Work

Health Behaviors Are Moralized When Perceived to Cause Harm

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: People readily moralize health, whether by criticizing smokers or treating exercise as noble. Drawing from the theory of dyadic morality, we theorized that people moralize health most strongly when they perceive poor health as a source of suffering. Through five studies (total N = 2,055), we show that perceived harm can drive the moralization of health. We identified three types of harm—personal, interpersonal, and collective—that people perceive as relevant to health and created a 15-item measure to capture each (Study 1). Perceived interpersonal harm reliably predicted moralizations of health, whether health was conceived broadly (Study 2) or as a concrete health issue (e.g., smoking, eating healthfully, disease prevention; Study 3). Experimentally manipulating the interpersonal harmfulness of a health behavior caused participants to moralize it (Studies 4 and 5), whereas disgust had no unique effect (Study 4). We suggest that perceived harm plays a key role in moralizing health.

Source: Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

DOI: 10.1177/01461672251372823

Authors: Samuel Pratt, Daniel L. Rosenfeld, Amelia Goranson, A. Janet Tomiyama, Paschal Sheeran, Kurt Gray

Institutions: University of California, Los Angeles, Knox College, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, The Ohio State University

Language: English

Topic: Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment

Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience

Field: Neuroscience

Domain: Life Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,900