2025/11/03 by Samuel Pratt, Daniel L. Rosenfeld, Amelia Goranson +3 · 1 voice
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion #Behavioral Health and Interventions
paper · doi:10.1177/01461672251372823
openalex publication_date 2025/11/03 · openalex created_date 2025/11/04 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
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.