UCLA

People often use their sense of right and wrong to influence their decision making processes. Most people consider values like fairness, loyalty, care, and honesty as important and make these a part of their moral identity. This identity can be shifted, however, by situational factors. This dissertation explores how challenging or stressful situations cause people to prioritize different values or reconsider their moral frameworks. In Chapter 1, we study how experiencing a natural disaster (an event that makes mortality more salient) affects moral behavior. We find that after experiencing an earthquake, people become more rigid in their worldviews, attending church more often and becoming more racially and politically segregated, as well as more isolated. In Chapter 2, we study how moral identity can influence a challenging financial decision. In particular, we consider why people repay debts that are no longer legally or financially enforceable, and find that as enforceability of a debt goes down, moral considerations become more important in making the decision to repay the debt. We suggest that this is because the decision becomes more self-diagnostic of identity when the debt is unenforceable, as compared to enforceable debt. Taken together, these essays consider how challenging, real-world situations can play a role in shaping moral identity and moral behavior.