Opposing torture: Moral conviction and resistance to majority influence

The first and second author contributed equally to the research and to this paper; order of authorship was randomly determined. We would like to thank Amir Jacob and Jared Majerle for their assistance in conducting this research.

¹The theoretical properties of moral conviction that lead to the prediction that moral convictions are likely to be associated with resistance to majority influence are also features that theoretically distinguish moral convictions from variables such as attitude extremity and importance. For example, one might have an extremely negative attitude about eating insects, and see it as personally important never to eat insects, but these high levels of extremity and importance do not by definition mean that one's attitude about eating insects will be high in moral conviction. Moreover, even though attitudes high in moral conviction are also likely to be high on other dimensions of attitude strength (e.g., extremity, importance), extreme and important attitudes will not necessarily be high in moral conviction (see Skitka et al., Citation2005, for a more detailed discussion of these issues).

²Because moral conviction was measured using two items, measurement error may have been lower for this variable compared to the other measures of attitude strength, which used single items. Because reduced measurement error increases the likelihood of obtaining statistically significant results, our measurement of moral conviction may have advantaged this variable over the others. To address this concern we ran all reported analyses with a single measure of moral conviction (“reflect your core moral values and convictions”), and found equivalent results. Additionally, one might think that moral conviction should be represented as a dichotomous variable—an all or nothing phenomena. We treat moral conviction as a continuous variable for a number of reasons: (a) classification of an attitude as a moral one, and strength of moral conviction both contribute to explained variance in relevant phenomena (Wright, Cullum, & Schwab, Citation2008), therefore dichotomizing the variable would lose valuable information, (b) other indices of attitude strength are conceptualized as continuous rather than dichotomous constructs (e.g., attitude importance), (c) dichotomizing continuously measured variables is “seldom defensible and often will lead to misleading results” (MacCallum, Zhang, Preacher, & Rucker, Citation2002, p. 19).

³We also assessed whether strength of moral conviction was associated with participants maintaining some degree of opposition to torture versus switching their stance to reporting any degree of support or uncertainty about the issue, both to their groups, and in private following the group interaction (0 = switched sides, 1 = maintained opposition). Two binary logistic regressions replicated the pattern of results observed in Table 2, Columns 1 and 2. Specifically, controlling for participants’ prior attitudes about torture at pretest, the other indicators of attitude strength, and the presence of social support, strength of moral conviction was negatively associated with the likelihood of changing one's stance on torture, both in public and in private.