The Effect of Personal Orientations towards Intergroup Relations on Moral Reasoning

This article examined how the group membership of the person being judged influenced level of moral reasoning. Nearly two hundred ordinary Italians were given two measures of moral ingroup inclusiveness (the Bogardus social distance scale and a self-categorization measure) and the short form of Rest’s Defining Issues Test (DIT). The protagonists in the dilemmas were either Italian (ingroup member) or Romanian (outgroup member). Overall, the postconventional score (P score) was related to higher inclusiveness. However, respondents with a narrow moral ingroup scored lower on postconventional reasoning when the protagonists were Romanian (outgroup members) than in case they were Italian. By contrast, those respondents with an inclusive moral ingroup obtained identical P scores on both types of dilemmas. Inclusiveness of the moral ingroup also mediated the relation of political affiliation and postconventional reasoning.