Smartphone App Takes Morality Science out of the Lab and into the Real World

Scientific American:

Just when it seems there’s a mobile app for just about everything, psychologists have shown there’s room for one more: they are using smartphones to help them better understand the dynamics of moral and immoral behavior out in the community.

A team of U.S., German and Dutch researchers has used Apple iOS, Google Android and other mobile devices to assess real-life situations. Their goal is to better understand how our moral sense develops and moral judgments are made as well as the differences in moral experiences among various individuals, groups and cultures.

The researchers selected more than 1,200 smartphone users—ages 18 to 68—in the U.S. and Canada and texted them five times a day with requests to report whether they had committed, were the target of, witnessed or learned about a moral or immoral act within the past hour. Each text message came embedded with a link that took participants to an online survey displayed on the smartphone’s browser. There, they rated—on a scale of zero to five—specific moral emotions they might be feeling, such as guilt or disgust, as well as their level of happiness and sense of purpose at that moment. Participants also briefly described each event in a text they sent back to the researchers.

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Underlying all of this was an app the researchers developed to sign up participants, send texts to them at random intervals and manage the more than 3,800 messages they received. “[This approach] allowed us to get as close as possible to where the everyday moral or immoral action is,” says Wilhelm Hofmann, a professor of social and economic cognition at Germany’s University of Cologne. He and his colleagues report their findings to be published Friday in the journal Science.

Read the whole story: Scientific American