- compared to pride-inducing personal experiences (Shiota et al., 2007).  One quintessential “we concern” for humanity is climate change, and both correlational and experimental research demonstrate that experiencing awe relates to people’s interest in sustainability (Ibanez et al., 2017; Zhao et al., 2018).  

However, in certain instances awe may also misfire, making individuals more amenable to acting in ways that harm themselves or others.  In 1978, 918 people in a remote settlement in Guyana poisoned themselves with cyanide.   These members of the “People’s Temple,” many of them minors, overrode their moral instincts after they watched their peers consume this poison. Under the thrall of their leader Jim Jones, they may have felt as if they were part of something larger than themselves, to their own fatal detriment.  Although it is impossible to know how much these individuals acted out of feelings of awe, past work offers clues about its potential role. Collective identity engendered by awe can encourage conformity.  In one experiment, after watching an awe, amusement, or neutral film clip, participants in the awe condition more often preferred the less desirable image within a pair after they were told that image was preferred by the majority of people (Prade & Saroglou, 2023).   

In addition, awe is a powerful response to charismatic leaders.  Max Weber (1947) claimed that people follow charismatic leaders because they believe they are extraordinary, stating that this kind of leader is, “set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least exceptional powers and qualities (p. 364).”  Recent work finds that leaders who elicit awe have followers that report greater loyalty and commitment compared to leaders who fail to elicit awe (Li et al., 2025). This awe-fueled collective identity, supported by conformity to the group and devotion to its leader, can be harnessed towards unseemly ends as may have been the case in Jonestown and other cults of personality.  

Building and Tuning Awe

Unlike other moral emotions, awe may be at its most powerful and frequent in youth, when much of the world falls beyond our comprehension. Watch a child witness fire for the first time and you will have a first-row seat to awe.  Some studies highlight the role of awe in generating curiosity among children, going as far as suggesting it may be a useful educational tool for encouraging intellectual exploration (Colantonio Bonawitz, 2022).  As we get older, we often lose a sense of awe about the world and contravening negative states like stress diminish its experience.  Therefore, over time the challenge is less about fine tuning awe or training this emotion and more about finding and retaining it.  However, experimental evidence suggests that recovering awe is straightforward: as simple as putting ourselves in situations that can evoke it, such as venturing out into nature.  There remains scarce work directly testing long term effects of the regular practice of awe, but this is an intriguing avenue for psychologists to explore in the decade to come.   

New therapies are harnessing the power of experiences like nature, art, and music to improve mental health, including through the experience of awe (Monroy & Keltner, 2023).  For instance, war veterans’ reports of awe during white water rafting excursions explained changes increases in well-being and declines in stress, controlling for other positive emotions (Anderson, Monroy, & Keltner, 2018).  

One class of therapy uses psychedelics, such as psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, mescalin, and peyote, which profoundly alter people’s cognitive and emotional experiences.  Psychedelic therapies appear to combat severe forms of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (Chi & Gold, 2020).  The use of psychedelics is not new-- first nations communities have used mescalin and peyote for centuries, experiencing transformative awe-filled mystical experiences.  Aldous Huxley, best known for his novel A Brave New World, wrote often of his use of mescalin in his autobiography, The Doors of Perception.  He touted its importance for insight and self-reflection, saying, “To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large—this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual” (Huxley, p. 22). 

Anecdotal reports like this one highlight core themes of awe, leading researchers to claim that this emotion underpins the treatment benefits of psychedelic use (Hendricks, 2018, Monroy & Kelnter, 2023).  One study has attempted to test this claim directly, measuring awe’s role during microdosing with psychedelics (van Elk et al., 2021).  Participants in this study volunteered to self-administer very small amounts of psychedelics after a laboratory training session. These participants, who were blind to condition, self-administered either a placebo or psychedelic for three weeks.  Then, after a two-week break, the conditions were reversed. At the end of each 3-week session, participants reported their levels of awe in response to neutral, positive and awe-inducing videos as well as abstract art.  

Although no effects were found for abstract art, there was a main effect of awe for videos, reports of which were higher for those microdosing with psychedelics than the placebo. However, this main effect was localized to the first experimental session and was not present in the second, when participants reversed whether they were self-administering the placebo or psychedelics. More generally, research on these therapies is still in its infancy, and faces major methodological hurdles, such as difficulty in running blind trials when the effects of these compounds are so obvious to patients (Aday et al., 2022).  Nonetheless, they offer intriguing avenues for cultivating and shaping awe. 

Guilt  

All manner of creature makes all manner of mistakes.  To survive and adapt, animals must learn—including through punishment—to make mistakes less often and with less severity.  Punishments can be physical, monetary, and social, but also arise through aversive emotions that guide people away from harmful actions.  For instance, the experience of disgust after tasting or smelling rotten foods prevents people from consuming pathogens (Rozin & Fallon, 1987).  Guilt is an aversive emotion that follows a person’s violation of a moral norm, and which often leads people away from committing further harm and towards actions that repair relationships following harm (Tangney et al., 2007).   

Appraisals

Guilt typically arises after an individual commits a moral violation, but plenty of malefactors avoid feeling this emotion, for instance when moral disengagement allows soldiers and executioners to justify their dark work (Bandura, 2016).  This suggests it is not violations alone, but how they are appraised, that gives rise to guilt.  Guilt is most likely to occur when an individual construes their action as inappropriately harmful to others (Miceli & Castelfranchi, 2018).  Detecting harm often requires knowing what others think and feel.  Consistent with this idea, people who excel at perspective taking are also relatively guilt prone (Leith & Baumeister, 1998), whereas individuals with frontotemporal dementia often exhibit blunted guilt, which in turn tracks abnormal functioning in brain regions associated with perspective taking (Moll et al., 2011).    

Guilt also arises insofar as people construe their own moral violations as controllable, in that the action could have been avoided, and internally driven, that is, caused by one’s goals rather than the situation (Tracy & Robins, 2006).  In other words, the assignment of outrage to others—and guilt to one’s self—can occur when people produce harm (“causal responsibility”), but also with intentionally breaking moral norms, even if these intentions produce little or no external harm ("moral responsibility," see Fincham & Jaspars, 1980; Zimmermann et al., 2011).  The legal system enshrines moral responsibility through mens rea, or “guilty mind,” which constitutes an intent to commit a crime.     

Moral responsibility is consistent with the view of guilt as a “self-conscious” emotion.  This category also includes pride, shame, and embarrassment, which occur insofar as a person infers that their actions reflect who they truly are (Tracy & Robins, 2004).  In the language of attribution theory (Jones & Davis, 1965; Kelley, 1967), self-conscious emotions occur when a person draws a trait-level attribution about themselves based on an action.  Thus, an individual who has violated a moral norm is most likely to experience guilt if they infer that they willfully committed an avoidable harm, and thus might be a less moral agent than they would like to be.   

Noisy Moral Functions

Guilt is no fun, which is probably the point.  Like many unpleasant emotions, it serves as a psychological deterrent, buffaloing people to avoid the actions that cause it.  This produces two important outcomes.  First, the mere anticipation of guilt makes people less likely to commit violations.  “Guilt-proneness” captures individual differences in the tendency for people to forecast that they would feel negative after acting immorally.  Highly guilt prone individuals are relatively unlikely to engage in unscrupulous business practices, lie for monetary gain in an experimental setting, or flout norms and laws (Cohen et al., 2012; Cohen et al., 2011; Gneezy, 2005; Shoji, 2022).  In a longitudinal study, fifth graders reported on their guilt proneness, and were interviewed years later as young adults.  At follow-up, highly guilt prone, versus less guilt prone, children were relatively less likely to have histories of risky behavior or involvement with the carceral system (Stuewig et al., 2015).   

A guilty premonition can prevent immorality before it occurs.  Its more famous cousin, a guilty conscience, encourages people to repair their moral standing after the fact.  This can mean avoiding further violations after one has already occurred.  In one study, prisoners were interviewed at the time of their release about their experience of moral emotions.  Individuals higher in guilt over their offense were less likely to have reoffended a year later than those lower in guilt (Tangney et al., 2014).   

Correlational work like this leaves open the possibility that people who transgress realize their wrongdoing and make amends.  Guilt could accompany, rather than cause, this process.  However, a growing body of experimental work pushes against this interpretation.  In one study, children chose the better of two toys to play with in a game, and then learned (or didn’t) that their choice had left another child to grimly play with a boring toy.  This induction increased children’s guilt, and that emotion in turn directly tracked how many stickers they gave to the other child as compensation (Donohue & Tully, 2019).  In another study, people played several rounds of a prisoner’s dilemma, and then during a pause in the game were asked to write either about their typical day (low guilt) or a time they had harmed someone else (high guilt).  Compared to players in the control condition, players in the guilty condition were more likely to cooperate in subsequent rounds (Ketelaar & Tung Au, 2003).  Finally, a recent meta-analysis of a dozen experimental studies found that people induced to feel environmental guilt are more willing to act in costly but sustainable ways afterwards (Shipley & van Riper, 2022). 

Beyond avoiding new offenses, a guilty person might also try to repair the harm caused by their old ones.  After experiencing guilt, wrongdoers are more likely to pursue strategies to repair the harm they’ve done and the relationships they’ve threatened.  These include apologies, confessions, prosocial behavior towards victims, and voluntarily punishing oneself, for instance by giving up ill-begotten gains (Ghorbani et al., 2013; Inbar et al., 2013; Nelissen & Zeelenberg, 2009; Xu et al., 2011).  Reparative strategies scratch guilt’s itch, alleviating negative feelings and arousal in transgressors.  But guilt also serves a signaling function.  Victims are more likely to forgive perpetrators who display guilt (Hareli & Eisikovits, 2006; Riek & Mania, 2012).  Beyond forgiveness, guilt also buffs out at least some of the moral damage done by transgressions—causing observers to judge guilty perpetrators less harshly.  In one of many studies like it, people read vignettes about a person who causes harm and feels either guilt or no emotion.  Guilty transgressors were judged as more moral and socially attuned than non-guilty ones.   

Guilt thus serves many moral functions: preventing individuals from committing violations, inducing them to make amends for past transgressions, and increasing the likelihood their gestures of repair will be accepted.  To understand guilt’s importance, one can observe its absence.  Any one of us might wish to feel less guilt, but most people would not want to be the type of person who’s free from it—or to depend on such people.   Relatively guilt-free individuals often exhibit antisocial dispositions, such as Machiavellianism and psychopathy, and engage in pervasive antisocial behavior, as though they lack the emotional braking system needed to guide their moral lives.  Individuals with psychopathy also tend to be sensation-seeking, so might also have inclinations towards behavior guilt-prone individuals do not (Giammarco & Vernon, 2015; Gong et al., 2019; Widiger & Crego, 2021).  Nonetheless, these data converge to suggest guilt plays a role in both deterrence and repair around moral transgressions.   

This does not mean that guilt is a perfect moral guide.  Most importantly, it is significantly correlated with another negative self-conscious emotion, shame.  As described by Tangney and others, guilt focuses people on their harmful actions, whereas shame follows from a more global assessment that they are fundamentally immoral.  In one early study, students described situations that had led them to feel either guilt or shame, and then were asked to think of counterfactuals that would have made the situation better by completing the prompt “if only…”.  People in the guilt condition focused on the behaviors that could have been prevented—for instance, “if only I hadn’t said that”—whereas those in the shame condition focused on features of themselves that would have to be different—such as “if only I wasn’t so self-centered” (Niedenthal et al., 1994).  Guilt makes us wish we had acted differently; shame makes us wish we were a different person.     

Perhaps because of these appraisals, shame tracks a raft of maladaptive outcomes that guilt does not, including self-harm, secrecy, defensiveness, and continued wrongdoing (Tangney et al., 2007).  Importantly, shame but not guilt makes moral repair seem out of reach.  If a person is fundamentally flawed, no apology or reparation will fix that.  Consistent with this idea, shame has less of an effect on prosocial behavior than guilt does (Tangney, 1995).  For instance, in one study people imagined scenarios in which one person suffered financial harm at the hands of another.  Guilt, more than shame, predicted the amount of compensation participants believed the perpetrator should pay (Ghorbani et al., 2013).  In another, guilt predicted students’ willingness to apologize after a faux pas, whereas shame did so more weakly (Chrdileli & Kasser, 2018). 

Building and Tuning Guilt

Guilt arises early in development.  By age four, children experience arousal after causing harm, respond to those harms with prosocial behavior, and understand that a transgressor who feels guilt will do the same (Hepach et al., 2017; Vaish, 2018).  Guilt is also a powerful tool for promoting injunctive social norms (Drell & Jaswal, 2016), which is actively wielded by parents, teachers, and cultural leaders.   

Guilt is a relational emotion, and it thus stands to reason that it should arise more easily in people for whom relationships loom large.  Cross-cultural data bear out this idea.  Collectivistic, versus individualistic, cultures encourage people to define themselves through connection with others, and people in collectivistic settings are more prone towards guilt and repair following transgressions (Young et al., 2021).  Interestingly, at least one study has found that within individualistic cultures, women experience guilt more than men, but that this difference is blunted in collectivistic cultures (Silfver, 2007).  This perhaps reflects the idea that women in individualistic cultures are nonetheless encouraged to view themselves in more collectivistic terms, through their connections and relationships.  Finally, as described above, people who undergo unusual levels of adversity experience “survivor’s guilt,” which in turn motivates prosocial action (Lim & DeSteno, 2022).   

Compassion  

In his memoir, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, the surgeon Paul Brand recalls a lecture by the renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead.  An audience member asked Mead what she considered the earliest sign of civilization.  As Brand recalls:  

To her, evidence of the earliest true civilization was a healed femur, a leg bone … the healed femur showed that someone must have cared for the injured person—hunted on his behalf, brought him food, and served him at personal sacrifice.  Savage societies could not afford such pity. (Brand, 1980, pp., pg. 68)   

Care of the type Mead describes is fundamental to our species’ success, and archeological records indeed have found evidence of numerous cases in which prehistoric humans tended to victims of severe injuries that normally would have been fatal (Tilley & Oxenham, 2011).  Such behavior is driven by compassion—an emotion elicited when someone witnesses others suffer and experiences a motivation to help (Goetz et al., 2010).  Compassion might mark the beginnings of civilization according to Mead, but data demonstrate this emotion far precedes humanity.  Several species, including non-human primates, elephants, and even rats, show signs of distress when witnessing other animals suffering, and exhibit caring behaviors beyond kin (De Waal & Preston, 2002). Rats will help free a trapped cage mate in distress even when doing so means giving up personal rewards (Bartal, Decety, & Mason, 2011). 

Appraisals

If people connected deeply with the suffering of everyone, tragedy in films or novels would be unbearable and walking half a block in midtown Manhattan would leave a person collapsed into a burnt-out heap.  But people do not feel intense compassion for every person they see.  Instead, a number of appraisals serve as cognitive “filters,” increasing or decreasing compassionate responding (Zaki, 2014).  First, and perhaps most fundamental, an observer must appraise a target’s suffering as relevant to the observer themselves.  Compassion likely arose in evolution to inspire animals to protect and support kin (Preston, 2013), and relatives tend to elicit greater compassion than strangers (Korchmaros & Kenny, 2001).  Beyond blood relation, people exhibit greater self-reported, physiological, and brain indices of compassion when a suffering target shares their race, ideology, or group membership (Bernhardt & Singer, 2012; De Vignemont & Singer, 2006).  In competitive settings, people exhibit schadenfreude, a reversal of compassion in which individuals savor others’ suffering (Cikara et al., 2014; Hein et al., 2010; Lanzetta & Englis, 1989; Smith, Powell, Combs, & Schurtz, 2009). In war and Texas hold’em, a target’s suffering serves a sign that something has gone right for an observer. 

Second, an observer must also believe a target’s suffering is significant.  Observers will experience more compassion for suffering that follows a major loss, and less prone to feel for people who suffer minor tribulations, even if they greatly upset the social target (Wondra & Ellsworth, 2015). 

Third, one must deem the sufferer worthy of compassion. Attributions of responsibility can hamper moral behavior towards targets. For example, in an early study, Weiner and colleagues (1985) found that compassion was reduced for those who were sick because they drank too much alcohol, presumably a behavior that was within their own control, compared to those who caught the flu, which was largely considered out of their control. Researchers have since documented this effect of perceived controllability for helping intentions towards individuals diagnosed with those with HIV (Seacat, Hirschman, & Mickelson, 2007).   Worthiness stems from more than just perceived responsibility, it can also be a moral judgment about the character of another person.  Those deemed to be selfish tend to receive less compassion even for events that were unrelated to their selfishness (e.g., the death of their pet), than those who are seen as altruistic (Stellar, Feinberg, & Keltner, 2014).  

Compassion thus rests on several appraisals about other people.  It also tracks at least one appraisal about the self: an observer’s belief that they can cope with others’ suffering.  Compassion takes effort and can cause pain, and if that exceeds someone’s capacity, they are likely to down-regulate their affect in response.  Medical professionals drink from a firehose of human misery, and often develop “compassion fatigue,” reduced compassion for others in need (Figley, 1995), and “defensive dehumanization,” or purposeful disconnection from patients’ experiences (Haque & Waytz, 2012b; Vaes & Muratore, 2013).  Outside of medical settings, individuals who are high in distress avoid contact with suffering others (Davis et al., 1999), and when people anticipate that compassion will exhaust them or is out of their control, they are more likely to avoid it (Cameron & Payne, 2011; Cameron et al., 2016; Schumann et al., 2014). 

Noisy Moral Functions

Like other emotions, the role of compassion in moral life has been hotly debated by philosophers for centuries.  Some, along with Mead, considered it the foundation of morality (Hume, 1751; Nussbaum, 1996).  Adam Smith (1822), in particular, described the “fellow feeling,” or sharing of others’ experiences, as fundamental to moral choices.  Others take a dimmer view—that compassion is an obstacle to clear-headed moral action (Kant, 1785/1993). Nietzsche (1889/1971), for example, considered compassion and its related emotion, pity, a blight.  

It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect. Mankind has ventured to call pity a virtue (in every superior moral system it appears as a weakness); going still further, it has been called the virtue, the source and foundation of all other virtues—but let us always bear in mind that this was from the standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, and upon whose shield the denial of life was inscribed. (Nietzsche, 1895/2005). 

Rather than taking sides in this debate, it helps to consider the specific function compassion serves.  This emotion likely evolved to promote caretaking for vulnerable offspring and later extended to encourage cooperation among non-kin (Stellar et al., 2017).  In this way, compassion binds individuals into supportive networks, allowing them to achieve feats that are impossible for any human alone.  Hunting big game, cultivating food, and fending off other groups all required a close-knit community of individuals bound together by compassion.  

Consistent with this function, compassion increases a variety of prosocial behaviors. People feeling compassion are more generous (Saslow et al., 2013) and more likely to help another in need (Batson et al., 1981; Condon, Desbordes, & DeSteno, 2013).  They also report engaging in more subtle behaviors like support-giving and interpersonal emotion regulation to help others manage their negative affect (Stellar et al., 2019).  Critically, manipulating compassion experimentally through even a short compassion training intervention, increased prosocial behavior in a prosocial game, whereas a short memory training intervention did not (Leiberg, Klimeki, Singer, 2011). 

However, compassion can also misfire, generating choices that would be anathema to most of us.  Compassion can pose a challenge to other values that many modern societies hold dear, such as equality (Bloom, 2017b; Decety, 2021).  In a moving example of the potential moral dangers of compassion, participants who were given money to allocate to school groups gave a disproportionate amount of this finite resource to the groups that tugged at their heartstrings (Batson, Klein, Highberger & Shaw, 1995).  This is just one example of the identifiable victim effect, in which empathy and compassion are higher when the victim is singular, specific, and visible (Jenni & Lowenstein, 1997).  Conversely compassion often fails to scale up properly with increased numbers of people who are suffering (Cameron & Payne, 2011, Västfjäll, Slovic, Mayorga, & Peteres, 2014).  This is a moral irony; as the number of people suffering gets larger, the amount of compassion people experience for them declines. 

In reaction to compassion’s limits, movements like effective altruism aim to maximize do-gooding through precision principles (Singer, 2015).  One might calculate that a larger number of lives can be saved by donating the same amount of money to mosquito nets to protect many children from Malaria compared to a single heart-wrenching case of a child battling cancer.  Effective altruism and related movements take a rationalist view of moral action (Caviola et al., 2021).  But using principles rather than emotion when donating has been met with push-back. For instance, Berman et al. (2018) presented people with choices between different charities, in some cases providing simple, clear information about their effectiveness. This information rarely swayed decision-makers, who continued basing their choices on personal and emotional preferences.  As such, instead of trying to eliminate compassion from the equation, another option is to “tune” it towards effective outcomes, a strategy described below.   

Compassion can also sometimes be an obstacle to integrity and honesty.  In a series of studies, compassion motivated people to spare others’ feelings by lying to them, for instance, by not sharing direct feedback about a subpar piece of writing (Lupoli, Jampol & Oveis, 2017).  In some instances, white lies can be useful, as when the truth has no instrumental value (Levine & Lupoli, 2022).  We might refrain from telling a colleague who is sick that they look terrible right before they head into a presentation. However, in other instances, it can be paternalistic.  Sparing the person from emotional suffering in the moment causes greater suffering in the long run.  Telling someone they did a great job on their clearly underwhelming practice presentation may mean they do not improve it for the big day.  

These misfires exemplify how leaning into compassion can come at the expense of other values.  But even when compassion leads to helping, it can be doled out inequitably (Cikara, Bruneau, & Saxe, 2011).  Parochial compassion, focused on one’s own group but excluding outgroups, can exacerbate conflict between groups.  In fact, the strength of compassion for ingroups tracked indifference and aggression towards others (Bruneau et al., 2017; Simas et al., 2020).  Since compassion is grounded in cognitive appraisals of worthiness of the sufferer, it can reflect any number of biases we may bring into a situation.    

Building and Tuning Compassion

Compassion develops quickly in childhood.  Fourteen to eighteen-month-olds engage in prosocial behavior like helping those in need, albeit via simplistic behaviors such as grabbing objects adults are trying to reach or opening cabinets adults cannot (Warneken & Tomasello, 2009).  Children also exhibit other signs of compassion, for instance expressing concern for hurt experimenters, which in turn predicts their willingness to help (Davidov et al., 2013; Gluschkoff et al., 2018; Knafo et al., 2008; Malti et al., 2016).   

However, the fact that this emotion arises early in life does not mean it is fixed.  Compassion can shift along with people’s life history and experiences (Zaki, 2019), and throughout history, people have also sought to shift other people’s care.  Leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. have fought to extend compassion across historically fractured racial boundaries. Spiritual traditions around the world extoll compassion as a pillar of moral life (Buber, 2012; Stein, 1964 / 1989), and use practice to build it.  As described above, Loving Kindness Meditation is particularly well studied in the social sciences, and appears to produce increases in a number of measures of compassion (Jazaieri et al., 2013; Luberto et al., 2018; Singer & Klimecki, 2014; Weng et al., 2013).  Loving Kindness Meditation and allied practices target appraisals that underlie compassion, such as seeing all people as worthy of compassion, that give rise to this emotion. 

Psychologists have used numerous other methods to build compassion (Weisz & Zaki, 2017).  Many of these interventions trade on a core idea about compassion’s noisy function.  When compassion fails to guide moral action, it is often because of its “default settings.”  This emotion arises easily, quickly, and strongly when observers encounter people who think or look like them compared to outsiders, individuals over crowds, and people who are visible over those who are not.  However, those limits are not hard coded into our emotional repertoire.  Greene (2013) describes moral decision-making as having both automatic and manual settings; moral emotions do as well.  If and when compassion’s automatic mode points people in maladaptive moral directions, they can switch to manual—pointing their compassion in ways that harmonize with their broader principles and values (Zaki, 2017; Zaki, 2018).  When motivated to do so (Weisz & Cikara, 2021; Weisz & Zaki, 2018; Zaki, 2014), people in “manual compassion” mode extend care to strangers or even historic enemies, adding emotional heft to values like equity and collective action.   

Some research attempts to broaden compassion by shifting appraisals about this moral emotion.  For instance, when people believe compassion is a weakness, or unpopular among their peers, they are less likely to express or experience it.  Interventionists, thus, have encouraged the opposite appraisals.  In one series of studies, people who learned a “growth mindset” of compassion, in which it was described as a learnable skill, grew more open to racial and political outgroup members (Schumann et al., 2014).  In a follow-up to this work, people who adopted a growth mindset of compassion reported broader social networks even months after the intervention (Weisz et al., 2021).  In other work, people who learned that compassion was popular among their peers expressed more care for outsiders (Tarrant et al., 2009) and extended more prosocial behavior towards unhoused people (Nook et al., 2016).  A similar “compassionate norms” intervention in middle school produced increases in kind classroom behaviors one month later (Weisz et al., 2022).  In a third, researchers encouraged American partisans to appraise compassion for political outsiders as either a strength—which would help them find compromise and convince others—or a weakness—which would impede their ability to argue.  People who learned positive appraisals of compassion communicated more openly with outsiders, which in turn made them more convincing to those outsiders (Santos et al., 2022).  

Once people are convinced compassion is malleable, popular, and useful, they might still need opportunities to practice it.  Another approach to tuning compassion involves offering that opportunity—providing chances for individuals to directly connect with the experiences of people they might otherwise seldom meet, often through high-tech means.  In one study, psychiatry residents wore an aging simulation suit that included goggles, earplugs, and heavy gloves to mimic loss of vision, hearing, and fine motor skills.  While wearing the suit, they attempted to complete tasks such as interacting with a pharmacist to fill a prescription.  This simulation increased students’ empathy for older patients increased, even at a three-month follow-up (Saiva, Abdool, Maismith, & Nirula, 2020).  In other work, researchers have created virtual reality simulations in which people can experience themselves as a member of a different racial group or age, or progress through a series of scenes that mimic the process of becoming unhoused.  Virtual reality interventions likewise ramp up compassion for outgroup members (Ahn et al., 2013; Herrera et al., 2018).   

If compassion can be tuned in broader, more egalitarian ways, the opposite is also true.  Propagandists and autocrats stoke conflict by painting outsiders as subhuman, reducing compassion and paving the way for  antisocial behavior and violence (Cikara, 2015).  Attempts to decrease or limit this emotion often involve doubling down on its automatic mode—encouraging people to care only for people who look or think like they do.  The fact that compassion is malleable does not mean any change to it is positive from a broader perspective.  But harnessing it for moral aims can render those aims easier to achieve, because compassion can give moral choices an emotional and motivational boost.  For instance, researchers have found that individuals donate more to efficient charities championed by effective altruism when those donations are “bundled” with causes about which they care personally (Caviola & Greene, 2021). 

CONCLUSION 

Morality comprises principles for how life should be lived and how people should treat each other and their world.  Philosophers and scientists have long argued that those principles can be reasoned out and applied universally, irrespective of how individuals feel.  But people do feel, and their feelings are inextricably intertwined with the moral experiences they have and moral choices they make.   

The role emotion does and should play in moral life has been debated for centuries.  These arguments have, in our opinion, generated more heat than light.  Thankfully, contemporary affective science has cooled down the conversation, in part by rejecting some of the conversation’s premises.  First, the line between “reason” and “passion” is thin and porous.  Emotions, thus, play a role in moral life, but are also guided by thought and deliberation, and guide cognitive processes in return.  Affect informs reasoning and visa-versa, and this cycle informs all sorts of decisions, including moral ones.   

Second, people who wish moral choices were more Vulcan than human should reconsider.  Affect serves crucial social and moral functions, often in ways that would be difficult to replace with pure reason.  If we tried to excise emotion from moral life, that amputation might be lethal for the patient.  Emotions can also misguide moral decisions and produce moral disasters.  But this does not mean we are a slave to our passions and bound to these errors for life, which brings us to the third rejection of the conversation’s premises:  Emotions of all sorts can be trained, developed, and tuned through experience, including in ways that allow them to accord with local, universal, and evolving human values.   

We hope this chapter can help integrate scientific thinking on reason and emotion in moral life.  Understanding their relationship can help scientists align our theories with the best available evidence.  An updated view of moral emotion can also serve a practical purpose: helping people understand that their moral emotions are neither misguided nor static—and empowering them to guide their passions in the service of what they believe to be right.   

REFERENCES 

Adelson, E. H. (1993). Perceptual organization and the judgment of brightness. Science, 262(5142), 2042-2044.

Ahn, S. J., Le, A. M. T., & Bailenson, J. (2013). The effect of embodied experiences on self-other merging, attitude, and helping behavior. Media Psychology, 16(1), 7-38.

Algoe, S. B. (2012). Find, remind, and bind: The functions of gratitude in everyday relationships. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 6(6), 455-469.

Algoe, S. B., Dwyer, P. C., Younge, A., & Oveis, C. (2020). A new perspective on the social functions of emotions: Gratitude and the witnessing effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 119(1), 40-74.

Ameriks, K., & Clarke, D. M. (2000). Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics. Cambridge University Press.

Anderson, C. L., Monroy, M., & Keltner, D. (2018). Awe in nature heals: Evidence from military veterans, at-risk youth, and college students. Emotion, 18(8), 1195-1202.

Appiah, A. (2010). The honor code: How moral revolutions happen. Norton & Company.

Arnold, M. B. (1970). Perennial problems in the field of emotion. In M. B. Arnold (Ed.), Feelings and emotions. New York: Academic Press.

Baez, S., Kanske, P., Matallana, D., Montañes, P., Reyes, P., Slachevsky, A., Matus, C., Vigliecca, N. S., Torralva, T., & Manes, F. (2016). Integration of intention and outcome for moral judgment in frontotemporal dementia: brain structural signatures. Neurodegenerative Diseases, 16(3-4), 206-217.

Bai, Y., Maruskin, L. A., Chen, S., Gordon, A. M., Stellar, J. E., McNeiIG. D., ... & Keltner, D. (2017). Awe, the diminished self, and collective engagement: Universals and cultural variations in the small self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(2), 185-209.

Bandura, A. (2016). Moral disengagement: How people do harm and live with themselves. Macmillan.

Bandura, A., Barbaranelli, C., Caprara, G. V., & Pastorelli, C. (1996). Mechanisms of moral disengagement in the exercise of moral agency. Journal of Personality and Social psychology, 71(2), 364-374.

Barrett, L. F. (2017a). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Barrett, L. F. (2017b). The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(1), 1-23.

Barrett, L. F., Mesquita, B., Ochsner, K. N., & Gross, J. J. (2007). The experience of emotion. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 373-403.

Bartal, B., Decety, J., & Mason, P. (2011). Empathy and prosocial behavior in rats. Science, 334, 1427-1430.

Bartlett, M. Y., & DeSteno, D. (2006). Gratitude and prosocial behavior: Helping when it costs you. Psychological Science, 17(4), 319-325.

Bastian, B., Denson, T. F., & Haslam, N. (2013). The roles of dehumanization and moral outrage in retributive justice. PLoS One, 8(4), e61842.

Batson, C. D. (1998). Prosocial behavior and altruism. The handbook of social psychology, 4, 282-316.

Batson, C. D., Duncan, B. D., Ackerman, P., Buckley, T., & Birch, K. (1981). Is empathic emotion a source of altruistic motivation?, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40(2), 290-302.

Batson, C. D., Klein, T. R., Highberger, L., & Shaw, L. L. (1995). Immorality from empathy-induced altruism: When compassion and justice conflict. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68(6), 1042-1054.

Bechara, A., Damasio, H., & Damasio, A. R. (2000). Emotion, decision making and the orbitofrontal cortex. Cerebral cortex, 10(3), 295-307.

Beck, A. T. (1991). Cognitive therapy: A 30-year retrospective. American Psychologist, 46(4), 368-375.

Becker, J. C., & Wright, S. C. (2011). Yet another dark side of chivalry: Benevolent sexism undermines and hostile sexism motivates collective action for social change. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(1), 62-777.

Beedie, C., Terry, P., & Lane, A. (2005). Distinctions between emotion and mood. Cognition and Emotion, 19(6), 847-878.

Bell, D. A., & Metz, T. (2011). Confucianism and Ubuntu: Reflections on a dialogue between Chinese and African traditions. Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 38(s1), 78-95.

Berman, J. Z., Barasch, A., Levine, E. E., & Small, D. A. (2018). Impediments to effective altruism: The role of subjective preferences in charitable giving. Psychological Science, 29(5), 834-844.

Bernhardt, B. C., & Singer, T. (2012). The neural basis of empathy. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 35, 1-23.

Bigman, Y. E., Wilson, D., Arnestad, M. N., Waytz, A., & Gray, K. (2022). Algorithmic discrimination causes less moral outrage than human discrimination. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152(1), 4-27.

Bilali, R., Tropp, L. R., & Dasgupta, N. (2012). Attributions of responsibility and perceived harm in the aftermath of mass violence. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 18(1), 21-39.

Haidt, J., Björklund, F, & Murphy, S. (2000). Moral dumbfounding: When intuition finds no reason. [Unpublished manuscript]. University of Virginia

Bloom, P. (2017a). Against empathy: The case for rational compassion. UK: Random House.

Bloom, P. (2017b). Empathy and its discontents. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(1), 24-31.

Brady, W. J., & Crockett, M. J. (2019). How effective is online outrage? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(2), 79-80.

Brand, P. (1980). Fearfully and wonderfully made. New York, Zondervan.

Brosnan, S. F., & de Waal, F. B. (2014). Evolution of responses to (un) fairness. Science, 346(6207), 1251776.

Bruneau, E. G., Cikara, M., & Saxe, R. (2017). Parochial empathy predicts reduced altruism and the endorsement of passive harm. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 8(8), 934-942.

Buber, M. (2012). I and Thou. eBookIt. com.

Buhle, J. T., Silvers, J. A., Wager, T. D., Lopez, R., Onyemekwu, C., Kober, H., Weber, J., & Ochsner, K. N. (2014). Cognitive reappraisal of emotion: a meta-analysis of human neuroimaging studies. Cerebral cortex, 24(11), 2981-2990.

Buhrmester, M. D., Burnham, D., Johnson, D. D., Curry, O. S., Macdonald, D. W., & Whitehouse, H. (2018). How moments become movements: Shared outrage, group cohesion, and the lion that went viral. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 6, 54.

Burke, Edmund.  (1757).  A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. Printed for R. and J. Dodsley

Cameron, C. D., Harris, L. T., &Payne, B. K. (2016). The emotional cost of humanity: anticipated exhaustion motivates dehumanization of stigmatized targets. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(2), 105-112.

Carver, C. S., & Harmon-Jones, E. (2009). Anger is an approach-related affect: evidence and implications. Psychological Bulletin, 135(2), 183-204.

Caviola, L., & Greene, J. D. (2021). Boosting effective giving with bundling and donor coordination. PsyArXiv.

Caviola, L., Schubert, S., & Greene, J. D. (2021). The psychology of (in) effective altruism. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(7), 596-607.

Chrdileli, M., & Kasser, T. (2018). Guilt, shame, and apologizing behavior: A laboratory study. Personality and Individual Differences, 135, 304-306.

Cikara, M. (2015). Intergroup Schadenfreude: motivating participation in collective violence. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 3, 12-17.

Cikara, M., Bruneau, E., Van Bavel, J., & Saxe, R. (2014). Their pain gives us pleasure: How intergroup dynamics shape empathic failures and counter-empathic responses. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 55, 110-125.

Cohen, T. R., Panter, A., & Turan, N. (2012). Guilt proneness and moral character. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21(5), 355-359.

Cohen, T. R., Wolf, S. T., Panter, A. T., & Insko, C. A. (2011). Introducing the GASP scale: a new measure of guilt and shame proneness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(5), 947-966.

Colantonio, J., & Bonawitz, E. (under review). Awesome play: Awe increases preschooler’s exploration and discovery.

Condon, P., Desbordes, G., Miller, W. B., and DeSteno, D. (2013). Meditation increases compassionate responses to suffering, Psychological Science, 24(10), 2125-2127.

Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2000). Evolutionary psychology and the emotions. Handbook of emotions, 2(2), 91-115

Curry, O. S., Mullins, D. A., & Whitehouse, H. (2019). Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies. Current Anthropology, 60(1), 47-69.

Darbor, K. E., Lench, H. C., Davis, W. E., & Hicks, J. A. (2016). Experiencing versus contemplating: Language use during descriptions of awe and wonder. Cognition and Emotion, 30(6), 1188-1196.

Darwin, C. (1872/1965). The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. University of Chicage Press.

Davidov, M., Zahn-Waxler, C., Roth-Hanania, R., & Knafo, A. (2013). Concern for others in the first year of life: Theory, evidence, and avenues for research. Child Development Perspectives, 7, 126-131.

Davis, M. H., Mitchell, K. V., Hall, J. A., Lothert, J., Snapp, T., & Meyer, M. (1999). Empathy, expectations, and situational preferences: personality influences on the decision to participate in volunteer helping behaviors. Journal of Personality, 67(3), 469-503.

De Sousa, R. (2001). Moral emotions. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 4(2), 109-126.

De Vignemont, F., & Singer, T. (2006). The empathic brain: how, when and why? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(10), 435-441.

de Waal, F. (2006). Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton University Press.

de Waal, F. (2008). Putting the altruism back into altruism: the evolution of empathy. Annual Review of Psycholpgy, 59, 279-300.

de Waal, F., & Preston, S. D. (2017). Mammalian empathy: behavioural manifestations and neural basis. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 18(8), 498-509.

Decety, J. (2021). Why empathy is not a reliable source of information in moral decision making. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 30(5), 425-430.

Degner, J., & Dalege, J. (2013). The apple does not fall far from the tree, or does it? A meta-analysis of parent–child similarity in intergroup attitudes. Psychological Bulletin, 139(6), 1270-1304.

Denny, B. T., Inhoff, M. C., Zerubavel, N., Davachi, L., & Ochsner, K. N. (2015). Getting over it: Long-lasting effects of emotion regulation on amygdala response. Psychological Science, 26(9), 1377-1388.

Denny, B. T., & Ochsner, K. N. (2014). Behavioral effects of longitudinal training in cognitive reappraisal. Emotion, 14(2), 425-433.

DeSteno, D. (2021). How God works: The science behind the benefits of religion. Simon & Schuster.

DeSteno, D., Duong, F., Lim, D., & Kates, S. (2019). The grateful don’t cheat: Gratitude as a fount of virtue. Psychological Science, 30(7), 979-988.

Dittes, J. (1954). Psychology of Religion. In G. Lindszey & E. Aronson (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (2nd Ed.) Addison-Wesley.

Dixon, J., Tropp, L. R., Durrheim, K., & Tredoux, C. (2010). “Let Them Eat Harmony” Prejudice-Reduction Strategies and Attitudes of Historically Disadvantaged Groups. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(2), 76-80.

Donohue, M. R., & Tully, E. C. (2019). Reparative prosocial behaviors alleviate children’s guilt. Developmental Psychology, 55(10), 2102-2113.

Drell, M. B., & Jaswal, V. K. (2016). Making amends: Children's expectations about and responses to apologies. Social Development, 25(4), 742-758.

Drury, J., Carter, H., Cocking, C., Ntontis, E., Tekin Guven, S., & Amlôt, R. (2019). Facilitating collective resilience in the public in emergencies: Twelve recommendations based on the social identity approach. Frontiers in Public Health, 7, 141.

Drwecki, B. B., Moore, C. F., Ward, S. E., & Prkachin, K. M. (2011). Reducing racial disparities in pain treatment: The role of empathy and perspective-taking. Pain, 152(5), 1001-1006.

Ejova, A., Krátký, J., Kundtová Klocová, E., Kundt, R., Cigán, J., Kotherová, S., ... & Gray, R. D. (2021). The awe-prosociality relationship: evidence for the role of context. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 11(3), 294-311.

Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. (1975/2003). Unmasking the Face. Malor Books.

Emerson, R. W. (1836/2009). Nature Ebook https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29433/29433-h/29433-h.htm

Engelmann, J. M., Clift, J. B., Herrmann, E., & Tomasello, M. (2017). Social disappointment explains chimpanzees' behaviour in the inequity aversion task. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 284(1861), 20171502.

Eskine, K. J., Kacinik, N. A., & Prinz, J. J. (2011). A bad taste in the mouth: Gustatory disgust influences moral judgment. Psychological Science, 22(3), 295-299.

Everett, J. A., & Kahane, G. (2020). Switching tracks? Towards a multidimensional model of utilitarian psychology. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(2), 124-134.

Ewuoso, C., & Hall, S. (2019). Core aspects of ubuntu: A systematic review. South African Journal of Bioethics and Law, 12(2), 93-103.

Feinberg, M., Kovacheff, C., Teper, R., & Inbar, Y. (2019). Understanding the process of moralization: How eating meat becomes a moral issue. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 117(1), 50-72.

Feinberg, M., Willer, R., & Kovacheff, C. (2020). The activist’s dilemma: Extreme protest actions reduce popular support for social movements. Journal of Personality andSsocial Psychology, 119(5), 1086-1111.

Feltz, A. (2007). The Knobe effect: A brief overview. The Journal of Mind and Behavior, 265-277.

Figley, C. R. (1995). Compassion fatigue: Toward a new understanding of the costs of caring. In B. H. Stamm (Ed.), Secondary traumatic stress: Self-care issues for clinicians, researchers, and educators (pp. 3–28). The Sidran Press.

Fincham, F. D., & Jaspars, J. M. (1980). Attribution of responsibility: From man the scientist to man as lawyer. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 13, 81-138.

Fletcher, G. E. (2008). Attending to the outcome of others: disadvantageous inequity aversion in male capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella). American Journal of Primatology, 70(9), 901-905.

Ford, B. Q., Feinberg, M., Lam, P., Mauss, I. B., & John, O. P. (2019). Using reappraisal to regulate negative emotion after the 2016 US Presidential election: Does emotion regulation trump political action? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 117(5), 998-1015.

Forgas, J. P. (1995). Mood and judgment: the affect infusion model (AIM). Psychological Bulletin, 117(1), 39-66.

Frankl, V. E. (1969). The will to meaning: Foundations and applications of logotherapy. New American Library

Frijda, N. H; Mesquita, B. (1994). The social roles and functions of emotions. In S.E. Kitayama & H. R. E. Markus (Eds.) Emotion and culture: Empirical studies of mutual influence. pp. 51–87.

Fletcher, G. E. (2008). Attending to the outcome of others: disadvantageous inequity aversion in male capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella). American Journal of Primatology, 70(9), 901-905.

Geen, R. (1998). Aggression and antisocial behavior. In D. Gilbert, S. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The Handbook of Social Psychology (4th ed.). Oxford University Press

Ghelfi, E., Christopherson, C. D., Urry, H. L., Lenne, R. L., Legate, N., Ann Icher, M., ... & Sullivan, D. (2020). Reexamining the effect of gustatory disgust on moral judgment: A multilab direct replication of Eskine, Kacinik, and Prinz (2011). Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 3(1), 3-23

Ghorbani, M., Liao, Y., Çayköylü, S., & Chand, M. (2013). Guilt, shame, and reparative behavior: The effect of psychological proximity. Journal of Business Ethics, 114(2), 311-323.

Giammarco, E. A., & Vernon, P. A. (2015). Interpersonal guilt and the dark triad. Personality and Individual Differences, 81, 96-101.

Gilligan, C. (1993). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Harvard University Press.

Giner-Sorolla, R., & Chapman, H. A. (2017). Beyond purity: Moral disgust toward bad character. Psychological Science, 28(1), 80-91.

Ginther, M. R., Hartsough, L. E., & Marois, R. (2022). Moral outrage drives the interaction of harm and culpable intent in third-party punishment decisions. Emotion, 22(4), 795.

Gluschkoff, K., Oksman, E., Knafo-Noam, A., Dobewall, H., Hintsa, T., Keltikangas-Järvinen, L., & Hintsanen, M. (2018). The early roots of compassion: From child care arrangements to dispositional compassion in adulthood. Personality and Individual Differences, 129, 28-32.

Gneezy, U. (2005). Deception: The role of consequences. American Economic Review, 95(1), 384-394.

Goetz, J. L., Keltner, D., & Simon-Thomas, E. (2010). Compassion: an evolutionary analysis and empirical review, Psychological Bulletin, 136(3), 351-374.

Gong, X., Brazil, I. A., Chang, L. J., & Sanfey, A. G. (2019). Psychopathic traits are related to diminished guilt aversion and reduced trustworthiness during social decision-making. Scientific Reports, 9(1), 1-11.

Gordijn, E. H., Wigboldus, D., & Yzerbyt, V. (2001). Emotional consequences of categorizing victims of negative outgroup behavior as ingroup or outgroup. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 4(4), 317-326.

Graham, J., Haidt, J., Koleva, S., Motyl, M., Iyer, R., Wojcik, S. P., & Ditto, P. H. (2013). Moral foundations theory: The pragmatic validity of moral pluralism. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 47, pp. 55-130). Elsevier.

Greenberg, D. M., Baron-Cohen, S., Rosenberg, N., Fonagy, P., & Rentfrow, P. J. (2018). Elevated empathy in adults following childhood trauma. PLoS One, 13(10), e0203886.

Greenberg, L. S. (2004). Emotion–focused therapy. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy: An International Journal of Theory & Practice, 11(1), 3-16.

Greenberg, L. S. (2011). Emotion-focused therapy. American Psychological Association.

Greene, J. (2013). Moral tribes: Emotion, reason, and the gap Between us and them. Penguin.

Greene, J., Cushman, F. A., Stewart, L. E., Lowenberg, K., Nystrom, L. E., & Cohen, J. D. (2009). Pushing moral buttons: The interaction between personal force and intention in moral judgment. Cognition, 111(3), 364-371.

Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, 293(5537), 2105-2108.

Gross, J. (1998). Antecedent- and response-focused emotion regulation: divergent consequences for experience, expression, and physiology. Journal Peronality Social Psychology, 74(1), 224-237.

Gross, J. J. (2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 1-26.

Gross, J. J., & Barrett, L. F. (2011). Emotion Generation and Emotion Regulation: One or Two Depends on Your Point of View. Emotion Review, 3(1), 8-16.

Guan, F., Chen, J., Chen, O., Liu, L., & Zha, Y. (2019). Awe and prosocial tendency. Current Psychology, 38, 1033-1041.

Gummerum, M., Van Dillen, L. F., Van Dijk, E., & López-Pérez, B. (2016). Costly third-party interventions: The role of incidental anger and attention focus in punishment of the perpetrator and compensation of the victim. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 65, 94-104.

Gyurak, A., Gross, J. J., & Etkin, A. (2011). Explicit and implicit emotion regulation: A dual-process framework. Cognition and Emotion, 25(3), 400-412.

Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814-834.

Haidt, J. (2003b). Elevation and the positive psychology of morality. In C.L.M Keyes & J. Haidt, (Eds.), Flourishing: Positive psychology and the life well-lived (pp. 275-289). American Psychological Association.

Haidt, J. (2007). The new synthesis in moral psychology. Science, 316(5827), 998-1002.

Haidt, J., & Kesebir, S. (2010). Morality.

Halperin, E., Porat, R., Tamir, M., & Gross, J. J. (2013). Can emotion regulation change political attitudes in intractable conflicts? From the laboratory to the field. Psychological Science, 24(1), 106-111.

Haque, O. S., & Waytz, A. (2012a). Dehumanization in medicine causes, solutions, and functions. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(2), 176-186.

Hardy, S. A., Zhang, Z., Skalski, J. E., Melling, B. S., & Brinton, C. T. (2014). Daily religious involvement, spirituality, and moral emotions. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 6(4), 338-348.

Hareli, S., & Eisikovits, Z. (2006). The role of communicating social emotions accompanying apologies in forgiveness. Motivation and Emotion, 30(3), 189-197.

Hasan-Aslih, S., Pliskin, R., van Zomeren, M., Halperin, E., & Saguy, T. (2019). A darker side of hope: Harmony-focused hope decreases collective action intentions among the disadvantaged. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 45(2), 209-223.

Hechler, S., & Kessler, T. (2018). On the difference between moral outrage and empathic anger: Anger about wrongful deeds or harmful consequences. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 76, 270-282.

Heck, I. A., Shutts, K., & Kinzler, K. D. (2022). Children’s thinking about group-based social hierarchies. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 26(7), 593-606,

Hein, G., Silani, G., Preuschoff, K., Batson, C. D., & Singer, T. (2010). Neural responses to ingroup and outgroup members' suffering predict individual differences in costly helping. Neuron, 68(1), 149-160.

Helion, C., & Pizarro, D. A. (2015). Beyond dual-processes: the interplay of reason and emotion in moral judgment. Handbook of neuroethics, 109-125.

Hendricks, P. S. (2018). Awe: a putative mechanism underlying the effects of classic psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. International Review of Psychiatry, 30(4), 331-342.

Hepach, R., Vaish, A., & Tomasello, M. (2017). Children's intrinsic motivation to provide help themselves after accidentally harming others. Child Development, 88(4), 1251-1264.

Herrera, F., Bailenson, J., Weisz, E., Ogle, E., & Zaki, J. (2018). Building long-term empathy: A large-scale comparison of traditional and virtual reality perspective-taking. PLoS One, 13(10), e0204494.

Horberg, E. J., Oveis, C., & Keltner, D. (2011). Emotions as moral amplifiers: An appraisal tendency approach to the influences of distinct emotions upon moral judgment. Emotion Review, 3(3), 237-244.

Horberg, E. J., Oveis, C., Keltner, D., & Cohen, A. B. (2009). Disgust and the moralization of purity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97(6), 963.

Huebner, B., Dwyer, S., & Hauser, M. (2009). The role of emotion in moral psychology. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(1), 1-6.

Hume, D. (1751). An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Andrew Millar.

Humphreys, K. L., McGoron, L., Sheridan, M. A., McLaughlin, K. A., Fox, N. A., Nelson, C. A., & Zeanah, C. H. (2015). High-quality foster care mitigates callous-unemotional traits following early deprivation in boys: a randomized controlled trial. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 54(12), 977-983.

Hunsberger, B., & Jackson, L. M. (2005). Religion, meaning, and prejudice. Journal of SocialIissues, 61(4), 807-826.

Huxley, A. (2010). The doors of perception: And heaven and hell. Random House.

Huxley, T. H. (1894). Evolution and ethics: and other essays (Vol. 98). Macmillan.

Ibanez, L., Moureau, N., & Roussel, S. (2017). How do incidental emotions impact pro-environmental behavior? Evidence from the dictator game. Journal of Behavioral and ExperimentalEeconomics, 66, 150-155.

Im, M. (1999). Emotional control and virtue in the" mencius". Philosophy East and West, 1-27.

Inbar, Y., Pizarro, D. A., Gilovich, T., & Ariely, D. (2013). Moral masochism: on the connection between guilt and self-punishment. Emotion, 13(1), 14.

Iyer, A., Schmader, T., & Lickel, B. (2007). Why individuals protest the perceived transgressions of their country: The role of anger, shame, and guilt. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33(4), 572-587.

Jazaieri, H., Jinpa, G. T., McGonigal, K., Rosenberg, E. L., Finkelstein, J., Simon-Thomas, E., Cullen, M., Doty, J. R., Gross, J. J., & Goldin, P. R. (2013). Enhancing compassion: A randomized controlled trial of a compassion cultivation training program. Journal of Happiness Studies, 14(4), 1113-1126.

Jenni, K., & Loewenstein, G. (1997). Explaining the identifiable victim effect. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 14, 235-257.

Joye, Y., & Bolderdijk, J. W. (2015). An exploratory study into the effects of extraordinary nature on emotions, mood, and prosociality. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1577.

Kahane, G., Everett, J. A., Earp, B. D., Caviola, L., Faber, N. S., Crockett, M. J., & Savulescu, J. (2018). Beyond sacrificial harm: A two-dimensional model of utilitarian psychology. Psychological Review, 125(2), 131.

Kanol, E. (2021). Explaining Unfavorable Attitudes Toward Religious Out‐Groups Among Three Major Religions. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 60(3), 590-610.

Kant, I. (1785/1993). Grounding for the metaphysics of morals (J. W. Ellington, Trans.). Hackett Publishing.

Kates, S., & DeSteno, D. (2020). Gratitude reduces consumption of depleting resources. Emotion, 21(5), 1119–1123

Kelley, H. (1973). The process of causal attribution. American Psychologist, 28(2), 107-128.

Keltner, D. (2023). Awe: The new science of everyday wonder and how it can transform your life. National Geographic Books.

Keltner, D., Ellsworth, P. C., & Edwards, K. (1993). Beyond simple pessimism: effects of sadness and anger on social perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(5), 740-752.

Keltner, D. & Gross J. J. (1999). Functional accounts of emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 13(5), 467-480.

Keltner, D. & Haidt, J. (1999). Social Functions of Emotions at Four Levels of Analysis. Cognition and Emotion. 13(5): 505–521.

Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297-314.

Keltner, D., & Lerner, J. S. (2010). Emotion. In D. Gilbert, S. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The Handbook of Social Psychology (5th Ed.). Oxford University Press

Ketelaar, T., & Tung Au, W. (2003). The effects of feelings of guilt on the behaviour of uncooperative individuals in repeated social bargaining games: An affect-as-information interpretation of the role of emotion in social interaction. Cognition and Emotion, 17(3), 429-453.

King Jr, M. L. (1967). King’s challenge to the nation’s social scientists. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

King, M. L. (1964). Letter from Birmingham jail. Penguin

Kiss, M. J., Morrison, M. A., & Morrison, T. G. (2020). A meta-analytic review of the association between disgust and prejudice toward gay men. Journal of Homosexuality, 67(5), 674-696.

Knafo, A., Zahn-Waxler, C., Van Hulle, C., Robinson, J. L., & Rhee, S. H. (2008). The developmental origins of a disposition toward empathy: Genetic and environmental contributions. Emotion, 8(6), 737.

Knobe, J. (2003). Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language. Analysis, 63(3), 190-194.

Koenigs, M., Kruepke, M., Zeier, J., & Newman, J. P. (2012). Utilitarian moral judgment in psychopathy. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 7(6), 708-714.

Koenigs, M., Young, L., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., Cushman, F., Hauser, M., & Damasio, A. (2007). Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgements. Nature, 446(7138), 908-911.

Kohlberg, L. (1958). The Development of Modes of Thinking and Choices in Years 10 to 16. Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Chicago.

Kohlberg, L. (1984). The Psychology of Moral Development: The Nature and Validity of Moral Stages (Essays on Moral Development, Volume 2). Harper & Row

Kraus, M. W., Piff, P. K., Mendoza-Denton, R., Rheinschmidt, M. L., & Keltner, D. (2012). Social class, solipsism, and contextualism: how the rich are different from the poor. Psychological Review, 119(3), 546.

Kreplin, U., Farias, M., & Brazil, I. A. (2018). The limited prosocial effects of meditation: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Scientific Reports, 8(1), 1-10.

Kuppens, T., Yzerbyt, V. Y., Dandache, S., Fischer, A. H., & Van Der Schalk, J. (2013). Social identity salience shapes group-based emotions through group-based appraisals. Cognition and Emotion, 27(8), 1359-1377.

Landy, J. F., & Goodwin, G. P. (2015). Does incidental disgust amplify moral judgment? A meta-analytic review of experimental evidence. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(4), 518-536.

Lange, J., & Crusius, J. (2015). The tango of two deadly sins: The social-functional relation of envy and pride. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109(3), 453-472.

Lanzetta, J. T., & Englis, B. G. (1989). Expectations of cooperation and competition and their effects on observers vicarious emotional responses. Journal Personality Social Psychology, 56(4), 543-554.

Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, Appraisal, & Coping. Springer Publishing.

Lees, J., & Cikara, M. (2020). Inaccurate group meta-perceptions drive negative out-group attributions in competitive contexts. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(3), 279-286.

Leiberg, S., Klimecki, O., & Singer, T. (2011). Short-term compassion training increases prosocial behavior in a newly developed prosocial game. PloS one, 6(3), e17798.

Leith, K. P., & Baumeister, R. F. (1998). Empathy, shame, guilt, and narratives of interpersonal conflicts: Guilt‐prone people are better at perspective taking. Journal of Personality, 66(1), 1-37.

Lerner, J. S., & Tiedens, L. Z. (2006). Portrait of the angry decision maker: How appraisal tendencies shape anger's influence on cognition. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 19(2), 115-137.

Levenson, R. W. (1999). The intrapersonal functions of emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 13(5), 481-504.

Levine, E. E., Barasch, A., Rand, D., Berman, J. Z., & Small, D. A. (2018). Signaling emotion and reason in cooperation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(5), 702-719.

Levine, E. E., & Lupoli, M. J. (2022). Prosocial lies: Causes and consequences. Current Opinion in Psychology, 43, 335-340.

Li, Y., Mir, M., Di Censo, L., & Stellar, J. E. (under review). Awe-inspiring figures and their devoted following: Awe as an affective pathway to commitment.

Lim, D., & DeSteno, D. (2016). Suffering and compassion: The links among adverse life experiences, empathy, compassion, and prosocial behavior. Emotion, 16(2), 175.

Lim, D., & DeSteno, D. (2022). Guilt Underlies Compassion Among Those Who Have Suffered Adversity. Emotion 613-621.

Lomas, T., Froh, J. J., Emmons, R. A., Mishra, A., & Bono, G. (2014). Gratitude interventions: A review and future agenda. The Wiley Blackwell handbook of positive psychological interventions, 1-19.

Lotz, S., Baumert, A., Schlösser, T., Gresser, F., & Fetchenhauer, D. (2011). Individual differences in third‐party interventions: How justice sensitivity shapes altruistic punishment. Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, 4(4), 297-313.

Luberto, C. M., Shinday, N., Song, R., Philpotts, L. L., Park, E. R., Fricchione, G. L., & Yeh, G. Y. (2018). A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of meditation on empathy, compassion, and prosocial behaviors. Mindfulness, 9(3), 708-724.

Lupoli, M. J., Jampol, L., & Oveis, C. (2017). Lying because we care: Compassion increases prosocial lying. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146(7), 1026.

Mackie, D. M., Devos, T., & Smith, E. R. (2000). Intergroup emotions: Explaining offensive action tendencies in an intergroup context. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(4), 602.

Mackie, D. M., Silver, L. A., & Smith, E. R. (2004). Intergroup Emotions: Emotion as an Intergroup Phenomenon. In L. Z. Tiedens & C. W. Leach (Eds.), The social life of emotions (pp. 227–245). Cambridge University Press.

Malti, T., Ongley, S. F., Peplak, J., Chaparro, M. P., Buchmann, M., Zuffianò, A., & Cui, L. (2016). Children's sympathy, guilt, and moral reasoning in helping, cooperation, and sharing: A 6‐year longitudinal study. Child Development, 87(6), 1783-1795.

Malle, B. F. (2021). Moral judgments. Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 293-318.

Marsh, A. A., & Cardinale, E. M. (2014). When psychopathy impairs moral judgments: neural responses during judgments about causing fear. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(1), 3-11.

Martins, A., Faisca, L., Esteves, F., Muresan, A., & Reis, A. (2012). Atypical moral judgements following traumatic brain injury. Judgment and Decision Making, 7(4), 478-487.

McCullough, M. E., Kilpatrick, S. D., Emmons, R. A., & Larson, D. B. (2001). Is gratitude a moral affect? Psychological Bulletin, 127(2), 249–266.

McKay, R., Herold, J., & Whitehouse, H. (2013). Catholic guilt? Recall of confession promotes prosocial behavior. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 3(3), 201-209.

Mendez, M. F., Anderson, E., & Shapira, J. S. (2005). An investigation of moral judgement in frontotemporal dementia. Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, 18(4), 193-197.

Mernyk, J. S., Pink, S. L., Druckman, J. N., & Willer, R. (2022). Correcting inaccurate metaperceptions reduces Americans’ support for partisan violence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(16), e2116851119.

Miceli, M., & Castelfranchi, C. (2018). Reconsidering the differences between shame and guilt. Europe's Journal of Psychology, 14(3), 710-733.

Moll, J., Zahn, R., de Oliveira-Souza, R., Bramati, I. E., Krueger, F., Tura, B., Cavanagh, A. L., & Grafman, J. (2011). Impairment of prosocial sentiments is associated with frontopolar and septal damage in frontotemporal dementia. Neuroimage, 54(2), 1735-1742.

Monroy, M., & Keltner, D. (2023). Awe as a pathway to mental and physical health. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 18(2), 309-320.

Mugumbate, J. R., & Chereni, A. (2020). Now, the theory of Ubuntu has its space in social work. African Journal of Social Work, 10(1).

Nelissen, R., & Zeelenberg, M. (2009). When guilt evokes self-punishment: evidence for the existence of a Dobby Effect. Emotion, 9(1), 118.

Nesdale, D., Maass, A., Kiesner, J., Durkin, K., Griffiths, J., & James, B. (2009). Effects of peer group rejection and a new group's norms on children's intergroup attitudes. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 27(4), 799-814.

Neumann, M., Edelhäuser, F., Tauschel, D., Fischer, M. R., Wirtz, M., Woopen, C., Haramati, A., & Scheffer, C. (2011). Empathy decline and its reasons: a systematic review of studies with medical students and residents. Academic Medicine, 86(8), 996-1009.

Niedenthal, P. M., Tangney, J. P., & Gavanski, I. (1994). If only I weren't" versus" If only I hadn't: Distinguishing shame and guilt in conterfactual thinking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(4), 585-595.

Nietzsche. (1889/1971). “The hammer speaks.” In Twilight of the idols (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Chatto.

Nietzsche, F. W. (1895/2005). Nietzsche: The anti-Christ, Ecce homo, Twilight of the idols: And other writings. Cambridge University Press.

Nichols, R. (2011). A genealogy of early Confucian moral psychology. Philosophy East and West, 609-629.

Nivison, D. S. (1979). Mencius and motivation. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 47(3, Suppl.), 417-432.

Nook, E., Ong, D., Morelli, S., Mitchell, J., & Zaki, J. (2016). Prosocial conformity: Generalization across behavior and affect. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 42(8), 1045-1062.

Nunes, P., Williams, S., Sa, B., & Stevenson, K. (2011). A study of empathy decline in students from five health disciplines during their first year of training. International Journal of Medical Education, 2, 12.

Nussbaum, M. (1996). Compassion: The basic social emotion. Social Philosophy and Policy, 13(1), 27-58.

Nussbaum, M. (2008). Liberty of conscience: in defense of America's tradition of religious equality. Basic Books.

Ochsner, K. N., Silvers, J. A., & Buhle, J. T. (2012). Functional imaging studies of emotion regulation: a synthetic review and evolving model of the cognitive control of emotion. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1251(1), E1-E24.

Ogude, J. (2018). Ubuntu and personhood. Africa World Press.

O'Mara, E. M., Jackson, L. E., Batson, C. D., & Gaertner, L. (2011). Will moral outrage stand up?: Distinguishing among emotional reactions to a moral violation. European Journal of Social Psychology, 41(2), 173-179.

Otto, R. (1917/1923). The idea of the holy (John W. Harvey, Trans.). Oxford University.

Park, J., Kitayama, S., Markus, H. R., Coe, C. L., Miyamoto, Y., Karasawa, M., ... & Ryff, C. D. (2013). Social status and anger expression: the cultural moderation hypothesis. Emotion, 13(6), 1122-1131.

Perlin, Joshua D., and Leon Li. "Why does awe have prosocial effects? New perspectives on awe and the small self." Perspectives on Psychological Science 15.2 (2020): 291-308.

Persky, J. (1995). The ethology of homo economicus. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 9(2), 221-231.

Piaget, J. (1932). The moral judgment of the child. Harcourt, Brace.

Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1966/1972). The psychology of the child. Basic Books.

Piff, P. K., Martinez, A. G., & Keltner, D. (2012). Me against we: In-group transgression, collective shame, and in-group-directed hostility. Cognition and Emotion, 26(4), 634-649.

Pizarro, D. A., & Bloom, P. (2003). The intelligence of the moral intuitions: A comment on Haidt (2001). Psychological Review, 110(1), 193–196.

Plato. (1952). Plato’s Phaedrus. University Press.

Prade, C., & Saroglou, V. (2016). Awe’s effects on generosity and helping. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 11(5), 522-530.

Prade, C., & Saroglou, V. (2023). Awe and social conformity: Awe promotes the endorsement of social norms and conformity to the majority opinion. Emotion. 23(7), 2100–2104.

Preston, S. (2013). The origins of altruism in offspring care. Psychological Bulletin, 139(6), 1305-1341.

Rhodes, M., & Brickman, D. (2011). The influence of competition on children's social categories. Journal of Cognition and Development, 12(2), 194-221.

Riek, B. M., & Mania, E. W. (2012). The antecedents and consequences of interpersonal forgiveness: A meta‐analytic review. Personal Relationships, 19(2), 304-325.

Rotella, K. N., & Richeson, J. A. (2013). Motivated to “forget” the effects of in-group wrongdoing on memory and collective guilt. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4(6), 730-737.

Rozin, P., & Fallon, A. E. (1987). A perspective on disgust. Psychological Review, 94(1), 23.

Rudd, M., Vohs, K. D., & Aaker, J. (2012). Awe expands people’s perception of time, alters decision making, and enhances well-being. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1130-1136.

Sachdeva, S., Singh, P., & Medin, D. (2011). Culture and the quest for universal principles in moral reasoning. International Journal of Psychology, 46(3), 161-176.

Saguy, T., Shchori-Eyal, N., Hasan-Aslih, S., Sobol, D., & Dovidio, J. F. (2016). The irony of harmony: Past and new developments. In Intergroup Contact Theory (pp. 61-79). Routledge.

Saguy, T., Tausch, N., Dovidio, J. F., & Pratto, F. (2009). The irony of harmony intergroup contact can produce false expectations for equality. Psychological Science, 20(1), 114-121.

Saiva, A., Abdool, P. S., Naismith, L. M., & Nirula, L. (2020). An immersive simulation to build empathy for geriatric patients with co-occurring physical and mental illness. Academic Psychiatry, 44(6), 745-750.

Salerno, J. M., & Peter-Hagene, L. C. (2013). The interactive effect of anger and disgust on moral outrage and judgments. Psychological Science, 24(10), 2069-2078.

Santos, L. A., Voelkel, J. G., Willer, R., & Zaki, J. (2022). Belief in the utility of cross-partisan empathy reduces partisan animosity and facilitates political persuasion. Psychological Science, 33(9), 1557-1573.

Saunders, L. F. (2016). Reason and emotion, not reason or emotion in moral judgment. Philosophical Explorations, 19(3), 252-267.

Saslow, L. R., Willer, R., Feinberg, M., Piff, P. K., Clark, K., Keltner, D., and Saturn, S. R. (2013). “My brother’s keeper? Compassion predicts generosity more among less religious individuals, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4(1), 31-38.

Sawaoka, T., & Monin, B. (2018). The paradox of viral outrage. Psychological Science, 29(10), 1665-1678.

Schachter, S., & Singer, J. E. (1962). Cognitive, social, and physiological determinants of emotion state. Psychological Review, 69, 379-99.

Scherer, K. R., Schorr, A., & Johnstone, T. (2001). Appraisal processes in emotion: Theory, methods, research. Oxford University Press.

Schnall, S., Haidt, J., Clore, G. L., & Jordan, A. H. (2008). Disgust as embodied moral judgment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(8), 1096-1109.

Schumann, K., Zaki, J., & Dweck, C. S. (2014). Addressing the empathy deficit: Beliefs about the malleability of empathy predict effortful responses when empathy is challenging. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107(3), 475–493.

Seacat, J. D., Hirschman, R., & Mickelson, K. D. (2007). Attributions of HIV Onset Controllability, Emotional Reactions, and Helping Intentions: Implicit Effects of Victim Sexual Orientation 1. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 37(7), 1442-1461.

Seger, C. R., Smith, E. R., & Mackie, D. M. (2009). Subtle activation of a social categorization triggers group-level emotions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(3), 460-467.

Seok, B. (2017). Moral psychology of Confucian shame: Shame of shamelessness. Rowman & Littlefield.

Shepherd, L., & Evans, C. (2020). From gaze to outrage: The role of group-based anger in mediating the relationship between sexual objectification and collective action. Sex Roles, 82(5), 277-292.

Shiota, M. N., Keltner, D., & John, O. P. (2006). Positive emotion dispositions differentially associated with Big Five personality and attachment style. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 1(2), 61-71.

Shiota, M. N., Keltner, D., & Mossman, A. (2007). The nature of awe: Elicitors, appraisals, and effects on self-concept. Cognition and Emotion, 21(5), 944-963.

Shipley, N. J., & van Riper, C. J. (2022). Pride and guilt predict pro-environmental behavior: A meta-analysis of correlational and experimental evidence. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 79, 101753.

Shoji, M. (2022). Guilt and prosocial behavior: Lab-in-the-field evidence from Bangladesh. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 70(2), 823-833.

Silfver, M. (2007). Gender differences in value priorities, guilt, and shame among Finnish and Peruvian adolescents. Sex Roles, 56(9), 601-609.

Simas, E. N., Clifford, S., & Kirkland, J. H. (2020). How empathic concern fuels political polarization. American Political Science Review, 114(1), 258-269.

Singer, P. (2015). The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically. Yale University Press.

Singer, T., & Klimecki, O. M. (2014). Empathy and compassion. Current biology, 24(18), R875-

Smith, A.  (1759).  The theory of moral sentiments. Printed for A. Millar, and A. Kincaid and J. Bell, in Edinburgh

Smith, E. R. (1993). Social identity and social emotions: Toward new conceptualizations of prejudice. In Affect, cognition and stereotyping (pp. 297-315). Elsevier.

Smith, E. R., & Mackie, D. M. (2015). Dynamics of group-based emotions: insights from intergroup emotions theory. Emotion Review, 7(4), 349-354.

Smith, E. R., Seger, C. R., & Mackie, D. M. (2007). Can emotions be truly group level? Evidence regarding four conceptual criteria. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(3), 431-446.

Spring, V. L., Cameron, C. D., & Cikara, M. (2018). The upside of outrage. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(12), 1067-1069.

Stancato, D. M., & Keltner, D. (2021). Awe, ideological conviction, and perceptions of ideological opponents. Emotion, 21(1), 61-72.

Stanley, M. L., Yin, S., & Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2019). A reason-based explanation for moral dumbfounding. Judgment and Decision Making, 14(2), 120–129.

Staub, E., & Vollhardt, J. (2008). Altruism born of suffering: The roots of caring and helping after victimization and other trauma. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 78(3), 267-280.

Stein, E. (1964/1989). On the problem of empathy. ICS Books.

Stellar, J. E., Feinberg, M., and Keltner, D. (2014). When the selfish suffer: Evidence for selective prosocial emotional and physiological responses to suffering egoists. Evolution and Human Behavior, 35(2), 140-147.

Stellar, J. E., Gordon, A., Anderson, C. L., Piff, P. K., McNeil, G. D., & Keltner, D. (2018). Awe and humility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(2), 258–269.

Stellar, J. E., Gordon, A. M., Piff, P. K., Cordaro, D., Anderson, C. L., Bai, Y., Maruskin, L. A., & Keltner, D. (2017). Self-transcendent emotions and their social functions: Compassion, gratitude, and awe bind us to others through prosociality. Emotion Review, 9(3), 200-207.

Stellar, J. E., Manzo, V. M., Kraus, M. W., & Keltner, D. (2012). Compassion and class: Socioeconomic factors predict compassionate responding. Emotion, 12, 449-459.

Storbeck, J., & Clore, G. L. (2007). On the interdependence of cognition and emotion. Cogn Emot, 21(6), 1212-1237.

Strayer, J., & Roberts, W. (2004). Children's anger, emotional expressiveness, and empathy: Relations with parents’ empathy, emotional expressiveness, and parenting practices. Social Development, 13(2), 229-254.

Strikwerda-Brown, C., Ramanan, S., Goldberg, Z.-L., Mothakunnel, A., Hodges, J. R., Ahmed, R. M., Piguet, O., & Irish, M. (2021). The interplay of emotional and social conceptual processes during moral reasoning in frontotemporal dementia. Brain, 144(3), 938-952.

Stuewig, J., Tangney, J. P., Kendall, S., Folk, J. B., Meyer, C. R., & Dearing, R. L. (2015). Children’s proneness to shame and guilt predict risky and illegal behaviors in young adulthood. Child Psychiatry & Human Development, 46(2), 217-227.

Swann, W. B., Gómez, A., Seyle, D. C., Morales, J., & Huici, C. (2009). Identity fusion: the interplay of personal and social identities in extreme group behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 995-1011.

Tangney, J. P. (1995). Shame and guilt in interpersonal relationships.

Tangney, J. P., Stuewig, J., & Martinez, A. G. (2014). Two faces of shame: The roles of shame and guilt in predicting recidivism. Psychological Science, 25(3), 799-805.

Tangney, J. P., Stuewig, J., & Mashek, D. J. (2007). Moral emotions and moral behavior. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 345-372.

Tarrant, M., Dazeley, S., & Cottom, T. (2009). Social categorization and empathy for outgroup members. British Journal of Social Psychology, 48(3), 427-446.

Thulin, E. W., & Bicchieri, C. (2016). I’m so angry I could help you: Moral outrage as a driver of victim compensation. Social Philosophy and Policy, 32(2), 146-160.

Tilley, L., & Oxenham, M. F. (2011). Survival against the odds: Modeling the social implications of care provision to seriously disabled individuals. International Journal of Paleopathology, 1(1), 35-42.

Tomasello, M. (2016). A natural history of human morality. In A Natural History of Human Morality. Harvard University Press.

Tracy, J. L., & Robins, R. W. (2004). Putting the Self Into Self-Conscious Emotions: A Theoretical Model. Psychological Inquiry, 15(2), 103-125.

Tracy, J. L., & Robins, R. W. (2006). Appraisal antecedents of shame and guilt: Support for a theoretical model. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32(10), 1339-1351.

Trivers, R. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology, 46, 35-57.

Tyler, T., & Smith, H. (1998). Social Justice and Social Movements. In D. Gilbert, S. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The Handbook of Social Psychology (4th ed.). Oxford University Press

Vaes, J., & Muratore, M. (2013). Defensive dehumanization in the medical practice: A cross‐sectional study from a health care worker's perspective. British Journal of Social Psychology, 52(1), 180-190.

Vaish, A. (2018). The prosocial functions of early social emotions: the case of guilt. Current Opinion in Psychology, 20, 25-29.

Vaish, A., & Hepach, R. (2020). The development of prosocial emotions. Emotion Review, 12(4), 259-273.

Valdesolo, P., & DeSteno, D. (2006). Manipulations of emotional context shape moral judgment. Psychological Science, 17(6), 476-477.

Van Cappellen, P., Edwards, M. E., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2021). Upward spirals of positive emotions and religious behaviors. Current Opinion in Psychology, 40, 92-98.

Van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M., & Pieters, R. (2012). Appraisal patterns of envy and related emotions. Motivation and Emotion, 36, 195-204.

van Elk, M., Fejer, G., Lempe, P., Prochazckova, L., Kuchar, M., Hajkova, K., & Marschall, J. (2021). Effects of psilocybin microdosing on awe and aesthetic experiences: a preregistered field and lab-based study. Psychopharmacology, 1-16.

Van Kleef, G. A., Oveis, C., Van Der Löwe, I., LuoKogan, A., Goetz, J., & Keltner, D. (2008). Power, distress, and compassion: Turning a blind eye to the suffering of others. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1315-1322.

Västfjäll, D., Slovic, P., Mayorga, M., & Peters, E. (2014). Compassion fade: Affect and charity are greatest for a single child in need. PloS one, 9(6), e100115.

Vollhardt, J. R. (2009). Altruism born of suffering and prosocial behavior following adverse life events: A review and conceptualization. Social Justice Research, 22(1), 53-97.

Wager, T. D., Davidson, M. L., Hughes, B. L., Lindquist, M. A., & Ochsner, K. N. (2008). Prefrontal-subcortical pathways mediating successful emotion regulation. Neuron, 59(6), 1037-1050.

Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2009). The roots of human altruism. British Journal of Psychology, 100(3), 455-471.

Wasow, O. (2020). Agenda seeding: How 1960s black protests moved elites, public opinion and voting. American Political Science Review, 114(3), 638-659.

Weber M., Henderson, A. M., & Parsons T. (1947). The theory of social and economic organization ([1st American ed.]). Oxford University Press.

Weiner, B. (1985). An attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion, Psychological Review, 92, 548–573.

Weisz, E., Chen, P., Ong, D. C., Carlson, R. W., Clark, M. D., & Zaki, J. (2022). A brief intervention to motivate empathy among middle school students. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 51(12), 3144–3153.

Weisz, E., & Cikara, M. (2021). Strategic regulation of empathy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(3), 213-227.

Weisz, E., Ong, D. C., Carlson, R. W., & Zaki, J. (2021). Building empathy through motivation-based interventions. Emotion, 21(5), 990-999.

Weisz, E., & Zaki, J. (2017). Empathy-Building Interventions: A Review of Existing Work and Suggestions for Future Directions. In E. D. Seppala, J. (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science (pp. 205-217). Oxford University Press.

Weisz, E., & Zaki, J. (2018). Motivated empathy: a social neuroscience perspective. Current Opinion in Psychology, 24, 67-71.

Weng, H. Y., Fox, A. S., Shackman, A. J., Stodola, D. E., Caldwell, J. Z., Olson, M. C., Rogers, G. M., & Davidson, R. J. (2013). Compassion Training Alters Altruism and Neural Responses to Suffering. Psychological Science, 24(7), 1171–1180.

Wheatley, T., & Haidt, J. (2005). Hypnotic disgust makes moral judgments more severe. Psychological Science, 16(10), 780-784.

Whitesell, N. R., & Harter, S. (1996). The interpersonal context of emotion: Anger with close friends and classmates. Child Development, 67(4), 1345-1359.

Widiger, T. A., & Crego, C. (2021). Psychopathy and lack of guilt. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 28(2), 109-111.

Wondra, J. D., & Ellsworth, P. C. (2015). An appraisal theory of empathy and other vicarious emotional experiences. Psychological Review, 122(3), 411-428.

Wong, Y. J. (2023). The catalyst model of change: Gratitude interventions with positive long-term effects. Affective Science, 4(1), 152-162.

Wood, A. M., Maltby, J., Stewart, N., Linley, P. A., & Joseph, S. (2008). A social-cognitive model of trait and state levels of gratitude. Emotion, 8(2), 281-290.

Woods, C. J. (1996). Gender differences in moral development and acquisition: A review of Kohlberg's and Gilligan's models of justice and care. Social Behavior and Personality: An iInternational Journal, 24(4), 375-383.

Xiao, S. X., Spinrad, T. L., & Eisenberg, N. (2019). Longitudinal relations of preschoolers’ dispositional and situational anger to their prosocial behavior: The moderating role of shyness. Social Development, 28(2), 383-397.

Xu, H., Bègue, L., & Shankland, R. (2011). Guilt and guiltlessness: An integrative review. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 5(7), 440-457.

Yaden, D. B., Haidt, J., Hood Jr, R. W., Vago, D. R., & Newberg, A. B. (2017). The varieties of self-transcendent experience. Review of General Psychology, 21(2), 143-160.

Yaden, D. B., Iwry, J., Slack, K. J., Eichstaedt, J. C., Zhao, Y., Vaillant, G. E., & Newberg, A. B. (2016). The overview effect: Awe and self-transcendent experience in space flight. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 3(1), 1-11.

Young, I. F., Razavi, P., Cohen, T. R., Yang, Q., Alabèrnia-Segura, M., & Sullivan, D. (2021). A multidimensional approach to the relationship between individualism-collectivism and guilt and shame. Emotion, 21(1), 108-122.

Zajonc, R. (1998). Emotions. In D. Gilbert, S. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The Handbook of Social Psychology (4th ed.). Oxford University Press

Zaki, J. (2014). Empathy: A motivated account. Psychological Bulletin, 140(6), 1608-1647.

Zaki, J. (2017). Moving beyond stereotypes of empathy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(2), 59-60.

Zaki, J. (2018). Empathy is a moral force. Atlas of moral psychology, 49-58.

Zaki, J. (2019). The war for kindness: Building empathy in a fractured world. Crown.

Zaki, J. (2020). Catastrophe compassion: Understanding and extending prosociality under crisis. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(8), 587-589.

Zimmermann, A., Abrams, D., Doosje, B., & Manstead, A. S. (2011). Causal and moral responsibility: Antecedents and consequences of group‐based guilt. European Journal of Social Psychology, 41(7), 825-839.

Zhao, H., Zhang, H., Xu, Y., Lu, J., & He, W. (2018). Relation between awe and environmentalism: The role of social dominance orientation. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2367.

ENDNOTES

The Handbook of Social Psychology, 6th edition © 2025 by Situational Press is licensed under Creative Commons- Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. This work may be copied and distributed only in unmodified form, for noncommercial purposes, and with attribution.

 Gilligan’s criticisms have faced skepticism of their own for overemphasizing the category of gender without recognizing the immense variability in women’s moral development (Woods, 1996). ↑

Ioacocca made this remark during a 1983 commencement address at the University of Michigan. ↑