The relationship between religion and morality has long been hotly debated. Does religion make us more moral? Is it necessary for morality? Do moral inclinations emerge independently of religious intuitions? In the minds of many people, the terms morality and religion signal two related but distinct ideas. Morality is thought to pertain to the conduct of human affairs and relations between persons, while religion primarily involves the relationship between human beings and a transcendent reality. The complex interrelationship between religion and morality is illustrated by the fact that moral legitimation may sometimes involve appeal to shared beliefs involving the supernatural or the sacred. But this is not a necessary aspect of moral justification, which can appeal to reason or to considerations of human welfare.
deed, almost all STI research has been conducted about individuals (Hamilton, Chen, Ko, Winczewski, Banerji, & Thurston, 2015). It is important to include group-based research in this line of work, given the importance of group membership and belonging in social interactions (Hamilton et al., 2015). Otten and Moskowitz (2000) found that behaviors implying positive traits about ingroup members led to the formation of STIs more than either negative behavior descriptions or behavior descriptions of outgroup members. Hamilton et al. (2015) have found evidence for the existence of STIs about groups (dubbed STIGs). Importantly, they noted that these STIGs lay a framework for (a) stereotype formation about a group and (b) generalizations about the behavior of an individual based solely on his or her group membership.
In addition to the limited research involving groups, STI research has largely eschewed the study of how purported moral behaviors affect participants’ likelihood of inferring moral traits. In one such study, Ma et al. (2012) found that participants do generate STIs for moral and immoral behaviors, though a limitation of this work is the lack of a nonmoral group of traits to compare it to. Indeed, the lack of this variable makes it difficult to conclude whether moral behaviors increase STIs or immoral behaviors depress STIs. It is important to note that a host of research into impression formation has found a bias for negative behaviors over positive behaviors (for a review, see Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001; see also Skowronski & Carlston, 1989), leading to the intuition that perhaps immoral traits may be more readily inferred over moral traits, independent of the effect of group membership.
Group Membership
Membership in a group is one of the main features of social interaction. It has been established that membership in a group can alter one’s perception of other individuals, with this effect extending to both ingroup and outgroup members (Hackel, Looser, & Van Bavel, 2014). This includes having a skewed, positive outlook toward one’s ingroup members while inhibiting the extension of empathy and mind perception toward outgroup members (Hackel et al., 2014). Mind perception is the process of attributing a mind to another entity, and is an important mechanism for determining what is not only capable of agency (i.e., taking autonomous actions), but is also capable of feeling emotions, pain, and suffering and thus being afforded em
