(University of Michigan)
Punish or Protect? How Close Relationships Shape Moral Reasoning
In 2017, Murray Miller, the writer of HBO’s Girls, was accused of sexually assaulting a 17-year old actress. Lena Dunham, the star of Girls and a close friend of Miller, quickly came to his defense, insisting on his innocence. A year later, she admitted she lied:
“When someone I knew, someone I had loved as a brother, was accused, I did something inexcusable,” she said, “I publicly spoke up in his defense. I didn’t have the ‘insider information’ I claimed but rather blind faith.”
What makes situations like this particularly interesting from a psychological perspective is that they pit two fundamental human motivations against each other: the desire to protect people we know versus our commitment to abide by universal laws governing society. Despite the frequency with which people experience such dilemmas, we know remarkably little about the psychological processes that underlie how people navigate them. In this talk I will review findings from a new multidisciplinary line of research that has begun to systematically examine this issue to illuminate how close relationships shape moral reasoning.