Judging Moral Issues in a Multicultural Society: Moral Reasoning and Social Dominance Orientation

People’s reactions to crimes sometimes change depending on whether the culprits are the members of the ingroup or an outgroup. This issue raises questions on the study of moral reasoning. That is, is the individual’s level of moral reasoning unambiguous or does the group membership of the person to be judged exert an influence? In this research we analysed the combined effects of the protagonist’s nationality of a moral dilemma and social dominance orientation (SDO) attitudes on the level of moral reasoning. Two-hundred and thirty Italian participants responded to two moral dilemmas taken from the Defining Issues Test modified so that one was about an Italian and the other was about a Romanian. The results showed a significant interaction between the dilemma and the protagonist’s nationality and SDO: low SDO participants did not have a different level on the P-score (post-conventional reasoning) judging the two nationalities, while high SDO participants tended to have a higher P-score in judging Italians as opposed to Romanians.