Using Smartphones to Track Our Everyday Moral Judgments

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Our lives are surprisingly packed with morally loaded experiences. We see others behaving badly (or well), and we behave well (or badly) ourselves. In a new study, researchers used a smartphone app to track moral and immoral acts committed or witnessed by more than 1,200 people as they went about their days. It’s one of the first attempts to quantify the moral landscape of daily life, and it contains some interesting hints about how people are influenced by the behavior or others, as well as by their own political and religious leanings.

Wilhelm Hofmann, a social psychologist at the University of Cologne in Germany, and his colleagues pinged study participants with text messages at random times and asked them to report any moral or immoral acts they’d committed, been the target of, witnessed, or simply heard about within the previous hour. Such acts turned out to be common: of the 13,240 responses collected over the course of the study study, 29 percent included a morally significant event. These were roughly evenly split between moral acts (in the judgment of the person reporting the event), such as helping a lost tourist or giving a sandwich to a homeless person, and acts deemed immoral, such as petty theft or smoking in a car full of children. Most of these acts–64 percent—occurred in public places. Another 23 percent occurred at home.

There’s much more to the study, but that finding alone is interesting because it shows how often we make moral judgments in daily life, says Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, who was not involved in the work. “My view is that moral psychology is the operating system of human social life,” he said. “To the extent that we’re able to interact with strangers it’s because we create these dense webs of moral norms and then we judge each other relentlessly on them and know that we’ll be judged, and that’s what makes it all work.”

In recent years, psychologists and neuroscientists have grown increasingly interested in studying the roots of human morality. Until now, they’ve relied largely on questionnaires and fictional moral dilemmas like the infamous trolley problems (variations on the question, “Would you shove one person in front of an oncoming trolley car in order to save the lives of five other people?”).

The new study attempts to take morality research out of the lab and into the real world, in this case, into the lives of 1,252 US and Canadian adults recruited through Craigslist, Twitter, and other sources. The findings, reported today in Science , are largely consistent with what researchers previously have found with surveys and lab studies (and the rest of us have encountered in real life).

A screenshot from the smartphone app used in the study. Wilhelm Hofmann

For example, there were hints of hypocrisy, or at least selective awareness. People were about three times as likely to report committing a moral act as an immoral one, but about 2.5 times as likely to report hearing about someone else behaving badly as doing good deeds. (It’s all those other people doing bad things).

The study also supports the idea, proposed by Haidt and popularized in his book The Righteous Mind, that people with different political leanings emphasize different aspects of morality. Hoffmann and colleagues found that people who self-identified as liberal reported more events having to do with fairness or unfairness, for example, while conservatives reported more events having to do with sanctity or degradation (talking with a relative about God and meditating, for example, or, conversely, catching a teenage son watching porn).

The researchers found no evidence that religious people commit moral acts more often than nonreligious people. Religious people reported hearing about fewer immoral acts, however, which the authors suggest may be due largely to being selective about the company they keep (and perhaps not watching Game of Thrones, although the study didn’t actually examine that).

They did find evidence for a phenomenon psychologists call moral contagion: People who were the target of a moral act were more likely to commit a moral act later in the day. But there was also evidence for a countervailing influence called moral self-licensing. People who committed a moral act earlier in the day were more likely to slack off, morally speaking: They committed fewer moral and more immoral acts later in the day.

It might be possible to use of some of these findings to craft public policies that encourage good behavior, says co-author Mark Brandt of Tilburg University in the Netherlands. “It may be possible to take advantage of moral contagion by making people the targets of moral acts more often or at least reminding them of times when they were a target of moral charity,” Brandt said. Similarly, he says, warning people about the possibility of self-licensing and stressing the importance of moral consistency might be useful in recycling programs or other efforts to care for the environment.

The smartphone approach raises many possibilities for future research on moral psychology. For example, to study the factors that influence moral behavior, researchers could text people survey questions or tests of moral judgement as they pass through certain locations—as they walk by a church, for example, or a neighborhood with a lot of crime—or right after they see or commit certain types of acts.

“This kind of technology could be used to see how communities respond to sociologically relevant events like a terrorist attack, a basketball victory, or extreme weather—all things that seem to pull people together,” Haidt said. For example, he says, New Yorkers often say people were nicer to each other in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. “If you’re tracking people over time, it would be interesting to see if people do more nice things for each other, if they’re more trusting and cooperative, when the local team wins. If there’s a threat, does everyone band together, or do people band together along ethnic lines or lines of similarity?”