Ryan Daley

Collective memories play important social roles for individuals within society. Although other types of memory content (e.g. autobiographical and associative memory) appear to guide decision-making in social and moral contexts, it is unclear how or whether collective memories are associated with third-person moral evaluations. Also, updating third-person moral evaluations can be impacted by broader narrative contexts. The primary goal of the present study was to determine whether particular collective memory details (described here as prioritised details) associated with a specific event (i.e. the breaching of the U.S. Capitol building) or other related collective memories (described here as general event memories), are associated with evaluations of groups of U.S. Senators, based on whether they followed their intended voting behaviour, or changed their voting behaviour following the breaching. Liberal participants' prioritised memories included more details overall than conservatives', and the more details liberals retrieved, the more they differentiated evaluations of the Senator groups. Liberals and conservatives showed a positive correlation between prioritised memory details and the number of general event memories retrieved, but general event memories were not associated with subsequent evaluations of Senators. These findings point to a role for specific details from collective memories in third-person evaluations.

The COVID-19 pandemic provided the opportunity to determine whether age-related differences in utilitarian moral decision-making during sacrificial moral dilemmas extend to non-sacrificial dilemmas in real-world settings. As affect and emotional memory are associated with moral and prosocial behaviors, we also sought to understand how these were associated with moral behaviors during the 2020 spring phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Older age, higher negative affect, and greater reports of reflecting on negative aspects of the pandemic were associated with higher reported purchase of hard-to-find goods, while older age and higher negative affect alone were associated with higher reported purchase of hard-to-find medical supplies. Older age was associated with what appeared at first to be non-utilitarian moral behaviors with regard to the purchasing of these supplies; However, they also reported distributing these goods to family members rather than engaging in hoarding behaviors. These findings suggest that advancing age may be associated with engagement in utilitarian moral decision-making in real-world settings more than the sacrificial moral decision-making literature would suggest.