The effect of personal orientations toward intergroup relations on moral reasoning

Abstract

This article examined how the group membership of the person being judged influenced the level of moral reasoning. Nearly 200 ordinary Italians were given two measures of moral ingroup inclusiveness (the Bogardus social distance scale and a self-categorization measure) and the short form of Rest’s Defining Issues Test (DIT). The protagonists in the dilemmas were either Italian (ingroup member) or Romanian (outgroup member). Overall, the post-conventional score (P score) was related to higher inclusiveness. However, respondents with a narrow moral ingroup scored lower on post-conventional reasoning when the protagonists were Romanian (outgroup members) than when they were Italian. By contrast, those respondents with an inclusive moral ingroup obtained identical P scores on both types of dilemmas. Inclusiveness of the moral ingroup also mediated the relation of political affiliation and post-conventional reasoning.

Keywords:

• moral reasoning
• inclusive self-categorisation
• social distance
• intergroup dynamics
• DIT

Notes

1. Romanians were chosen because they are usually put forward by Italian media as a socially distant community (see Solimene, 2011).