From this point of view, our societies have become less and less prudish and less critical. We have become more tolerant of others, rational, irreligious and scientific in the way we approach issues of right and wrong. Both psychological and neuroscientific research tell us that morality, our mental capacity to distinguish right from wrong in our behaviors and in the behaviors of others, is a product of evolution.
Morality
has been transmitted throughout evolution because it helps us to live in large social groups by improving our ability to get along and interact with others.Moral reasoning involves specific parts of the human brain, both of the kind that happens very quickly and of the kind that is thought of. Damage to certain parts of the brain can dramatically alter moral judgment and behavior. While human morality has been transmitted through evolution, it also depends on the culture in which we grew up. What humans consider moral behavior varies from culture to culture and also varies over time.
The relative frequencies were calculated with a smoothing of ± 3 years to reduce the irregularity of the time series, since the objective of the analysis was to identify changes in the frequency of words over long periods of time, rather than short-term fluctuations. The subsequent uptick in moral language may point to the revitalization of social conservatism in the English-speaking world around this time, led by figures such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and manifest itself in the current “culture wars” and in the growing political polarization. These studies reveal important historical trends in the cultural prominence of some moral concepts, but they are limited to paying attention only to positive concepts (virtue), they focus on specific terms rather than on broader patterns linked to theoretical explanations of morality, and they emphasize trajectories of linear change (that is, the dynamic changes in the prominence of morality) throughout the 20th century, which, according to him, are complex and resist simple and linear narratives of ups and downs. uninterrupted).
Based on previous work, the present study investigated historical changes in the cultural prominence of multiple domains of morality, as revealed by changes in the relative frequency of large sets of moral terms in Google's nGram database of English-language books. Graham, Haidt and Nosek proposed that the foundations form two groups of higher-order moral foundations. Think of someone whose moral behavior could affect your life, whether it's a family member, a co-worker, a friend, or a candidate for public office. Although both were individualizing foundations, harm and fairness were negatively associated (which could indicate the replacement of one by the other over time) and, although authority and purity were positively associated with each other, both were negatively associated with the group's morality.
I researched the words related to moral foundations that Democrats and Republicans used near the word “gay”. Both the General Morality and Purity series are dominated by strong linear descents combined with smaller curvilinear (quadratic) effects that represent their spikes after the 1970s. This morality of obedience and conformity, of insubordination and rebellion, then regressed with the same intensity during the 1970s. On the contrary, the hierarchical morality of authority (gray) declined slightly during the first half of the century.
The theory of moral foundations, for example, proposes five moral grammars, each with its own set of associated virtues and vices. .
