psychology and empirical research

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Psychology Research Guide

What is empirical research, finding empirical research, what is peer review.

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Empirical research  is based on observed and measured phenomena and derives knowledge from actual experience rather than from theory or belief. 

How do you know if a study is empirical? Read the subheadings within the article, book, or report and look for a description of the research "methodology." Ask yourself: Could I recreate this study and test these results?

Key characteristics to look for:

• Specific research questions  to be answered
• Definition of the  population, behavior, or   phenomena  being studied
• Description of the  process  used to study this population or phenomena, including selection criteria, controls, and testing instruments (such as surveys)

Another hint: some scholarly journals use a specific layout, called the "IMRaD" format, to communicate empirical research findings. Such articles typically have 4 components:

• Introduction : sometimes called "literature review" -- what is currently known about the topic -- usually includes a theoretical framework and/or discussion of previous studies
• Methodology:  sometimes called "research design" -- how to recreate the study -- usually describes the population, research process, and analytical tools
• Results : sometimes called "findings"  --  what was learned through the study -- usually appears as statistical data or as substantial quotations from research participants
• Discussion : sometimes called "conclusion" or "implications" -- why the study is important -- usually describes how the research results influence professional practices or future studies

Adapted from PennState University Libraries, Empirical Research in the Social Sciences and Education

Empirical research is published in books and in scholarly, peer-reviewed journals. Keep in mind that most library databases do not offer straightforward ways to identifying empirical research.

Finding Empirical Research in PsycINFO

• PsycInfo Use the "Advanced Search" Type your keywords into the search boxes Scroll down the page to "Methodology," and choose "Empirical Study" Choose other limits, such as publication date, if needed Click on the "Search" button

Finding Empirical Research in PubMed

• PubMED One technique is to limit your search results after you perform a search: Type in your keywords and click on the "Search" button To the left of your results, under "Article Types," check off the types of studies that interest you Another alternative is to construct a more sophisticated search: From PubMed's main screen, click on "Advanced" link underneath the search box On the Advanced Search Builder screen type your keywords into the search boxes Change one of the empty boxes from "All Fields" to "Publication Type" To the right of Publication Type, click on "Show Index List" and choose a methodology that interests you. You can choose more than one by holding down the "Ctrl" or "⌘" on your keyboard as you click on each methodology Click on the "Search" button

Finding Empirical Research in Library OneSearch & Google Scholar

These tools do not have a method for locating empirical research. Using "empirical" as a keyword will find some studies, but miss many others. Consider using one of the more specialized databases above.

• Library OneSearch
• Google Scholar

This refers to the process where authors who are doing research submit a paper they have written to a journal. The journal editor then sends the article to the author's peers (researchers and scholars) who are in the same discipline for review. The reviewers determine if the article should be published based on the quality of the research, including the validity of the data, the conclusions the authors' draw and the originality of the research. This process is important because it validates the research and gives it a sort of "seal of approval" from others in the research community.

Identifying a Journal is Peer-Reviewed

One of the best places to find out if a journal is peer-reviewed is to go to the journal website.

Most publishers have a website for a journal that tells you about the journal, how authors can submit an article, and what the process is for getting published.

If you find the journal website, look for the link that says information for authors, instructions for authors, submitting an article or something similar.

Finding Peer-Reviewed Articles

Start in a library database. Look for a peer-review or scholarly filter.

• PsycInfo Most comprehensive database of psychology. Filters allow you to limit by methodology. Articles without full-text can be requested via Interlibrary loan.
• Library OneSearch Search almost all the library resources. Look for a peer-review filter on the left.
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• Last Updated: Apr 23, 2024 12:47 PM
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• Empirical Studies

This guide will help you get started with your psychology research. In addition to recommending useful databases, this guide provides information on finding and accessing tests and measures, and other helpful tips to guide you along the way.

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What is an empirical study?

An empirical study is one that is based on "observation, investigation, or experiment rather than on abstract reasoning, theoretical analysis, or speculation." * Empirical studies should be divided into the following parts: abstract, introduction, method, results, discussion, and references. Typically these studies also include tables, figures, and charts to display collected data.

Here is an example of an empirical study:

Westervelt, H. J., Bruce, J. M., & Faust, M. A. (2016). Distinguishing Alzheimer’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies using cognitive and olfactory measures . Neuropsychology , 30 (3), 304-311. doi:10.1037/neu0000230

Finding empirical studies

Finding empirical studies is simple using RIT Library's databases! Both PsycArticles and PyscINFO allow you to narrow your results to empirical studies before  you even click "Search." The steps outlined below apply to both:

• switch from basic search to advanced search
• look below the search bars for your available filters/limiters
• go the the "Methodology" set of options
• click on "Empirical"
• Now begin your search 

A Couple Quick Tips :

• such as, "multiple personality disorder"
• such as, addict* will tell the search software to look for addict, addicted, addictive, addictions, addicts, addicting...
• Use keywords and phrases, never use sentences or as a question
• Use more of your filters for choosing: a date range, FULL TEXT, scholarly/peer reviewed articles, geography (region/country), language, etc.
• Grab the citation in the format you need. You may have to correct it for complete accuracy, but at least you'll have a start
• Save the link or download and save the article. Trying to find something awesome after the fact can be brutal

*EVEN MORE TIPS ON THE "Get Better Results" page :-)

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Penn State University Libraries

Empirical research in the social sciences and education.

• What is Empirical Research and How to Read It
• Finding Empirical Research in Library Databases
• Designing Empirical Research
• Ethics, Cultural Responsiveness, and Anti-Racism in Research
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Contact the Librarian at your campus for more help!

Introduction: What is Empirical Research?

Empirical research is based on observed and measured phenomena and derives knowledge from actual experience rather than from theory or belief. 

How do you know if a study is empirical? Read the subheadings within the article, book, or report and look for a description of the research "methodology."  Ask yourself: Could I recreate this study and test these results?

Key characteristics to look for:

• Specific research questions to be answered
• Definition of the population, behavior, or   phenomena being studied
• Description of the process used to study this population or phenomena, including selection criteria, controls, and testing instruments (such as surveys)

Another hint: some scholarly journals use a specific layout, called the "IMRaD" format, to communicate empirical research findings. Such articles typically have 4 components:

• Introduction : sometimes called "literature review" -- what is currently known about the topic -- usually includes a theoretical framework and/or discussion of previous studies
• Methodology: sometimes called "research design" -- how to recreate the study -- usually describes the population, research process, and analytical tools used in the present study
• Results : sometimes called "findings" -- what was learned through the study -- usually appears as statistical data or as substantial quotations from research participants
• Discussion : sometimes called "conclusion" or "implications" -- why the study is important -- usually describes how the research results influence professional practices or future studies

Reading and Evaluating Scholarly Materials

Reading research can be a challenge. However, the tutorials and videos below can help. They explain what scholarly articles look like, how to read them, and how to evaluate them:

• CRAAP Checklist A frequently-used checklist that helps you examine the currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose of an information source.
• IF I APPLY A newer model of evaluating sources which encourages you to think about your own biases as a reader, as well as concerns about the item you are reading.
• Credo Video: How to Read Scholarly Materials (4 min.)
• Credo Tutorial: How to Read Scholarly Materials
• Credo Tutorial: Evaluating Information
• Credo Video: Evaluating Statistics (4 min.)
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• Last Updated: Feb 18, 2024 8:33 PM
• URL: https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/emp

Psychological Science

Prospective submitters of manuscripts are encouraged to read Editor-in-Chief Simine Vazire’s editorial , as well as the editorial by Tom Hardwicke, Senior Editor for Statistics, Transparency, & Rigor, and Simine Vazire.

Psychological Science , the flagship journal of the Association for Psychological Science, is the leading peer-reviewed journal publishing empirical research spanning the entire spectrum of the science of psychology. The journal publishes high quality research articles of general interest and on important topics spanning the entire spectrum of the science of psychology. Replication studies are welcome and evaluated on the same criteria as novel studies. Articles are published in OnlineFirst before they are assigned to an issue. This journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) .

Quick Facts

Read the February 2022 editorial by former Editor-in-Chief Patricia Bauer, “Psychological Science Stepping Up a Level.”

Read the January 2020 editorial by former Editor Patricia Bauer on her vision for the future of  Psychological Science .

Read the December 2015 editorial on replication by former Editor Steve Lindsay, as well as his April 2017 editorial on sharing data and materials during the review process.

Watch Geoff Cumming’s video workshop on the new statistics.

Current Issue

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Featured research from psychological science, new research in psychological science.

A sample of research on oppressed groups engendering implicit positivity, compassion fatigue as a self-fulfilling prophecy, gaze-triggered communicative intention, and much more.

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Audio associations can help us recognize objects more quickly, suggesting that sounds can help us make fine-grained discriminations between objects, new research suggests.

Talking Politics With Strangers Isn’t as Awful as You’d Expect, Research Suggests

Many of us avoid discussing politics with someone who holds an opposing viewpoint, assuming the exchange will turn nasty or awkward. But having those conversations is far more gratifying than we expect, new research suggests. 

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The Use of Research Methods in Psychological Research: A Systematised Review

Salomé elizabeth scholtz.

1 Community Psychosocial Research (COMPRES), School of Psychosocial Health, North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa

Werner de Klerk

Leon t. de beer.

2 WorkWell Research Institute, North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa

Research methods play an imperative role in research quality as well as educating young researchers, however, the application thereof is unclear which can be detrimental to the field of psychology. Therefore, this systematised review aimed to determine what research methods are being used, how these methods are being used and for what topics in the field. Our review of 999 articles from five journals over a period of 5 years indicated that psychology research is conducted in 10 topics via predominantly quantitative research methods. Of these 10 topics, social psychology was the most popular. The remainder of the conducted methodology is described. It was also found that articles lacked rigour and transparency in the used methodology which has implications for replicability. In conclusion this article, provides an overview of all reported methodologies used in a sample of psychology journals. It highlights the popularity and application of methods and designs throughout the article sample as well as an unexpected lack of rigour with regard to most aspects of methodology. Possible sample bias should be considered when interpreting the results of this study. It is recommended that future research should utilise the results of this study to determine the possible impact on the field of psychology as a science and to further investigation into the use of research methods. Results should prompt the following future research into: a lack or rigour and its implication on replication, the use of certain methods above others, publication bias and choice of sampling method.

Introduction

Psychology is an ever-growing and popular field (Gough and Lyons, 2016 ; Clay, 2017 ). Due to this growth and the need for science-based research to base health decisions on (Perestelo-Pérez, 2013 ), the use of research methods in the broad field of psychology is an essential point of investigation (Stangor, 2011 ; Aanstoos, 2014 ). Research methods are therefore viewed as important tools used by researchers to collect data (Nieuwenhuis, 2016 ) and include the following: quantitative, qualitative, mixed method and multi method (Maree, 2016 ). Additionally, researchers also employ various types of literature reviews to address research questions (Grant and Booth, 2009 ). According to literature, what research method is used and why a certain research method is used is complex as it depends on various factors that may include paradigm (O'Neil and Koekemoer, 2016 ), research question (Grix, 2002 ), or the skill and exposure of the researcher (Nind et al., 2015 ). How these research methods are employed is also difficult to discern as research methods are often depicted as having fixed boundaries that are continuously crossed in research (Johnson et al., 2001 ; Sandelowski, 2011 ). Examples of this crossing include adding quantitative aspects to qualitative studies (Sandelowski et al., 2009 ), or stating that a study used a mixed-method design without the study having any characteristics of this design (Truscott et al., 2010 ).

The inappropriate use of research methods affects how students and researchers improve and utilise their research skills (Scott Jones and Goldring, 2015 ), how theories are developed (Ngulube, 2013 ), and the credibility of research results (Levitt et al., 2017 ). This, in turn, can be detrimental to the field (Nind et al., 2015 ), journal publication (Ketchen et al., 2008 ; Ezeh et al., 2010 ), and attempts to address public social issues through psychological research (Dweck, 2017 ). This is especially important given the now well-known replication crisis the field is facing (Earp and Trafimow, 2015 ; Hengartner, 2018 ).

Due to this lack of clarity on method use and the potential impact of inept use of research methods, the aim of this study was to explore the use of research methods in the field of psychology through a review of journal publications. Chaichanasakul et al. ( 2011 ) identify reviewing articles as the opportunity to examine the development, growth and progress of a research area and overall quality of a journal. Studies such as Lee et al. ( 1999 ) as well as Bluhm et al. ( 2011 ) review of qualitative methods has attempted to synthesis the use of research methods and indicated the growth of qualitative research in American and European journals. Research has also focused on the use of research methods in specific sub-disciplines of psychology, for example, in the field of Industrial and Organisational psychology Coetzee and Van Zyl ( 2014 ) found that South African publications tend to consist of cross-sectional quantitative research methods with underrepresented longitudinal studies. Qualitative studies were found to make up 21% of the articles published from 1995 to 2015 in a similar study by O'Neil and Koekemoer ( 2016 ). Other methods in health psychology, such as Mixed methods research have also been reportedly growing in popularity (O'Cathain, 2009 ).

A broad overview of the use of research methods in the field of psychology as a whole is however, not available in the literature. Therefore, our research focused on answering what research methods are being used, how these methods are being used and for what topics in practice (i.e., journal publications) in order to provide a general perspective of method used in psychology publication. We synthesised the collected data into the following format: research topic [areas of scientific discourse in a field or the current needs of a population (Bittermann and Fischer, 2018 )], method [data-gathering tools (Nieuwenhuis, 2016 )], sampling [elements chosen from a population to partake in research (Ritchie et al., 2009 )], data collection [techniques and research strategy (Maree, 2016 )], and data analysis [discovering information by examining bodies of data (Ktepi, 2016 )]. A systematised review of recent articles (2013 to 2017) collected from five different journals in the field of psychological research was conducted.

Grant and Booth ( 2009 ) describe systematised reviews as the review of choice for post-graduate studies, which is employed using some elements of a systematic review and seldom more than one or two databases to catalogue studies after a comprehensive literature search. The aspects used in this systematised review that are similar to that of a systematic review were a full search within the chosen database and data produced in tabular form (Grant and Booth, 2009 ).

Sample sizes and timelines vary in systematised reviews (see Lowe and Moore, 2014 ; Pericall and Taylor, 2014 ; Barr-Walker, 2017 ). With no clear parameters identified in the literature (see Grant and Booth, 2009 ), the sample size of this study was determined by the purpose of the sample (Strydom, 2011 ), and time and cost constraints (Maree and Pietersen, 2016 ). Thus, a non-probability purposive sample (Ritchie et al., 2009 ) of the top five psychology journals from 2013 to 2017 was included in this research study. Per Lee ( 2015 ) American Psychological Association (APA) recommends the use of the most up-to-date sources for data collection with consideration of the context of the research study. As this research study focused on the most recent trends in research methods used in the broad field of psychology, the identified time frame was deemed appropriate.

Psychology journals were only included if they formed part of the top five English journals in the miscellaneous psychology domain of the Scimago Journal and Country Rank (Scimago Journal & Country Rank, 2017 ). The Scimago Journal and Country Rank provides a yearly updated list of publicly accessible journal and country-specific indicators derived from the Scopus® database (Scopus, 2017b ) by means of the Scimago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator developed by Scimago from the algorithm Google PageRank™ (Scimago Journal & Country Rank, 2017 ). Scopus is the largest global database of abstracts and citations from peer-reviewed journals (Scopus, 2017a ). Reasons for the development of the Scimago Journal and Country Rank list was to allow researchers to assess scientific domains, compare country rankings, and compare and analyse journals (Scimago Journal & Country Rank, 2017 ), which supported the aim of this research study. Additionally, the goals of the journals had to focus on topics in psychology in general with no preference to specific research methods and have full-text access to articles.

The following list of top five journals in 2018 fell within the abovementioned inclusion criteria (1) Australian Journal of Psychology, (2) British Journal of Psychology, (3) Europe's Journal of Psychology, (4) International Journal of Psychology and lastly the (5) Journal of Psychology Applied and Interdisciplinary.

Journals were excluded from this systematised review if no full-text versions of their articles were available, if journals explicitly stated a publication preference for certain research methods, or if the journal only published articles in a specific discipline of psychological research (for example, industrial psychology, clinical psychology etc.).

The researchers followed a procedure (see Figure 1 ) adapted from that of Ferreira et al. ( 2016 ) for systematised reviews. Data collection and categorisation commenced on 4 December 2017 and continued until 30 June 2019. All the data was systematically collected and coded manually (Grant and Booth, 2009 ) with an independent person acting as co-coder. Codes of interest included the research topic, method used, the design used, sampling method, and methodology (the method used for data collection and data analysis). These codes were derived from the wording in each article. Themes were created based on the derived codes and checked by the co-coder. Lastly, these themes were catalogued into a table as per the systematised review design.

Systematised review procedure.

According to Johnston et al. ( 2019 ), “literature screening, selection, and data extraction/analyses” (p. 7) are specifically tailored to the aim of a review. Therefore, the steps followed in a systematic review must be reported in a comprehensive and transparent manner. The chosen systematised design adhered to the rigour expected from systematic reviews with regard to full search and data produced in tabular form (Grant and Booth, 2009 ). The rigorous application of the systematic review is, therefore discussed in relation to these two elements.

Firstly, to ensure a comprehensive search, this research study promoted review transparency by following a clear protocol outlined according to each review stage before collecting data (Johnston et al., 2019 ). This protocol was similar to that of Ferreira et al. ( 2016 ) and approved by three research committees/stakeholders and the researchers (Johnston et al., 2019 ). The eligibility criteria for article inclusion was based on the research question and clearly stated, and the process of inclusion was recorded on an electronic spreadsheet to create an evidence trail (Bandara et al., 2015 ; Johnston et al., 2019 ). Microsoft Excel spreadsheets are a popular tool for review studies and can increase the rigour of the review process (Bandara et al., 2015 ). Screening for appropriate articles for inclusion forms an integral part of a systematic review process (Johnston et al., 2019 ). This step was applied to two aspects of this research study: the choice of eligible journals and articles to be included. Suitable journals were selected by the first author and reviewed by the second and third authors. Initially, all articles from the chosen journals were included. Then, by process of elimination, those irrelevant to the research aim, i.e., interview articles or discussions etc., were excluded.

To ensure rigourous data extraction, data was first extracted by one reviewer, and an independent person verified the results for completeness and accuracy (Johnston et al., 2019 ). The research question served as a guide for efficient, organised data extraction (Johnston et al., 2019 ). Data was categorised according to the codes of interest, along with article identifiers for audit trails such as authors, title and aims of articles. The categorised data was based on the aim of the review (Johnston et al., 2019 ) and synthesised in tabular form under methods used, how these methods were used, and for what topics in the field of psychology.

The initial search produced a total of 1,145 articles from the 5 journals identified. Inclusion and exclusion criteria resulted in a final sample of 999 articles ( Figure 2 ). Articles were co-coded into 84 codes, from which 10 themes were derived ( Table 1 ).

Journal article frequency.

Codes used to form themes (research topics).

These 10 themes represent the topic section of our research question ( Figure 3 ). All these topics except, for the final one, psychological practice , were found to concur with the research areas in psychology as identified by Weiten ( 2010 ). These research areas were chosen to represent the derived codes as they provided broad definitions that allowed for clear, concise categorisation of the vast amount of data. Article codes were categorised under particular themes/topics if they adhered to the research area definitions created by Weiten ( 2010 ). It is important to note that these areas of research do not refer to specific disciplines in psychology, such as industrial psychology; but to broader fields that may encompass sub-interests of these disciplines.

Topic frequency (international sample).

In the case of developmental psychology , researchers conduct research into human development from childhood to old age. Social psychology includes research on behaviour governed by social drivers. Researchers in the field of educational psychology study how people learn and the best way to teach them. Health psychology aims to determine the effect of psychological factors on physiological health. Physiological psychology , on the other hand, looks at the influence of physiological aspects on behaviour. Experimental psychology is not the only theme that uses experimental research and focuses on the traditional core topics of psychology (for example, sensation). Cognitive psychology studies the higher mental processes. Psychometrics is concerned with measuring capacity or behaviour. Personality research aims to assess and describe consistency in human behaviour (Weiten, 2010 ). The final theme of psychological practice refers to the experiences, techniques, and interventions employed by practitioners, researchers, and academia in the field of psychology.

Articles under these themes were further subdivided into methodologies: method, sampling, design, data collection, and data analysis. The categorisation was based on information stated in the articles and not inferred by the researchers. Data were compiled into two sets of results presented in this article. The first set addresses the aim of this study from the perspective of the topics identified. The second set of results represents a broad overview of the results from the perspective of the methodology employed. The second set of results are discussed in this article, while the first set is presented in table format. The discussion thus provides a broad overview of methods use in psychology (across all themes), while the table format provides readers with in-depth insight into methods used in the individual themes identified. We believe that presenting the data from both perspectives allow readers a broad understanding of the results. Due a large amount of information that made up our results, we followed Cichocka and Jost ( 2014 ) in simplifying our results. Please note that the numbers indicated in the table in terms of methodology differ from the total number of articles. Some articles employed more than one method/sampling technique/design/data collection method/data analysis in their studies.

What follows is the results for what methods are used, how these methods are used, and which topics in psychology they are applied to . Percentages are reported to the second decimal in order to highlight small differences in the occurrence of methodology.

Firstly, with regard to the research methods used, our results show that researchers are more likely to use quantitative research methods (90.22%) compared to all other research methods. Qualitative research was the second most common research method but only made up about 4.79% of the general method usage. Reviews occurred almost as much as qualitative studies (3.91%), as the third most popular method. Mixed-methods research studies (0.98%) occurred across most themes, whereas multi-method research was indicated in only one study and amounted to 0.10% of the methods identified. The specific use of each method in the topics identified is shown in Table 2 and Figure 4 .

Research methods in psychology.

Research method frequency in topics.

Secondly, in the case of how these research methods are employed , our study indicated the following.

Sampling −78.34% of the studies in the collected articles did not specify a sampling method. From the remainder of the studies, 13 types of sampling methods were identified. These sampling methods included broad categorisation of a sample as, for example, a probability or non-probability sample. General samples of convenience were the methods most likely to be applied (10.34%), followed by random sampling (3.51%), snowball sampling (2.73%), and purposive (1.37%) and cluster sampling (1.27%). The remainder of the sampling methods occurred to a more limited extent (0–1.0%). See Table 3 and Figure 5 for sampling methods employed in each topic.

Sampling use in the field of psychology.

Sampling method frequency in topics.

Designs were categorised based on the articles' statement thereof. Therefore, it is important to note that, in the case of quantitative studies, non-experimental designs (25.55%) were often indicated due to a lack of experiments and any other indication of design, which, according to Laher ( 2016 ), is a reasonable categorisation. Non-experimental designs should thus be compared with experimental designs only in the description of data, as it could include the use of correlational/cross-sectional designs, which were not overtly stated by the authors. For the remainder of the research methods, “not stated” (7.12%) was assigned to articles without design types indicated.

From the 36 identified designs the most popular designs were cross-sectional (23.17%) and experimental (25.64%), which concurred with the high number of quantitative studies. Longitudinal studies (3.80%), the third most popular design, was used in both quantitative and qualitative studies. Qualitative designs consisted of ethnography (0.38%), interpretative phenomenological designs/phenomenology (0.28%), as well as narrative designs (0.28%). Studies that employed the review method were mostly categorised as “not stated,” with the most often stated review designs being systematic reviews (0.57%). The few mixed method studies employed exploratory, explanatory (0.09%), and concurrent designs (0.19%), with some studies referring to separate designs for the qualitative and quantitative methods. The one study that identified itself as a multi-method study used a longitudinal design. Please see how these designs were employed in each specific topic in Table 4 , Figure 6 .

Design use in the field of psychology.

Design frequency in topics.

Data collection and analysis —data collection included 30 methods, with the data collection method most often employed being questionnaires (57.84%). The experimental task (16.56%) was the second most preferred collection method, which included established or unique tasks designed by the researchers. Cognitive ability tests (6.84%) were also regularly used along with various forms of interviewing (7.66%). Table 5 and Figure 7 represent data collection use in the various topics. Data analysis consisted of 3,857 occurrences of data analysis categorised into ±188 various data analysis techniques shown in Table 6 and Figures 1 – 7 . Descriptive statistics were the most commonly used (23.49%) along with correlational analysis (17.19%). When using a qualitative method, researchers generally employed thematic analysis (0.52%) or different forms of analysis that led to coding and the creation of themes. Review studies presented few data analysis methods, with most studies categorising their results. Mixed method and multi-method studies followed the analysis methods identified for the qualitative and quantitative studies included.

Data collection in the field of psychology.

Data collection frequency in topics.

Data analysis in the field of psychology.

Results of the topics researched in psychology can be seen in the tables, as previously stated in this article. It is noteworthy that, of the 10 topics, social psychology accounted for 43.54% of the studies, with cognitive psychology the second most popular research topic at 16.92%. The remainder of the topics only occurred in 4.0–7.0% of the articles considered. A list of the included 999 articles is available under the section “View Articles” on the following website: https://methodgarden.xtrapolate.io/ . This website was created by Scholtz et al. ( 2019 ) to visually present a research framework based on this Article's results.

This systematised review categorised full-length articles from five international journals across the span of 5 years to provide insight into the use of research methods in the field of psychology. Results indicated what methods are used how these methods are being used and for what topics (why) in the included sample of articles. The results should be seen as providing insight into method use and by no means a comprehensive representation of the aforementioned aim due to the limited sample. To our knowledge, this is the first research study to address this topic in this manner. Our discussion attempts to promote a productive way forward in terms of the key results for method use in psychology, especially in the field of academia (Holloway, 2008 ).

With regard to the methods used, our data stayed true to literature, finding only common research methods (Grant and Booth, 2009 ; Maree, 2016 ) that varied in the degree to which they were employed. Quantitative research was found to be the most popular method, as indicated by literature (Breen and Darlaston-Jones, 2010 ; Counsell and Harlow, 2017 ) and previous studies in specific areas of psychology (see Coetzee and Van Zyl, 2014 ). Its long history as the first research method (Leech et al., 2007 ) in the field of psychology as well as researchers' current application of mathematical approaches in their studies (Toomela, 2010 ) might contribute to its popularity today. Whatever the case may be, our results show that, despite the growth in qualitative research (Demuth, 2015 ; Smith and McGannon, 2018 ), quantitative research remains the first choice for article publication in these journals. Despite the included journals indicating openness to articles that apply any research methods. This finding may be due to qualitative research still being seen as a new method (Burman and Whelan, 2011 ) or reviewers' standards being higher for qualitative studies (Bluhm et al., 2011 ). Future research is encouraged into the possible biasness in publication of research methods, additionally further investigation with a different sample into the proclaimed growth of qualitative research may also provide different results.

Review studies were found to surpass that of multi-method and mixed method studies. To this effect Grant and Booth ( 2009 ), state that the increased awareness, journal contribution calls as well as its efficiency in procuring research funds all promote the popularity of reviews. The low frequency of mixed method studies contradicts the view in literature that it's the third most utilised research method (Tashakkori and Teddlie's, 2003 ). Its' low occurrence in this sample could be due to opposing views on mixing methods (Gunasekare, 2015 ) or that authors prefer publishing in mixed method journals, when using this method, or its relative novelty (Ivankova et al., 2016 ). Despite its low occurrence, the application of the mixed methods design in articles was methodologically clear in all cases which were not the case for the remainder of research methods.

Additionally, a substantial number of studies used a combination of methodologies that are not mixed or multi-method studies. Perceived fixed boundaries are according to literature often set aside, as confirmed by this result, in order to investigate the aim of a study, which could create a new and helpful way of understanding the world (Gunasekare, 2015 ). According to Toomela ( 2010 ), this is not unheard of and could be considered a form of “structural systemic science,” as in the case of qualitative methodology (observation) applied in quantitative studies (experimental design) for example. Based on this result, further research into this phenomenon as well as its implications for research methods such as multi and mixed methods is recommended.

Discerning how these research methods were applied, presented some difficulty. In the case of sampling, most studies—regardless of method—did mention some form of inclusion and exclusion criteria, but no definite sampling method. This result, along with the fact that samples often consisted of students from the researchers' own academic institutions, can contribute to literature and debates among academics (Peterson and Merunka, 2014 ; Laher, 2016 ). Samples of convenience and students as participants especially raise questions about the generalisability and applicability of results (Peterson and Merunka, 2014 ). This is because attention to sampling is important as inappropriate sampling can debilitate the legitimacy of interpretations (Onwuegbuzie and Collins, 2017 ). Future investigation into the possible implications of this reported popular use of convenience samples for the field of psychology as well as the reason for this use could provide interesting insight, and is encouraged by this study.

Additionally, and this is indicated in Table 6 , articles seldom report the research designs used, which highlights the pressing aspect of the lack of rigour in the included sample. Rigour with regards to the applied empirical method is imperative in promoting psychology as a science (American Psychological Association, 2020 ). Omitting parts of the research process in publication when it could have been used to inform others' research skills should be questioned, and the influence on the process of replicating results should be considered. Publications are often rejected due to a lack of rigour in the applied method and designs (Fonseca, 2013 ; Laher, 2016 ), calling for increased clarity and knowledge of method application. Replication is a critical part of any field of scientific research and requires the “complete articulation” of the study methods used (Drotar, 2010 , p. 804). The lack of thorough description could be explained by the requirements of certain journals to only report on certain aspects of a research process, especially with regard to the applied design (Laher, 20). However, naming aspects such as sampling and designs, is a requirement according to the APA's Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS-Quant) (Appelbaum et al., 2018 ). With very little information on how a study was conducted, authors lose a valuable opportunity to enhance research validity, enrich the knowledge of others, and contribute to the growth of psychology and methodology as a whole. In the case of this research study, it also restricted our results to only reported samples and designs, which indicated a preference for certain designs, such as cross-sectional designs for quantitative studies.

Data collection and analysis were for the most part clearly stated. A key result was the versatile use of questionnaires. Researchers would apply a questionnaire in various ways, for example in questionnaire interviews, online surveys, and written questionnaires across most research methods. This may highlight a trend for future research.

With regard to the topics these methods were employed for, our research study found a new field named “psychological practice.” This result may show the growing consciousness of researchers as part of the research process (Denzin and Lincoln, 2003 ), psychological practice, and knowledge generation. The most popular of these topics was social psychology, which is generously covered in journals and by learning societies, as testaments of the institutional support and richness social psychology has in the field of psychology (Chryssochoou, 2015 ). The APA's perspective on 2018 trends in psychology also identifies an increased amount of psychology focus on how social determinants are influencing people's health (Deangelis, 2017 ).

This study was not without limitations and the following should be taken into account. Firstly, this study used a sample of five specific journals to address the aim of the research study, despite general journal aims (as stated on journal websites), this inclusion signified a bias towards the research methods published in these specific journals only and limited generalisability. A broader sample of journals over a different period of time, or a single journal over a longer period of time might provide different results. A second limitation is the use of Excel spreadsheets and an electronic system to log articles, which was a manual process and therefore left room for error (Bandara et al., 2015 ). To address this potential issue, co-coding was performed to reduce error. Lastly, this article categorised data based on the information presented in the article sample; there was no interpretation of what methodology could have been applied or whether the methods stated adhered to the criteria for the methods used. Thus, a large number of articles that did not clearly indicate a research method or design could influence the results of this review. However, this in itself was also a noteworthy result. Future research could review research methods of a broader sample of journals with an interpretive review tool that increases rigour. Additionally, the authors also encourage the future use of systematised review designs as a way to promote a concise procedure in applying this design.

Our research study presented the use of research methods for published articles in the field of psychology as well as recommendations for future research based on these results. Insight into the complex questions identified in literature, regarding what methods are used how these methods are being used and for what topics (why) was gained. This sample preferred quantitative methods, used convenience sampling and presented a lack of rigorous accounts for the remaining methodologies. All methodologies that were clearly indicated in the sample were tabulated to allow researchers insight into the general use of methods and not only the most frequently used methods. The lack of rigorous account of research methods in articles was represented in-depth for each step in the research process and can be of vital importance to address the current replication crisis within the field of psychology. Recommendations for future research aimed to motivate research into the practical implications of the results for psychology, for example, publication bias and the use of convenience samples.

Ethics Statement

This study was cleared by the North-West University Health Research Ethics Committee: NWU-00115-17-S1.

Author Contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Is Psychology a Science?

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

Psychology is a science because it employs systematic methods of observation, experimentation, and data analysis to understand and predict behavior and mental processes, grounded in empirical evidence and subjected to peer review.

Science uses an empirical approach. Empiricism (founded by John Locke) states that the only source of knowledge is our senses – e.g., sight, hearing, etc.

In psychology, empiricism refers to the belief that knowledge is derived from observable, measurable experiences and evidence, rather than from intuition or speculation.

This was in contrast to the existing view that knowledge could be gained solely through the powers of reason and logical argument (known as rationalism).  Thus, empiricism is the view that all knowledge is based on or may come from experience.

Through gaining knowledge through experience, the empirical approach quickly became scientific and greatly influenced the development of physics and chemistry in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The idea that knowledge should be gained through experience, i.e., empirically, turned into a method of inquiry that used careful observation and experiments to gather facts and evidence.

The nature of scientific inquiry may be thought of at two levels:

1. That to do with theory and the foundation of hypotheses. 2. And actual empirical methods of inquiry (i.e. experiments, observations)

The prime empirical method of inquiry in science is the experiment.

The key features of the experiment are control over variables ( independent, dependent , and extraneous ), careful, objective measurement, and establishing cause and effect relationships.

Features of Science

Empirical evidence.

• Refers to data being collected through direct observation or experiment.
• Empirical evidence does not rely on argument or belief.
• Instead, experiments and observations are carried out carefully and reported in detail so that other investigators can repeat and attempt to verify the work.

Objectivity

• Researchers should remain value-free when studying; they should try to remain unbiased in their investigations. I.e., Researchers are not influenced by personal feelings and experiences.
• Objectivity means that all sources of bias are minimized and that personal or subjective ideas are eliminated. The pursuit of science implies that the facts will speak for themselves, even if they differ from what the investigator hoped.
• All extraneous variables need to be controlled to establish the cause (IV) and effect (DV).

Hypothesis testing

• E.g., a statement made at the beginning of an investigation that serves as a prediction and is derived from a theory. There are different types of hypotheses (null and alternative), which need to be stated in a form that can be tested (i.e., operationalized and unambiguous).

Replication

• This refers to whether a particular method and finding can be repeated with different/same people and/or on different occasions to see if the results are similar.
• If a dramatic discovery is reported, but other scientists cannot replicate it, it will not be accepted.
• If we get the same results repeatedly under the same conditions, we can be sure of their accuracy beyond a reasonable doubt.
• This gives us confidence that the results are reliable and can be used to build up a body of knowledge or a theory: which is vital in establishing a scientific theory.

Predictability

• We should aim to be able to predict future behavior from the findings of our research.

The Scientific Process

Before the twentieth century, science largely used induction principles – making discoveries about the world through accurate observations, and formulating theories based on the regularities observed.

Newton’s Laws are an example of this. He observed the behavior of physical objects (e.g., apples) and produced laws that made sense of what he observed.

The scientific process is now based on the hypothetico-deductive model proposed by Karl Popper (1935).  Popper suggested that theories/laws about the world should come first, and these should be used to generate expectations/hypotheses, which observations and experiments can falsify.

As Popper pointed out, falsification is the only way to be certain: ‘No amount of observations of white swans can allow the conclusion that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

Darwin’s theory of evolution is an example of this. He formulated a theory and tested its propositions by observing animals in nature.  He specifically sought to collect data to prove his theory / disprove it.

Thomas Kuhn argued that science does not evolve gradually towards truth, science has a paradigm that remains constant before going through a paradigm shift when current theories can’t explain some phenomenon, and someone proposes a new theory. Science tends to go through these shifts; therefore, psychology is not a science as it has no agreed paradigm.

There are many conflicting approaches, and the subject matter of Psychology is so diverse; therefore, researchers in different fields have little in common.

Psychology is really a very new science, with most advances happening over the past 150 years or so.  However, it can be traced back to ancient Greece, 400 – 500 years BC.  The emphasis was a philosophical one, with great thinkers such as Socrates influencing Plato, who in turn influenced Aristotle.

Plato argued that there was a clear distinction between body and soul, believed very strongly in the influence of individual differences on behavior, and played a key role in developing the notion of “mental health,” believing that the mind needed stimulation from the arts to keep it alive.

Aristotle firmly believed that the body strongly affected the mind – you might say he was an early biopsychologist.

Psychology as a science took a “back seat” until Descartes (1596 – 1650) wrote in the 17th century. He believed strongly in the concept of consciousness, maintaining that it was that that separated us from animals.

He did, however, believe that our bodies could influence our consciousness and that the beginnings of these interactions were in the pineal gland – we know now that this is probably NOT the case!

From this influential work came other important philosophies about psychology, including the work by Spinoza (1632 – 1677) and Leibnitz (1646 – 1716). But there still was no single, scientific, unified psychology as a separate discipline (you could certainly argue that there still isn’t”t!).

When asked, “Who is the parent of psychology?” many people answer, “Freud.” Whether this is the case or not is open to debate, but if we were to ask who the parent of experimental psychology is, few would likely respond similarly.  So, where did modern experimental psychology come from, and why?

Psychology took so long to emerge as a scientific discipline because it needed time to consolidate.  Understanding behavior, thoughts, and feelings are not easy, which may explain why it was largely ignored between ancient Greek times and the 16th century.

But tired of years of speculation, theory, and argument, and bearing in mind Aristotle’s plea for scientific investigation to support the theory, psychology as a scientific discipline began to emerge in the late 1800s.

Wilheim Wundt developed the first psychology lab in 1879.  Introspection was used, but systematically (i.e., methodologically). It was really a place from which to start thinking about how to employ scientific methods to investigate behavior.

The classic movement in psychology to adopt these strategies was the behaviorists, who were renowned for relying on controlled laboratory experiments and rejecting any unseen or subconscious forces as causes of behavior. 

And later, cognitive psychologists adopted this rigorous (i.e., careful), scientific, lab-based approach.

Psychological Approaches

Psychoanalysis has great explanatory power and understanding of behavior. Still, it has been accused of only explaining behavior after the event, not predicting what will happen in advance, and being unfalsifiable.

Some have argued that psychoanalysis has approached the status more of a religion than a science. Still, it is not alone in being accused of being unfalsifiable (evolutionary theory has, too – why is anything the way it is? Because it has evolved that way!), and like theories that are difficult to refute – the possibility exists that it is actually right.

Kline (1984) argues that psychoanalytic theory can be broken down into testable hypotheses and tested scientifically. For example, Scodel (1957) postulated that orally dependent men would prefer larger breasts (a positive correlation) but, in fact, found the opposite (a negative correlation).

Although Freudian theory could be used to explain this finding (through reaction formation – the subject showing exactly the opposite of their unconscious impulses!), Kline has nevertheless pointed out that no significant correlation would have refuted the theory.

Behaviorism has parsimonious (i.e., economic / cost-cutting) theories of learning, using a few simple principles (reinforcement, behavior shaping, generalization, etc.) to explain a wide variety of behavior from language acquisition to moral development.

It advanced bold, precise, and refutable hypotheses (such as Thorndike’s law of effect ) and possessed a hard core of central assumptions such as determinism from the environment (it was only when this assumption faced overwhelming criticism by the cognitive and ethological theorists that the behaviorist paradigm/model was overthrown).

Behaviorists firmly believed in the scientific principles of determinism and orderliness. They thus came up with fairly consistent predictions about when an animal was likely to respond (although they admitted that perfect prediction for any individual was impossible).

The behaviorists used their predictions to control the behavior of both animals (pigeons trained to detect life jackets) and humans (behavioral therapies), and indeed Skinner , in his book Walden Two (1948), described a society controlled according to behaviorist principles.

Cognitive psychology – adopts a scientific approach to unobservable mental processes by advancing precise models and conducting experiments on behavior to confirm or refute them.

Full understanding, prediction, and control in psychology are probably unobtainable due to the huge complexity of environmental, mental, and biological influences upon even the simplest behavior (i.e., all extraneous variables cannot be controlled).

You will see, therefore, that there is no easy answer to the question, “is psychology a science?”. But many approaches of psychology do meet the accepted requirements of the scientific method, whilst others appear to be more doubtful in this respect.

Alternatives

However, some psychologists argue that psychology should not be a science. There are alternatives to empiricism, such as rational research, argument, and belief.

The humanistic approach (another alternative) values private, subjective conscious experience and argues for the rejection of science.

The humanistic approach argues that objective reality is less important than a person’s subjective perception and subjective understanding of the world. Because of this, Carl Rogers and Maslow placed little value on scientific psychology, especially using the scientific laboratory to investigate human and other animal behavior.

A person’s subjective experience of the world is an important and influential factor in their behavior. Only by seeing the world from the individual’s point of view can we really understand why they act the way they do. This is what the humanistic approach aims to do.

Humanism is a psychological perspective that emphasizes the study of the whole person. Humanistic psychologists look at human behavior not only through the eyes of the observer but through the eyes of the person doing the behavior. Humanistic psychologists believe that an individual’s behavior is connected to his inner feelings and self-image.

The humanistic approach in psychology deliberately steps away from a scientific viewpoint, rejecting determinism in favor of free will, aiming to arrive at a unique and in-depth understanding. The humanistic approach does not have an orderly set of theories (although it does have some core assumptions).

It is not interested in predicting and controlling people’s behavior – the individuals themselves are the only ones who can and should do that.

Miller (1969), in “Psychology as a Means of Promoting Human Welfare,” criticizes the controlling view of psychology, suggesting that understanding should be the main goal of the subject as a science since he asks who will do the controlling and whose interests will be served by it?

Humanistic psychologists rejected a rigorous scientific approach to psychology because they saw it as dehumanizing and unable to capture the richness of conscious experience.

In many ways, the rejection of scientific psychology in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was a backlash to the dominance of the behaviorist approach in North American psychology.

Common Sense Views of Behavior

In certain ways, everyone is a psychologist. This does not mean that everyone has been formally trained to study and be trained in psychology. 

People have common sense views of the world, of other people, and of themselves. These common-sense views may come from personal experience, from our upbringing as a child, and through culture, etc.

People have common-sense views about the causes of their own and other people’s behavior, personality characteristics they and others possess, what other people should do, how to bring up your children, and many more aspects of psychology.

Informal psychologists acquire common-sense knowledge in a rather subjective (i.e., unreliable) and anecdotal way.  Common-sense views about people are rarely based on systematic (i.e., logical) evidence and are sometimes based on a single experience or observation.

Racial or religious prejudices may reflect what seems like common sense within a group of people. However, prejudicial beliefs rarely stand up to what is actually the case.

Common sense, then, is something that everybody uses in their day-to-day lives, guides decisions and influences how we interact with one another.

However, because it is not based on systematic evidence or derived from scientific inquiry, it may be misleading and lead to one group of people treating others unfairly and in a discriminatory way.

Limitations of Scientific Psychology

Despite having a scientific methodology worked out (we think), some further problems and arguments doubt psychology is ever a science.

Limitations may refer to the subject matter (e.g., overt behavior versus subjective, private experience), objectivity, generality, testability, ecological validity, ethical issues, and philosophical debates, etc.

Science assumes that there are laws of human behavior that apply to each person. Therefore, science takes both a deterministic and reductionist approach.

Science studies overt behavior because overt behavior is objectively observable and can be measured, allowing different psychologists to record behavior and agree on what has been observed. This means that evidence can be collected to test a theory about people.

Scientific laws are generalizable, but psychological explanations are often restricted to specific times and places. Because psychology studies (mostly) people, it studies (indirectly) the effects of social and cultural changes on behavior.

Psychology does not go on in a social vacuum. Behavior changes over time and in different situations. These factors, and individual differences, make research findings reliable for a limited time only.

Are traditional scientific methods appropriate for studying human behavior? When psychologists operationalize their IV, it is highly likely that this is reductionist, mechanistic, subjective, or just wrong.

Operationalizing variables refers to how you will define and measure a specific variable as it is used in your study. For example, a biopsychologist may operationalize stress as an increased heart rate. Still, it may be that in doing this, we are removed from the human experience of what we are studying. The same goes for causality.

Experiments are keen to establish that X causes Y, but taking this deterministic view means that we ignore extraneous variables and the fact that at a different time, in a different place, we probably would not be influenced by X. There are so many variables that influence human behavior that it is impossible to control them effectively. The issue of ecological validity ties in really nicely here.

Objectivity is impossible. It is a huge problem in psychology, as it involves humans studying humans, and it is very difficult to study people’s behavior in an unbiased fashion.

Moreover, in terms of a general philosophy of science, we find it hard to be objective because a theoretical standpoint influences us (Freud is a good example). The observer and the observed are members of the same species are this creates problems of reflectivity.

A behaviorist would never examine a phobia and think in terms of unconscious conflict as a cause, just like Freud would never explain it as a behavior acquired through operant conditioning.

This particular viewpoint that a scientist has is called a paradigm (Kuhn, 1970). Kuhn argues that most scientific disciplines have one predominant paradigm that the vast majority of scientists subscribe to.

Anything with several paradigms (e.g., models – theories) is a pre-science until it becomes more unified. With a myriad of paradigms within psychology, it is not the case that we have any universal laws of human behavior. Kuhn would most definitely argue that psychology is not a science.

Verification (i.e., proof) may be impossible. We can never truly prove a hypothesis; we may find results to support it until the end of time, but we will never be 100% confident that it is true.

It could be disproved at any moment. The main driving force behind this particular grumble is Karl Popper, the famous philosopher of science and advocator of falsificationism.

Take the famous Popperian example hypothesis: “All swans are white.” How do we know for sure that we will not see a black, green, or hot pink swan in the future? So even if there has never been a sighting of a non-white swan, we still haven’t really proven our hypothesis.

Popper argues that the best hypotheses are those which we can falsify – disprove. If we know something is not true, then we know something for sure.

Testability: much of the subject matter in psychology is unobservable (e.g., memory) and, therefore, cannot be accurately measured. The fact that there are so many variables that influence human behavior that it is impossible to control the variables effectively.

So, are we any closer to understanding a) what science is and b) if psychology is a science? Unlikely. There is no definitive philosophy of science and no flawless scientific methodology.

When people use the term “Scientific,” we all have a general schema of what they mean, but when we break it down in the way that we just have done, the picture is less certain. What is science? It depends on your philosophy. Is psychology a science? It depends on your definition. So – why bother, and how do we conclude all this?

Slife and Williams (1995) have tried to answer these two questions:

1) We must at least strive for scientific methods because we need a rigorous discipline. If we abandon our search for unified methods, we’ll lose a sense of what psychology is (if we knew it in the first place).

2) We need to keep trying to develop scientific methods that are suitable for studying human behavior – it may be that the methods adopted by the natural sciences are not appropriate for us.

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Moral Psychology: Empirical Approaches

Moral psychology investigates human functioning in moral contexts, and asks how these results may impact debate in ethical theory. This work is necessarily interdisciplinary, drawing on both the empirical resources of the human sciences and the conceptual resources of philosophical ethics. The present article discusses several topics that illustrate this type of inquiry: thought experiments, responsibility, character, egoism v . altruism, and moral disagreement.

1. Introduction: What is Moral Psychology?

2. thought experiments and the methods of ethics, 3. moral responsibility, 4. virtue ethics and skepticism about character, 5. egoism vs. altruism, 6. moral disagreement, 7. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries.

Contemporary moral psychology—the study of human thought and behavior in ethical contexts—is resolutely interdisciplinary: psychologists freely draw on philosophical theories to help structure their empirical research, while philosophers freely draw on empirical findings from psychology to help structure their theories. [ 1 ]

While this extensive interdisciplinarity is a fairly recent development (with few exceptions, most of the relevant work dates from the past quarter century), it should not be a surprising development. From antiquity to the present, philosophers have not been bashful about making empirical claims, and many of these empirical claims have been claims about human psychology (Doris & Stich 2005). It is therefore unremarkable that, with the emergence of scientific psychology over the past century and a half, some of these philosophers would think to check their work against the systematic findings of psychologists (hopefully, while taking special care to avoid being misled by scientific controversy; see Doris 2015, Chapter 3; Machery & Doris forthcoming).

Similarly, at least since the demise of behaviorism, psychologists have been keenly interested in normative phenomena in general and ethical phenomena in particular. It is therefore unremarkable that some of these psychologists would seek to enrich their theoretical frameworks with the conceptual resources of a field intensively focused on normative phenomena: philosophical ethics. As a result, the field demarcated by “moral psychology”, routinely involves an admixture of empirical and normative inquiry, pursued by both philosophers and psychologists—increasingly, in the form of collaborative efforts involving practitioners from both fields.

For philosophers, the special interest of this interdisciplinary inquiry lies in the ways moral psychology may help adjudicate between competing ethical theories. The plausibility of its associated moral psychology is not, of course, the only dimension on which an ethical theory may be evaluated; equally important are normative questions having to do with how well a theory fares when compared to important convictions about such things as justice, fairness, and the good life. Such questions have been, and will continue to be, of central importance for philosophical ethics. Nonetheless, it is commonly supposed that an ethical theory committed to an impoverished or inaccurate conception of moral psychology is at a serious competitive disadvantage. As Bernard Williams (1973, 1985; cf. Flanagan 1991) forcefully argued, an ethical conception that commends relationships, commitments, or life projects that are at odds with the sorts of attachments that can be reasonably expected to take root in and vivify actual human lives is an ethical conception with—at best—a very tenuous claim to our assent.

With this in mind, problems in ethical theory choice making reference to moral psychology can be framed by two related inquiries:

• What empirical claims about human psychology do advocates of competing perspectives on ethical theory assert or presuppose?
• How empirically well supported are these claims?

The first question is one of philosophical scholarship: what are the psychological commitments of various positions in philosophical ethics? The second question takes us beyond the corridors of philosophy departments and to the sorts of questions asked, and sometimes answered, by the human sciences, including psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, cognitive science, linguistics and neuroscience. Thus, contemporary moral psychology is methodologically pluralistic : it aims to answer philosophical questions, but in an empirically responsible way.

However, it will sometimes be difficult to tell which claims in philosophical ethics require empirical substantiation. Partly, this is because it is sometimes unclear whether, and to what extent, a contention counts as empirically assessable. Consider questions regarding “normal functioning” in mental health care: are the answers to these questions statistical, or evaluative (Boorse 1975; Fulford 1989; Murphy 2006)? For example, is “normal” mental health simply the psychological condition of most people, or is it good mental health? If the former, the issue is, at least in principle, empirically decidable. If the latter, the issues must be decided, if they can be decided, by arguments about value.

Additionally, philosophers have not always been explicit about whether, and to what extent, they are making empirical claims. For example, are their depictions of moral character meant to identify psychological features of actual persons, or to articulate ideals that need not be instantiated in actual human psychologies? Such questions will of course be complicated by the inevitable diversity of philosophical opinion.

In every instance, therefore, the first task is to carefully document a theory’s empirically assessable claims, whether they are explicit or, as may often be the case, tacit. Once claims apt for empirical assessment have been located, the question becomes one of identifying any relevant empirical literatures. The next job is to assess those literatures, in an attempt to determine what conclusions can be responsibly drawn from them. Science, particularly social science, being what it is, many conclusions will be provisional; the philosophical moral psychologist must be prepared to adjudicate controversies in other fields, or offer informed conjecture regarding future findings. Often, the empirical record will be crucially incomplete. In such cases, philosophers may be forced to engage in empirically disciplined conjecture, or even to engage in their own empirical work, as some philosophers are beginning to do. [ 2 ]

When the philosophical positions have been isolated, and putatively relevant empirical literatures assessed, we can begin to evaluate the plausibility of the philosophical moral psychology: Is the speculative picture of psychological functioning that informs some region of ethical theory compatible with the empirical picture that emerges from systematic observation? In short, is the philosophical picture empirically adequate ? If it is determined that the philosophical conception is empirically adequate, the result is vindicatory . Conversely, if the philosophical moral psychology in question is found to be empirically in adequate, the result is revisionary , compelling alteration, or even rejection, of those elements of the philosophical theory presupposing the problematic moral psychology. The process will often be comparative . Theory choice in moral psychology, like other theory choice, involves tradeoffs, and while an empirically undersupported approach may not be decisively eliminated from contention on empirical grounds alone, it may come to be seen as less attractive than theoretical options with firmer empirical foundations.

The winds driving the sort of disciplinary cross-pollination we describe do not blow in one direction. As philosophers writing for an encyclopedia of philosophy, we are naturally concerned with the ways empirical research might shape, or re-shape, philosophical ethics. But philosophical reflection may likewise influence empirical research, since such research is often driven by philosophical suppositions that may be more or less philosophically sound. The best interdisciplinary conversations, then, should benefit both parties. To illustrate the dialectical process we have described, we will consider a variety of topics in moral psychology. Our primary concerns will be philosophical: What are some of the most central problems in philosophical moral psychology, and how might they be resolved? However, as the hybrid nature of our topic invites us to do, we will pursue these questions in an interdisciplinary spirit, and are hopeful that our remarks will also engage interested scientists. Hopefully, the result will be a broad sense of the problems and methods that will structure research on moral psychology during the 21 st century.

“Intuition pumps” or “thought experiments” have long been well-used items in the philosopher’s toolbox (Dennett 1984: 17–18; Stuart et al. 2018). Typically, a thought experiment presents an example, often a hypothetical example, in order to elicit some philosophically telling response. If a thought experiment is successful, it may be concluded that competing theories must account for the resulting response. These responses are supposed to serve an evidential role in philosophical theory choice; if you like, they can be understood as data competing theories must accommodate. [ 3 ] If an appropriate audience’s ethical responses to a thought experiment conflict with the response a theory prescribes for the case, the theory has suffered a counterexample.

The question of whose responses “count” philosophically (or, who is the “appropriate” audience) has been answered in a variety of ways, but for many philosophers, the intended audience for thought experiments seems to be some species of “ordinary folk” (see Jackson 1998: 118, 129; Jackson & Pettit 1995: 22–9; Lewis 1989: 126–9). Of course, the relevant folk must possess such cognitive attainments as are required to understand the case at issue; very young children are probably not an ideal audience for thought experiments. Accordingly, some philosophers may insist that the relevant responses are the considered judgments of people with the training required to see “what is at stake philosophically”. But if the responses are to help adjudicate between competing theories, the responders must be more or less theoretically neutral, and this sort of neutrality is rather likely to be vitiated by philosophical education. A dilemma emerges. On the one hand, philosophically naïve subjects may be thought to lack the erudition required to grasp the philosophical stakes. On the other, with increasing philosophical sophistication comes, very likely, philosophical partiality; one audience is naïve, and the other prejudiced. [ 4 ]

However exactly the philosophically relevant audience is specified, there are empirical questions that must be addressed in determining the philosophical potency of a thought experiment. In particular, when deciding what philosophical weight to give a response, philosophers need to determine its origins . What features of the example are implicated in a given judgment—are people reacting to the substance of the case, or the style of exposition? What features of the audience are implicated in their reaction—do different demographic groups respond to the example differently? Are there factors in the environment that are affecting people’s intuitive judgments? Does the order in which people consider examples affect their judgments? Such questions raise the following concern: judgments about thought experiments dealing with moral issues might be strongly influenced by ethically irrelevant characteristics of the example or the audience or the environment or the order of presentation. Whether a characteristic is ethically relevant is a matter for philosophical discussion, but determining the status of a particular thought experiment also requires empirical investigation of its causally relevant characteristics. We’ll now describe some examples of such investigation.

As part of their famous research on the “heuristics and biases” that underlie human reasoning, Tversky and Kahneman (1981) presented subjects with the following problem:

Imagine that the U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimate of the consequences of the programs are as follows: If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved. If Program B is adopted, there is a 1/3 probability that 600 people will be saved, and a 2/3 probability that no people will be saved.

A second group of subjects was given an identical problem, except that the programs were described as follows:

If Program C is adopted, 400 people will die. If Program D is adopted, there is a 1/3 probability that nobody will die and a 2/3 probability that 600 people will die.

On the first version of the problem, most subjects thought that Program A should be adopted. But on the second version, most chose Program D, despite the fact that the outcome described in A is identical to the one described in C. The disconcerting implication of this study is that ethical responses may be strongly influenced by the manner in which cases are described or framed . It seems that such framing sensitivities constitute ethically irrelevant influences on ethical responses. Unless this sort of possibility can be confidently eliminated, one should hesitate to rely on responses to a thought experiment for adjudicating theoretical controversies. Such possibilities can only be eliminated through systematic empirical work. [ 5 ]

While a relatively small percentage of empirical work on “heuristics and biases” directly addresses moral reasoning, numerous philosophers who have addressed the issue (Horowitz 1998; Doris & Stich 2005; Sinnott-Armstrong 2005; Sunstein 2005) agree that phenomena like framing effects are likely to be pervasively implicated in responses to ethically freighted examples, and argue that this state of affairs should cause philosophers to view the thought-experimental method with considerable concern.

We turn now to order effects. In a pioneering study, Petrinovich and O’Neill (1996) found that participants’ moral intuitions varied with the order in which the thought experiments were presented. Similar findings have been reported by Liao et al. (2012), Wiegman et al. (2012), and Schwitzgebel & Cushman (2011, 2015). The Schwitzgebel and Cushman studies are particularly striking, since they set out to explore whether order effects in moral intuitions were smaller or non-existent in professional philosophers. Surprisingly, they found that professional philosophers were also subject to order effects, even though the thought experiments used are well known in the field. Schwitzgebel and Cushman also report that in some cases philosophers intuitions show substantial order effects when the intuitions of non-philosophers don’t.

Audience characteristics may also affect the outcome of thought experiments. Haidt and associates (1993: 613) presented stories about “harmless yet offensive violations of strong social norms” to men and women of high and low socioeconomic status (SES) in Philadelphia (USA), Porto Alegre, and Recife (both in Brazil). For example:

A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a dead chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it. (Haidt et al. 1993: 617)

Lower SES subjects tended to “moralize” harmless and offensive behaviors like that in the chicken story. These subjects were more inclined than their high SES counterparts to say that the actor should be “stopped or punished”, and more inclined to deny that such behaviors would be “OK” if customary in a given country (Haidt et al. 1993: 618–19). The point is not that lower SES subjects are mistaken in their moralization of such behaviors while the urbanity of higher SES subjects represents a more rationally defensible response. The difficulty is deciding which—if any—of the conflicting responses is fit to serve as a constraint on ethical theory, when both may equally be the result of more or less arbitrary cultural factors.

Philosophical audiences typically decline to moralize the offensive behaviors, and we ourselves share their tolerant attitude. But of course these audiences—by virtue of educational attainments, if not stock portfolios—are overwhelmingly high SES. Haidt’s work suggests that it is a mistake for a philosopher to say, as Jackson (1998: 32n4; cf. 37) does, that “my intuitions reveal the folk conception in as much as I am reasonably entitled, as I usually am, to regard myself as typical”. The question is: typical of what demographic? Are philosophers’ ethical responses determined by the philosophical substance of the examples, or by cultural idiosyncrasies that are very plausibly thought to be ethically irrelevant? Once again, until such possibilities are ruled out by systematic empirical investigation, the philosophical heft of a thought experiment is open to question.

In recent years there has been a growing body of research reporting that judgments evoked by moral thought experiments are affected by environmental factors that look to be completely irrelevant to the moral issue at hand. The presence of dirty pizza boxes and a whiff of fart spray (Schnall et al. 2008a), the use of soap (Schnall et al. 2008b) or an antiseptic handwipe (Zhong et al. 2010), or even the proximity of a hand sanitizer dispenser (Helzer & Pizarro 2011) have all been reported to influence moral intuitions. Tobia et al. (2013) found that the moral intuitions of both students and professional philosophers are affected by spraying the questionnaire with a disinfectant spray. Valdesolo and DeSteno (2006) reported that viewing a humorous video clip can have a substantial impact on participant’s moral intuitions. And Strohminger et al. (2011) have shown that hearing different kinds of audio clips (stand-up comedy or inspirational stories from a volume called Chicken Soup for the Soul ) has divergent effects on moral intuitions.

How should moral theorists react to findings like these? One might, of course, eschew thought experiments in ethical theorizing. While this methodological austerity is not without appeal, it comes at a cost. Despite the difficulties, thought experiments are a window, in some cases the only accessible window, into important regions of ethical experience. In so far as it is disconnected from the thoughts and feels of the lived ethical life, ethical theory risks being “motivationally inaccessible”, or incapable of engaging the ethical concern of agents who are supposed to live in accordance with the normative standards of the theory. [ 6 ] Fortunately, there is another possibility: continue pursuing the research program that systematically investigates responses to intuition pumps. In effect, the idea is to subject philosophical thought experiments to the critical methods of experimental social psychology. If investigations employing different experimental scenarios and subject populations reveal a clear trend in responses, we can begin to have some confidence that we are identifying a deeply and widely shared moral conviction. Philosophical discussion may establish that convictions of this sort should serve as a constraint on moral theory, while responses to thought experiments that empirical research determines to lack such solidity, such as those susceptible to order, framing or environmental effects, or those admitting of strong cultural variation, may be ones that ethical theorists can safely disregard.

A philosophically informed empirical research program akin to the one just described is more than a methodological fantasy. This approach accurately describes a number of research programs aimed at informing philosophical debates through interdisciplinary research.

One of the earliest examples of this kind of work was inspired in large part by the work of Knobe (2003a,b, 2006) and addressed questions surrounding “folk morality” on issues ranging from intentional action to causal responsibility (see Knobe 2010 for review and discussion). This early work helped to spur the development of a truly interdisciplinary research program with both philosophers and psychologists investigating the folk morality of everyday life. (See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Experimental Moral Philosophy for a more complete treatment of this research.)

Another related philosophical debate concerns the compatibility of free will and moral responsibility with determinism. On the one hand, incompatibilists insist that determinism (the view that all events are jointly determined by antecedent events as governed by laws of nature), is incompatible with moral responsibility. Typically, these accounts also go on to specify what particular capacity is required to be responsible for one’s own behavior (e.g., that agents have alternate possibilities for behavior, or are the “ultimate” source of their behavior, or both (Kane 2002: 5; Haji 2002: 202–3). [ 7 ] On the other hand, compatibilists argue that determinism and responsibility are compatible , often by denying that responsible agency requires that the actor have genuinely open alternatives, or rejecting the ultimacy condition that requires indeterminism (or impossible demands for self-creation). In short, compatibilists hold that people may legitimately be held responsible even though there is some sense in which they “could not have done otherwise” or are not the “ultimate source” of their behavior. Incompatibilists deny that this is the case. Proponents of these two opposing positions have remained relatively entrenched, and some participants have raised fears of a “dialectical stalemate” (Fischer 1994: 83–5).

A critical issue in these debates has been the claim that the incompatibilist position better captures folk moral judgments about agents whose actions have been completely determined (e.g., G. Strawson 1986: 88; Smilansky 2003: 259; Pereboom 2001: xvi; O’Connor 2000: 4; Nagel 1986: 113, 125; Campbell 1951: 451; Pink 2004: 12). For example, Robert Kane (1999: 218; cf. 1996: 83–5), a leading incompatibilist, reports that in his experience “most ordinary persons start out as natural incompatibilists”, and “have to be talked out of this natural incompatibilism by the clever arguments of philosophers”.

Unsurprisingly, some compatibilists have been quick to assert the contrary. For example, Peter Strawson (1982) famously argued that in the context of “ordinary interpersonal relationships”, people are not haunted by the specter of determinism; such metaphysical concerns are irrelevant to their experience and expression of the “reactive attitudes”—anger, resentment, gratitude, forgiveness, and the like—associated with responsibility assessment. Any anxiety about determinism, Strawson insisted, is due to the “panicky metaphysics” of philosophers, not incompatibilist convictions on the part of ordinary people. However, incompatibilists have historically been thought to have ordinary intuitions on their side; even some philosophers with compatibilist leanings are prepared to concede the incompatibilist point about “typical” response tendencies (e.g., Vargas 2005a,b).

Neither side, so far as we are aware, has offered much in the way of systematic evidence of actual patterns of folk moral judgments. Recently however, a now substantial research program has begun to offer empirical evidence on the relationship between determinism and moral responsibility in folk moral judgments.

Inspired by the work of Frankfurt (1988) and others, Woolfolk, Doris, and Darley (2006) hypothesized that observers may hold actors responsible even when the observers judge that the actors could not have done otherwise, if the actors appear to “identify” with their behavior. Roughly, the idea is that the actor identifies with a behavior—and is therefore responsible for it—to the extent that she “embraces” the behavior, or performs it “wholeheartedly” regardless of whether genuine alternatives for behavior are possible. [ 8 ] Woolfolk et al.’s suspicion was, in effect, that people’s (presumably tacit) theory of responsibility is compatibilist.

To test this, subjects were asked to read a story about an agent who was forced by a group of armed hijackers to kill a man who had been having an affair with his wife. In the “low identification” condition, the man was described as being horrified at being forced to kill his wife’s lover, and as not wanting to do so. In the “high identification” condition, the man is instead described as welcoming the opportunity and wanting to kill his wife’s lover. In both cases, the man is not given a choice, and does kill his wife’s lover.

Consistent with Woolfolk and colleagues’ hypothesis, subjects judged that the highly identifying actor was more responsible, more appropriately blamed, and more properly subject to guilt than the low identification actor. [ 9 ] This pattern in folk moral judgments seems to suggest that participants were not consistently incompatibilist in their responsibility attributions, because the lack of alternatives available to the actor was not alone sufficient to rule out such attributions.

In response to these results, those who believe that folk morality is incompatibilist may be quick to object that the study merely suggests that responsibility attributions are influenced by identification, but says nothing about incompatibilist commitments or the lack thereof. Subjects still may have believed that the actor could have done otherwise. To address this concern, Woolfolk and colleagues also conducted a version of the study in which the man acted under the influence of a “compliance drug”. In this case, participants were markedly less likely to agree that the man “was free to behave other than he did” and yet they still held the agent who identified with the action as more responsible than the agent who did not. These results look to pose a clear challenge to the view that ordinary folk are typically incompatibilists.

A related pattern of responses was obtained by Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer and Turner (2009) who instead described agents preforming immoral behaviors in a “deterministic world” of the sort often described in philosophy classrooms. One variation read as follows:

Imagine that in the next century we discover all the laws of nature, and we build a supercomputer which can deduce from these laws of nature and from the current state of everything in the world exactly what will be happening in the world at any future time. It can look at everything about the way the world is and predict everything about how it will be with 100% accuracy. Suppose that such a supercomputer existed, and it looks at the state of the universe at a certain time on March 25th, 2150 C.E., twenty years before Jeremy Hall is born. The computer then deduces from this information and the laws of nature that Jeremy will definitely rob Fidelity Bank at 6:00 PM on January 26th, 2195. As always, the supercomputer’s prediction is correct; Jeremy robs Fidelity Bank at 6:00 PM on January 26th, 2195.

Subjects were then asked whether Jeremy was morally blameworthy. Most said yes, indicating that they thought an agent could be morally blameworthy even if his behaviors were entirely determined by natural laws. Consistent with the Woolfolk et al. results, it appears that the subjects’ judgments, at least those having to do with moral blameworthiness, were not governed by a commitment to incompatibilism.

This emerging picture was complicated, however, by Nichols and Knobe (2007), which argued that the ostensibly compatibilist responses were performance errors driven by an affective response to the agents’ immoral actions. To demonstrate this, all subjects were asked to imagine two universes—a universe completely governed by deterministic laws (Universe A) and a universe (Universe B) in which everything is determined except for human decisions which are not completely determined by deterministic laws and what has happened in the past. In Universe B, but not Universe A, “each human decision does not have to happen the way it does”. Some subjects were assigned to a concrete condition, and asked to make a judgment about a specific individual in specific circumstances, while others were assigned to an abstract condition, and asked to make a more general judgment, divorced from any particular individual. The hypothesis was that the difference between these two conditions would generate different responses regarding the relationship between determinism and moral responsibility. Subjects in the concrete condition read a story about a man, “Bill”, in the deterministic universe who murders his wife and children in a particularly ghastly manner, and were asked whether Bill was morally responsible for what he had done. By contrast, subjects in the abstract condition were asked “In Universe A, is it possible for a person to be fully morally responsible for their actions?” Seventy-two percent of subjects in the concrete condition gave a compatibilist response, holding Bill responsible in Universe A, whereas less than fifteen percent of subjects in the abstract condition gave a compatibilist response, allowing that people could be fully morally responsible in the deterministic Universe A.

In line with previous experimental work demonstrating that increased affective arousal amplified punitive responses to wrongdoing (Lerner, Goldberg, & Tetlock 1998), Nichols and Knobe hypothesized that previously observed compatibilist responses were the result of the affectively laden nature of the stimulus materials. When this affective element was eliminated from the materials (as in the abstract condition), participants instead exhibited an incompatibilist pattern of responses.

More recently, Nichols and Knobe’s line of reasoning has come under fire from two directions. First, a number of studies have now tried to systematically manipulate how affectively arousing the immoral behavior performed is, but have not found that these changes significantly alter participants’ judgments of moral responsibility in deterministic scenarios. Rather, the differences seem to be best explained simply by whether the case was described abstractly or concretely (see Cova et al. 2012 for work with patients who have frontotemporal dementia, and see Feltz & Cova 2014 for a meta-analysis). Second, a separate line of studies from Murray and Nahmias (2014) argued that participants who exhibited the apparently incompatibilist pattern of responses were making a critical error in how they understood the deterministic scenario. In particular, they argued these participants mistakenly took the agents, or their mental states, in these deterministic scenarios to be “bypassed” in the causal chain leading up to their behavior. In support of their argument, Murray and Nahmias (2014) demonstrated that when analyses were restricted to the participants who clearly did not take the agent to be bypassed, these participants judged the agent to be morally responsible (blameworthy, etc.) despite being in a deterministic universe. Unsurprisingly, this line of argument has, in turn, inspired a number of further counter-responses, both empirical (Rose & Nichols 2013) and theoretical (Björnsson & Pereboom 2016), which caution against the conclusions of Murray and Nahmias.

While the debate continues over whether the compatibilist or incompatibilist position better captures folk moral judgments of agents in deterministic universes, a related line of research has sprung up around what is widely taken to be the most convincing contemporary form of argument for incompatibilism: manipulation arguments (e.g., Mele 2006, 2013, Pereboom 2001, 2014). Pereboom’s Four-Case version, for example, begins with the case of an agent named Plum who is manipulated by neuroscientists who use a radio-like technology to change Plum’s neural states, which results in him wanting and then deciding to kill a man named White. In this case, it seems clear that Plum did not freely decide to kill White. Compare this case to a second one, in which the team of neuroscientists programmed Plum at the beginning of his life in a way that resulted in him developing the desire (and making the decision) to kill White. The incompatibilist argues that these two cases do not differ in a way that is relevant for whether Plum acted freely, and so, once again, it seems that Plum did not freely decide to kill White. Now compare this to a third case, in which Plum’s desire and decision to kill White were instead determined by his cultural and social milieu, rather than by a team of neuroscientists. Since the only difference between the second and third case is the particular technological process through which Plum’s mental states were determined, he would again seem to not have freely decided to kill White. Finally, in a fourth and final case, Plum’s desire and decision to kill White was determined jointly by the past states and the laws of nature in our own deterministic universe. Regarding these four cases, Pereboom argues that, since there is no difference between any of the four cases that is relevant to free will, if Plum was not morally responsible in the first case, then he was not morally responsible in the fourth.

In response to this kind of manipulation-based argument for incompatibilism, a number of researchers have taken aim at painting a better empirical picture of ordinary moral judgments concerning manipulated agents. This line of inquiry has been productive on two levels. First, a growing number of empirical studies have investigated moral responsibility judgments about cases of manipulation, and now provide a clearer psychological picture for why manipulated agents are judged to lack free will and moral responsibility. Second, continuing theoretical work, informed by this empirical picture, has provided new reasons for doubting that manipulation based arguments actually provide evidence against compatibilism.

One line of empirical research, led by Chandra Sripada (2012) has asked whether manipulated agents are perceived to be unfree because (a) they lack ultimate control over their actions (a capacity incompatibilists take to be essential for moral responsibility) or instead because (b) their psychological or volitional capacities (the capacities focused on by compatibilists) have been damaged. Using a statistical approach called Structural Equation Modeling (or SEM), Sripada found that participants’ moral responsibility judgments were best explained by whether they believed the psychological and volitional capacities of the agent were damaged by manipulation and not whether the agent lacked control over her actions. This finding suggests that patterns of judgment in cases of manipulation are more consistent with the predictions of compatibilism than with incompatibilism.

Taking a different approach, Phillips and Shaw (2014) demonstrated that the reduction of moral responsibility that is typically observed in cases of manipulation depends critically on the role of an intentional manipulator. In particular, ordinary people were shown to distinguish between (1) the moral responsibility of agents who are made to do a particular act by features of the situation they are in (i.e., situational determinism), and (2) the moral responsibility of agents who are made to do that same act by another intentional agent (i.e., manipulation). This work suggests that the ordinary practice of assessing freedom and responsibility is likely to clearly distinguish between cases that do and do not involve a manipulator who intervenes with the intention of causing the manipulated agent to do the immoral action. A series of studies by Murray and Lombrozo (2016) further elaborates these findings by providing evidence that the specific reduction of moral responsibility that results from being manipulated arises from the perception that the agent’s mental states are bypassed .

Collectively, two lessons have come out of this work on the ordinary practice of assessing the moral responsibility of manipulated agents: (1) folk morality provides a natural way of distinguishing between the different cases used in manipulation-based arguments (those that do involve the intentional intervention of a manipulator vs. those that don’t) and (2) folk morality draws an intimate link between the moral responsibility of an agent and that agent’s mental and volitional capacities. Building on this increasingly clear empirical picture, Deery and Nahmias (2017) formalized these basic principles in theoretical work that argues for a principled way of distinguishing between the moral responsibility of determined and manipulated agents.

While the majority of evidence may currently be in favor of the view that folk morality adheres to a kind of “natural compatibilism” (Cova & Kitano 2013), this remains a contentious topic, and new work is continually emerging on both sides of the debate (Andow & Cova 2016; Bear & Knobe 2016; Björnsson 2014; Feltz & Millan 2013; Figdor & Phelan 2015; Knobe 2014). One thing that has now been agreed on by parties on both sides of this debate, however, is a critical role for careful empirical studies (Björnsson & Pereboom 2016; Knobe 2014; Nahmias 2011).

To date, empirically informed approaches to moral psychology have been most prominent in discussions of moral character and virtue. The focus is decades of experimentation in “situationist” social psychology: unobtrusive features of situations have repeatedly been shown to impact behavior in seemingly arbitrary, and sometimes alarming, ways. Among the findings that have most interested philosophers:

• The Phone Booth Study (Isen & Levin (1972: 387): people who had just found a dime in a payphone’s coin return were 22 times more likely than those who did not find a dime to help a woman who had dropped some papers (88% v. 4%).
• The Good Samaritan Study (Darley & Batson 1973: 105): unhurried passersby were 6 times more likely than hurried passersby to help an unfortunate who appeared to be in significant distress (63% v. 10%).
• The Obedience Experiments (Milgram 1974) subjects repeatedly punished a screaming victim with realistic (but simulated) electric shocks at the polite request of an experimenter.
• The Stanford Prison Study (Zimbardo 2007): college students role-playing as “guards” in a simulated prison subjected student “prisoners” to grotesque verbal and emotional abuse.

These experiments are part of an extensive empirical literature, where social psychologists have time and again found that disappointing omissions and appalling actions are readily induced by apparently minor situational features. [ 10 ] The striking fact is not that people fail standards for good conduct, but that they can be so easily induced to do so.

Exploiting this observation, “character skeptics” contend that if moral conduct varies so sharply, often for the worse, with minor perturbations in circumstance, ostensibly good character provides very limited assurance of good conduct. In addition to this claim in descriptive psychology , concerning the fragility of moral character, some character skeptics also forward a thesis in normative ethics , to the effect that character merits less attention in ethical thought than it traditionally gets. [ 11 ]

Character skepticism contravenes the influential program of contemporary virtue ethics , which maintains that advancing ethical theory requires more attention to character, and virtue ethicists offer vigorous resistance. [ 12 ] Discussion has sometimes been overheated, but it has resulted in a large literature in a vibrantly interdisciplinary field of “character studies” (e.g., Miller et al. 2015). [ 13 ] The literature is too extensive for the confines of this entry, but we will endeavor to outline some of the main issues.

The first thing to observe is that the science which inspires the character skeptics may itself be subject to skepticism. Given the uneven history of the human sciences, it might be argued that the relevant findings are too uncertain to stand as a constraint on philosophical theorizing. This contention is potentially buttressed by recent prominent replication failures in social psychology.

The psychology at issue is, like much of science, unfinished business. But the replication controversy, and the attendant suspicion of science, is insufficient grounds for dismissing the psychology out of hand. Philosophical conclusions should not be based on a few studies; the task of the philosophical consumer of science is to identify trends in convergent strands of evidence (Doris 2015: 49, 56; Machery & Doris forthcoming). The observation that motivates character skepticism—the surprising situational sensitivity of behavior—is supported by a wide range of scientific findings, as well as by recurring themes in history and biography (Doris 2002, 2005). The strong situational discriminativeness of behavior is accepted as fact by high proportion of involved scientists; accordingly, it is not much contested in debates about character skepticism.

But the philosophical implications of this fact remain, after considerable debate, a contentious issue. The various responses to character skepticism need not be forwarded in isolation, and some of them may be combined as part of a multi-pronged defense. Different rejoinders have differing strengths and weaknesses, particularly with respect to the differing pieces of evidence on which character skeptics rely; the phenomena are not unitary, and accommodating them all may preclude a unitary response.

One way of defusing empirically motivated skepticism—dubbed by Alfano (2013) “the dodge”—is simply to deny that virtue ethics makes empirical claims. On this understanding, virtue ethics is cast as a “purely normative” endeavor aiming at erecting ethical ideals in complete absence of empirical commitments regarding actual human psychologies. This sort of purity is perhaps less honored than honored in the breach: historically, virtue ethics has been typified by an interest in how actual people become good. Aristotle ( Nicomachean Ethics , 1099b18–19) thought that anyone not “maimed” with regard to the capacity for virtue may acquire it “by a certain kind of study and care”, and contemporary Aristotelians have emphasized the importance of moral education and development (e.g., Annas 2011). More generally, virtue-based approaches have been claimed to have an advantage over major Kantian and consequentialist competitors with respect to “psychological realism”—the advantage of a more lifelike moral psychology (see Anscombe 1958: 1, 15; Williams 1985; Flanagan 1991: 182; Hursthouse 1999: 19–20).

To be sure, eschewing empirical commitment allows virtue ethics to escape empirical threat: obviously, empirical evidence cannot be used to undermine a theory that makes no empirical claims. However, it is not clear such theories could claim advantages traditionally claimed for virtue theories with regard to moral development and psychological realism. In any event, they are not contributions to empirical moral psychology, and needn’t be further discussed here.

Before seeing how the debate in moral psychology might be advanced, it is necessary to correct a mischaracterization that serves to arrest progress. It is too often said, particularly in reference to Doris (1998, 2002) and Harman (1999, 2000), that character skepticism comes to the view that character traits “do not exist” (e.g., Flanagan 2009: 55). Frequently, this attribution is made without documentation, but when documentation is provided, it is typically in reference to some early, characteristically pointed, remarks of Harman (e.g., 1999). Yet in his most recent contribution, Harman (2009: 241) says, “I do not think that social psychology demonstrates there are no character traits”. For his part, Doris has repeatedly asserted that traits exist, and has repeatedly drawn attention to such assertions (Doris 1998: 507–509; 2002: 62–6; 2005: 667; 2010: 138–141; Doris & Stich 2005: 119–20; Doris & Prinz 2009).

With good reason, to say “traits do not exist” is tantamount to denying that there are individual dispositional differences, an unlikely view that character skeptics and antiskeptics are united in rejecting. Quite unsurprisingly, this unlikely view is seriously undersubscribed in both philosophy and psychology. It is endorsed by neither the most aggressive critics of personality, situationists in social psychology such as Ross and Nisbett (1991), nor by the patron saint of situationism in personality psychology: Mischel (1999: 45). Mischel disavows a trait-based approach, but his skepticism concerns a particular approach to traits , not individual dispositional differences more generally.

Then the question of whether or not traits exist is emphatically not the issue dividing more and less skeptical approaches to character. Today, all mainstream parties to the debate are “interactionist”, treating behavioral outcomes as the function of a (complex) person by situation interaction (Mehl et al. 2015)—and it’s likely most participants have always been so (Doris 2002: 25–6). Contemporary research programs in personality and social psychology freely deploy both personal and situational variables (e.g., Cameron, Payne, & Doris 2013; Leikas, Lönnqvist, & Verkasalo 2012; Sherman, Nave, & Funder 2010). The issue worth discussing is not whether individual dispositional differences exist, but how these differences should be characterized , and how (or whether) these individual differences, when appropriately characterized, should inform ethical thought .

An important feature of early forays into character skepticism was that skeptics tended to focus on behavioral implications of traits rather than the psychological antecedents of behavior (Doris 2015: 15). Defenders of virtue ethics observe that character skeptics have had much to say about situational variation in behavior and little to say about the psychological processes underlying it, with the result that they overlook the rational order in people’s lives (Adams 2006: 115–232). These virtue ethicists maintain that the behavioral variation provoking character skepticism evinces not unreliability, but rationally appropriate sensitivity to differing situations (Adams 2006; Kamtekar 2004). The virtuous person, such as Aristotle’s exemplary phronimos (“man of practical wisdom”) may sometimes come clean, and sometimes dissemble, or sometimes fight, and sometimes flee, depending on the particular ethical demands of his circumstances.

For example, in the Good Samaritan Study, the hurried passersby was on the way to an appointment where they had agreed to give a presentation; perhaps these people made a rational determination—perhaps even an ethically defensible determination—to weigh the demands of punctuality and professionalism over ethical requirement to check on the welfare of a stranger in apparent distress. However attractive one finds such accounting for this case (note that some of Darley and Batson’s [1973] hurried passersby failed to notice the victim, which strains explanations in terms of their rational discriminations), there are other cases where the “rationality response” seems plainly unattractive. These are cases of ethically irrelevant influences ( Sec. 2 above ; Doris & Stich 2005), where it seems unlikely the influence could be cited as part of a rationalizing explanation of the behavior: it’s odd to cite failing to find a dime as justification for failing to help—or for that matter, finding a dime as justification for doing so.

It is certainly appropriate for virtue ethicists to emphasize practical rationality in their accounts of character. This is a central theme in the tradition going back to Aristotle himself, who is probably the most oft-cited canonical philosopher in contemporary virtue ethics. But while the rationality response may initially accommodate some of the troubling behavioral evidence, it encounters further empirical difficulty. There is an extensive empirical literature problematizing familiar conceptions of rationality: psychologists have endlessly documented a dispiriting range of reasoning errors (Baron 1994, 2001; Gilovich et al. 2002; Kahneman et al. 1982; Tversky & Kahneman 1973; Kruger & Dunning 1999; Nisbett & Borgida 1975; Nisbett & Ross 1980; Stich 1990; Tversky & Kahneman 1981). In light of this evidence, character skeptics claim that the vagaries afflicting behavior also afflict reasoning (Alfano 2013; Olin & Doris 2014).

Research supporting this discouraging assessment of human rationality is controversial, and not all psychologists think things are so bleak (Gigerenzer 2000; Gigerenzer et al. 1999; for philosophical commentary see Samuels & Stich 2002). Nevertheless, if virtue ethics is to have an empirically credible moral psychology, it needs to account for the empirical challenges to practical reasoning: how can the relevant excellence in practical reasoning be developed?

Faced with the challenge to practical rationality, virtue ethicists may respond that their theories concern excellent reasoning, not the ordinary reasoning studied in psychology. Practical wisdom, and the ethical virtue it supports, are expected to be rare , and not widely instantiated. This state of affairs, it is said, is quite compatible with the disturbing, but not exceptionlessly disturbing, behavior in experiments like Milgram’s (see Athanassoulis 1999: 217–219; DePaul 1999; Kupperman 2001: 242–3). If this account is supposed to be part of an empirically contentful moral psychology, rather than unverified speculation, we require a detailed and empirically substantiated account of how the virtuous few get that way—remember that an emphasis on moral development is central to the virtue ethics tradition. Moreover, if virtue ethics is supposed to have widespread practical implications—as opposed to being merely a celebration of a tiny “virtue elite”—it should have an account of how the less-than-virtuous-many may at least tolerably approximate virtue.

This point is underscored by the fact that for some of the troubling evidence, as in the Stanford Prison Study, the worry is not so much that people fail standards of virtue, but that they fail standards of minimal decency . Surely an approach to ethics that celebrates moral development, even one that acknowledges (or rather, insists) that most people will not attain its ideal, might be expected to have an account of how people can become minimally decent.

Recently, proponents of virtue ethics have been increasingly proposing a suggestive solution to this problem: virtue is a skill acquired through effortful practice, so virtue is a kind of expertise (Annas 2011; Bloomfield 2000, 2001, 2014; Jacobson 2005; Russell 2015; Snow 2010; Sosa 2009; Stichter 2007, 2011; for reservations, see Doris, in preparation). The virtuous are expert at morality and—given the Aristotelian association of virtue and happiness—expert at life.

An extensive scientific literature indicates that developing expert skill requires extensive preparation, whether the practitioner is a novelist, doctor, or chess master—around 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice”, according to a popular generalization (Ericsson 2014; Ericsson et al. 1993). The “10,000–hour rule” is likely an oversimplification, but there is no doubt that attaining expertise requires intensive training. Because of this, people rarely achieve eminence in more than one area; for instance, “baseball trivia” experts display superior recall for baseball-related material, but not for non-baseball material (Chiesi et al. 1979). Conversely, becoming expert at morality, or (even more ambitiously) expert at the whole of life, would apparently require a highly generalized form of expertise: to be good, there’s a lot to be good at. Moreover, it’s quite unclear what deliberate practice at life involves; how exactly does one get better at being good?

One obvious problem concerns specifying the “good” in question. Expertises like chess have been effectively studied in part because there are accepted standards of excellence (the “ELO” score used for ranking chess players; Glickman 1995). To put it blithely, there aren’t any chess skeptics. But there have, historically, been lots of moral skeptics. And if there’s not moral knowledge, how could there be moral experts? And even if there are moral experts, there’s the problem of how are they to be identified, since it is not clear we are possessed of standard independent of expert opinion itself (like winning chess matches) for doing so (for the “metaethics of expertise”, see McGrath 2008, 2011).

Even if these notorious philosophical difficulties can be resolved—as defenders of expertise approaches to virtue must think they can—matters remain complicated, because if moral expertise is like other expertises, practice alone—assuming we have a clear notion of what “moral practice” entails—will be insufficient. While practice matters in attaining expertise, other factors, such as talent, also matter (Hambrick et al. 2014; Macnamara et al. 2014). And some of the required endowments may be quite unequally distributed across populations: practice cannot make a jockey into an NFL lineman, or an NFL lineman into a jockey.

What are the natural endowments required for moral expertise, and how widely are they distributed in the population? If they are rare, like the skill of a chess master or the strength of an NFL lineman, virtue will also be rare. Some virtue ethicists believe virtue should be widely attainable, and they will resist this result (Adams 2006: 119–123, and arguably Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1099b15–20). But even virtue ethicists who embrace the rarity of virtue require an account of what the necessary natural endowments are, and if they wish to also have an account of how the less well-endowed may achieve at least minimal decency, they should have something to say about how moral development will proceed across a population with widely varying endowments.

What is needed, for the study of moral character research to advance, is an account of the biological, psychological, and social factors requisite for successful moral development—on the expertise model, the conditions conducive to developing “moral skill”. This, quite obviously, is a tall order, and the research needed to systematically address these issue is in comparative infancy. Yet the expertise model, in exploiting connections with areas in which skill acquisition has been well studied, such as music and sport, provides a framework for moving discussion of character beyond the empirically under-informed conjectures and assumptions about “habituation” that have been too frequent in previous literature (Doris 2015: 128).

People often behave in ways that benefit others, and they sometimes do this knowing that it will be costly, unpleasant or dangerous. But at least since Plato’s classic discussion in the second Book of the Republic , debate has raged over why people behave in this way. Are their motives altruistic, or is their behavior ultimately motivated by self-interest? Famously, Hobbes gave this answer:

No man giveth but with intention of good to himself, because gift is voluntary; and of all voluntary acts, the object is to every man his own good; of which, if men see they shall be frustrated, there will be no beginning of benevolence or trust, nor consequently of mutual help. (1651 [1981: Ch. 15])

Views like Hobbes’ have come to be called egoism , [ 14 ] and this rather depressing conception of human motivation has any number of eminent philosophical advocates, including Bentham, J.S. Mill and Nietzsche. [ 15 ] Dissenting voices, though perhaps fewer in number, have been no less eminent. Butler, Hume, Rousseau and Adam Smith have all argued that, sometimes at least, human motivation is genuinely altruistic.

Though the issue that divides egoistic and altruistic accounts of human motivation is largely empirical, it is easy to see why philosophers have thought that the competing answers will have important consequences for moral theory. For example, Kant famously argued that a person should act “not from inclination but from duty, and by this would his conduct first acquire true moral worth” (1785 [1949: Sec. 1, parag. 12]). But egoism maintains that all human motivation is ultimately self-interested, and thus people can’t act “from duty” in the way that Kant urged. Thus if egoism is true, Kant’s account would entail that no conduct has “true moral worth”. Additionally, if egoism is true, it would appear to impose a strong constraint on how a moral theory can answer the venerable question “Why should I be moral?” since, as Hobbes clearly saw, the answer will have to ground the motivation to be moral in the agent’s self-interest. [ 16 ]

While the egoism vs. altruism debate has historically been of great philosophical interest, the issue centrally concerns psychological questions about the nature of human motivation, so it’s not surprise that psychologists have done a great deal of empirical research aimed at determining which view is correct. Some of the most influential and philosophically sophisticated empirical work on this issue has been done by Daniel Batson and his associates. The conclusion Batson draws from this work is that people do sometimes behave altruistically, and that the emotion of empathy plays an important role in generating altruistic motivation. [ 17 ] Others are not convinced. For a discussion of Batson’s experiments, the conclusion he draws from them, and some reasons for skepticism about that conclusion, see sections 5 and 6 of the entry “Empirical Approaches to Altruism” in this encyclopedia. In this section, we’ll focus on some of the philosophical spadework that is necessary before plunging into the empirical literature.

A crucial question that needs to be addressed is: What, exactly, is the debate about; what is altruism? Unfortunately, there is no uncontroversial answer to this question, since researchers in many disciplines, including philosophy, biology, psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology and primatology, have written about altruism, and authors in different disciplines tend to use the term “altruism” in quite different ways. Even among philosophers the term has been used with importantly different meanings. There is, however, one account of altruism—actually a cluster closely related accounts—that plays a central role both in philosophy and in a great deal of psychology, including Batson’s work. We’ll call it “the standard account”. That will be our focus in the remainder of this section. [ 18 ]

According to the standard account, an action is altruistic if it is motivated by an ultimate desire for the well-being of another person. This formulation invites questions about (1) what it is for a behavior to be motivated by an ultimate desire , and (2) the distinction between desires that are self-interested and desires that are for the well-being of others .

Although the second question will need careful consideration in any comprehensive treatment, a few rough and ready examples of the distinction will suffice here. [ 19 ] Desires to save someone else’s life, to alleviate someone else’s suffering, or to make someone else happy are paradigm cases of desires for the well-being of others, while desires to experience pleasure, get rich, and become famous are typical examples of self-interested desires. The self-interested desires to experience pleasure and to avoid pain have played an especially prominent role in the debate, since one version of egoism, often called hedonism , maintains that these are our only ultimate desires.

The first question, regarding ultimate desires, requires a fuller exposition; it can be usefully explicated with the help of a familiar account of practical reasoning . [ 20 ] On this account, practical reasoning is a causal process via which a desire and a belief give rise to or sustain another desire. For example, a desire to drink an espresso and a belief that the best place to get an espresso is at the espresso bar on Main Street may cause a desire to go to the espresso bar on Main Street. This desire can then join forces with another belief to generate a third desire, and so on. Sometimes this process will lead to a desire to perform a relatively simple or “basic” action, and that desire, in turn, will cause the agent to perform the basic action without the intervention of any further desires. Desires produced or sustained by this process of practical reasoning are instrumental desires—the agent has them because she thinks that satisfying them will lead to something else that she desires. But not all desires can be instrumental desires. If we are to avoid circularity or an infinite regress there must be some desires that are not produced because the agent thinks that satisfying them will facilitate satisfying some other desire. These desires that are not produced or sustained by practical reasoning are the agent’s ultimate desires, and the objects of ultimate desires, the states of affairs desired, are desired for their own sake. A behavior is motivated by a specific ultimate desire when that desire is part of the practical reasoning process that leads to the behavior.

If people do sometimes have ultimate desires for the well-being of others, and these desires motivate behavior, then altruism is the correct view, and egoism is false. However, if all ultimate desires are self-interested, then egoism is the correct view, and altruism is false. The effort to establish one or the other of these options has given rise to a vast and enormously sophisticated empirical literature. For an overview of that literature, see the empirical approaches to altruism entry .

Given that moral disagreement—about abortion, say, or capital punishment—so often seems intractable, is there any reason to think that moral problems admit objective resolutions? While this difficulty is of ancient coinage, contemporary philosophical discussion was spurred by Mackie’s (1977: 36–8) “argument from relativity” or, as it is called by later writers, the “argument from disagreement” (Brink 1989: 197; Loeb 1998). Such “radical” differences in moral judgment as are frequently observed, Mackie (1977: 36) argued, “make it difficult to treat those judgments as apprehensions of objective truths”.

Mackie supposed that his argument undermines moral realism , the view that, as Smith (1994: 9, cf. 13) puts it,

moral questions have correct answers, that the correct answers are made correct by objective moral facts … and … by engaging in moral argument, we can discover what these objective moral facts are. [ 21 ]

This notion of objectivity, as Smith recognizes, requires convergence in moral views—the right sort of argument, reflection and discussion is expected to result in very substantial moral agreement (Smith 1994: 6). [ 22 ]

While moral realists have often taken pretty optimistic positions on the extent of actual moral agreement (e.g., Sturgeon 1988: 229; Smith 1994: 188), there is no denying that there is an abundance of persistent moral disagreement; on many moral issues there is a striking failure of convergence even after protracted argument. Anti-realists like Mackie have a ready explanation for this phenomenon: Moral judgment is not objective in Smith’s sense, and moral argument cannot be expected to accomplish what Smith and other realists think it can. [ 23 ] Conversely, the realist’s task is to explain away failures of convergence; she must provide an explanation of the phenomena consistent with it being the case that moral judgment is objective and moral argument is rationally resolvable. Doris and Plakias (2008) call these “defusing explanations”. The realist’s strategy is to insist that the preponderance of actual moral disagreement is due to limitations of disputants or their circumstances, and insist that (very substantial, if not unanimous) [ 24 ] moral agreement would emerge in ideal conditions, when, for example, disputants are fully rational and fully informed of the relevant non-moral facts.

It is immediately evident that the relative merits of these competing explanations cannot be fairly determined without close discussion of the factors implicated in actual moral disagreements. Indeed, as acute commentators with both realist (Sturgeon 1988: 230) and anti-realist (Loeb 1998: 284) sympathies have noted, the argument from disagreement cannot be evaluated by a priori philosophical means alone; what’s needed, as Loeb observes, is “a great deal of further empirical research into the circumstances and beliefs of various cultures”. This research is required not only to accurately assess the extent of actual disagreement, but also to determine why disagreement persists or dissolves. Only then can realists’ attempts to “explain away” moral disagreement be fairly assessed.

Richard Brandt, who was a pioneer in the effort to integrate ethical theory and the social sciences, looked primarily to anthropology to help determine whether moral attitudes can be expected to converge under idealized circumstances. It is of course well known that anthropology includes a substantial body of work, such as the classic studies of Westermarck (1906) and Sumner (1908 [1934]), detailing the radically divergent moral outlooks found in cultures around the world. But as Brandt (1959: 283–4) recognized, typical ethnographies do not support confident inferences about the convergence of attitudes under ideal conditions, in large measure because they often give limited guidance regarding how much of the moral disagreement can be traced to disagreement about factual matters that are not moral in nature, such as those having to do with religious or cosmological views.

With this sort of difficulty in mind, Brandt (1954) undertook his own anthropological study of Hopi people in the American southwest, and found issues for which there appeared to be serious moral disagreement between typical Hopi and white American attitudes that could not plausibly be attributed to differences in belief about nonmoral facts. [ 25 ] A notable example is the Hopi attitude toward animal suffering, an attitude that might be expected to disturb many non-Hopis:

[Hopi children] sometimes catch birds and make “pets” of them. They may be tied to a string, to be taken out and “played” with. This play is rough, and birds seldom survive long. [According to one informant:] “Sometimes they get tired and die. Nobody objects to this”. (Brandt 1954: 213)

Brandt (1959: 103) made a concerted effort to determine whether this difference in moral outlook could be traced to disagreement about nonmoral facts, but he could find no plausible explanation of this kind; his Hopi informants didn’t believe that animals lack the capacity to feel pain, for example, nor did they have cosmological beliefs that would explain away the apparent cruelty of the practice, such as beliefs to the effect that animals are rewarded for martyrdom in the afterlife. The best explanation of the divergent moral judgments, Brandt (1954: 245, 284) concluded, is a “basic difference of attitude”, since “groups do sometimes make divergent appraisals when they have identical beliefs about the objects”.

Moody-Adams argues that little of philosophical import can be concluded from Brandt’s—and indeed from much—ethnographic work. Deploying Gestalt psychology’s doctrine of “situational meaning” (e.g., Dunker 1939), Moody-Adams (1997: 34–43) contends that all institutions, utterances, and behaviors have meanings that are peculiar to their cultural milieu, so that we cannot be certain that participants in cross-cultural disagreements are talking about the same thing. [ 26 ] The problem of situational meaning, she thinks, threatens “insuperable” methodological difficulty for those asserting the existence of intractable intercultural disagreement (1997: 36). Advocates of ethnographic projects will likely respond—not unreasonably, we think—that judicious observation and interview, such as that to which Brandt aspired, can motivate confident assessments of evaluative diversity. Suppose, however, that Moody-Adams is right, and the methodological difficulties are insurmountable. Now, there’s an equitable distribution of the difficulty: if observation and interview are really as problematic as Moody-Adams suggests, neither the realists’ nor the anti-realists’ take on disagreement can be supported by appeal to empirical evidence. We do not think that such a stalemate obtains, because we think the implicated methodological pessimism excessive. Serious empirical work can, we think, tell us a lot about cultures and the differences between them. The appropriate way of proceeding is with close attention to particular studies, and what they show and fail to show. [ 27 ]

As Brandt (1959: 101–2) acknowledged, the anthropological literature of his day did not always provide as much information on the exact contours and origins of moral attitudes and beliefs as philosophers wondering about the prospects for convergence might like. However, social psychology and cognitive science have recently produced research which promises to further discussion; during the last 35 years, there has been an explosion of “cultural psychology” investigating the cognitive and emotional processes of different cultures (Shweder & Bourne 1982; Markus & Kitayama 1991; Ellsworth 1994; Nisbett & Cohen 1996; Nisbett 1998, 2003; Kitayama & Markus 1999; Heine 2008; Kitayama & Cohen 2010; Henrich 2015). Here we will focus on some cultural differences found close to (our) home, differences discovered by Nisbett and his colleagues while investigating regional patterns of violence in the American North and South. We argue that these findings support Brandt’s pessimistic conclusions regarding the likelihood of convergence in moral judgment.

The Nisbett group’s research can be seen as applying the tools of cognitive social psychology to the “culture of honor”, a phenomenon that anthropologists have documented in a variety of groups around the world. Although these groups differ in many respects, they manifest important commonalities:

A key aspect of the culture of honor is the importance placed on the insult and the necessity to respond to it. An insult implies that the target is weak enough to be bullied. Since a reputation for strength is of the essence in the culture of honor, the individual who insults someone must be forced to retract; if the instigator refuses, he must be punished—with violence or even death. (Nisbett & Cohen 1996: 5)

According to Nisbett and Cohen (1996: 5–9), an important factor in the genesis of southern honor culture was the presence of a herding economy. Honor cultures are particularly likely to develop where resources are liable to theft, and where the state’s coercive apparatus cannot be relied upon to prevent or punish thievery. These conditions often occur in relatively remote areas where herding is a main form of subsistence; the “portability” of herd animals makes them prone to theft. In areas where farming rather than herding dominates, cooperation among neighbors is more important, stronger government infrastructures are more common, and resources—like decidedly unportable farmland—are harder to steal. In such agrarian social economies, cultures of honor tend not to develop. The American South was originally settled primarily by peoples from remote areas of Britain. Since their homelands were generally unsuitable for farming, these peoples have historically been herders; when they emigrated from Britain to the American South, they initially sought out remote regions suitable for herding, and in such regions, the culture of honor flourished.

In the contemporary South, police and other government services are widely available and herding has all but disappeared as a way of life, but certain sorts of violence continue to be more common than they are in the North. Nisbett and Cohen (1996) maintain that patterns of violence in the South, as well as attitudes toward violence, insults, and affronts to honor, are best explained by the hypothesis that a culture of honor persists among contemporary white non-Hispanic southerners. In support of this hypothesis, they offer a compelling array of evidence, including:

• demographic data indicating that (1) among southern whites, homicides rates are higher in regions more suited to herding than agriculture, and (2) white males in the South are much more likely than white males in other regions to be involved in homicides resulting from arguments, although they are not more likely to be involved in homicides that occur in the course of a robbery or other felony (Nisbett & Cohen 1996: Ch. 2)
• survey data indicating that white southerners are more likely than northerners to believe that violence would be “extremely justified” in response to a variety of affronts, and that if a man failed to respond violently to such affronts, he was “not much of a man” (Nisbett & Cohen 1996: Ch. 3)
• legal scholarship indicating that southern states “give citizens more freedom to use violence in defending themselves, their homes, and their property” than do northern states (Nisbett & Cohen 1996: Ch. 5, p. 63)

Two experimental studies—one in the field, the other in the laboratory—are especially striking.

In the field study (Nisbett & Cohen 1996: 73–5), letters of inquiry were sent to hundreds of employers around the United States. The letters purported to be from a hardworking 27-year-old Michigan man who had a single blemish on his otherwise solid record. In one version, the “applicant” revealed that he had been convicted for manslaughter. The applicant explained that he had been in a fight with a man who confronted him in a bar and told onlookers that “he and my fiancée were sleeping together. He laughed at me to my face and asked me to step outside if I was man enough”. According to the letter, the applicant’s nemesis was killed in the ensuing fray. In the other version of the letter, the applicant revealed that he had been convicted of motor vehicle theft, perpetrated at a time when he needed money for his family. Nisbett and his colleagues assessed 112 letters of response, and found that southern employers were significantly more likely to be cooperative and sympathetic in response to the manslaughter letter than were northern employers, while no regional differences were found in responses to the theft letter. One southern employer responded to the manslaughter letter as follows:

As for your problems of the past, anyone could probably be in the situation you were in. It was just an unfortunate incident that shouldn’t be held against you. Your honesty shows that you are sincere…. I wish you the best of luck for your future. You have a positive attitude and a willingness to work. These are qualities that businesses look for in employees. Once you are settled, if you are near here, please stop in and see us. (Nisbett & Cohen 1996: 75)

No letters from northern employers were comparably sympathetic.

In the laboratory study (Nisbett & Cohen 1996: 45–8) subjects—white males from both northern and southern states attending the University of Michigan—were told that saliva samples would be collected to measure blood sugar as they performed various tasks. After an initial sample was collected, the unsuspecting subject walked down a narrow corridor where an experimental confederate was pretending to work on some filing. The confederate bumped the subject and, feigning annoyance, called him an “asshole”. A few minutes after the incident, saliva samples were collected and analyzed to determine the level of cortisol—a hormone associated with high levels of stress, anxiety and arousal, and testosterone—a hormone associated with aggression and dominance behavior. As Figure 1 indicates, southern subjects showed dramatic increases in cortisol and testosterone levels, while northerners exhibited much smaller changes.

The two studies just described suggest that southerners respond more strongly to insult than northerners, and take a more sympathetic view of others who do so, manifesting just the sort of attitudes that are supposed to typify honor cultures. We think that the data assembled by Nisbett and his colleagues make a persuasive case that a culture of honor persists in the American South. Apparently, this culture affects people’s judgments, attitudes, emotion, behavior, and even their physiological responses. Additionally, there is evidence that child rearing practices play a significant role in passing the culture of honor on from one generation to the next, and also that relatively permissive laws regarding gun ownership, self-defense, and corporal punishment in the schools both reflect and reinforce southern honor culture (Nisbett & Cohen 1996: 60–63, 67–9). In short, it seems to us that the culture of honor is deeply entrenched in contemporary southern culture, despite the fact that many of the material and economic conditions giving rise to it no longer widely obtain. [ 28 ]

We believe that the North/South cultural differences adduced by Nisbett and colleagues support Brandt’s conclusion that moral attitudes will often fail to converge, even under ideal conditions. The data should be especially troubling for the realist, for despite the differences that we have been recounting, contemporary northern and southern Americans might be expected to have rather more in common—from circumstance to language to belief to ideology—than do, say, Yanomamö and Parisians. So if there is little ground for expecting convergence in the case at hand, there is probably little ground in a good many others.

Fraser and Hauser (2010) are not convinced by our interpretation of Nisbett and Cohen’s data. They maintain that while those data do indicate that northerners and southerners differ in the strength of their disapproval of insult-provoked violence, they do not show that northerners and southerners have a real moral disagreement. They go on to argue that the work of Abarbanell and Hauser (2010) provides a much more persuasive example of a systematic moral disagreement between people in different cultural groups. Abarbanell and Hauser focused on the moral judgments of rural Mayan people in the Mexican state of Chiapas. They found that people in that community do not judge actions causing harms to be worse than omissions (failures to act) which cause identical harms, while nearby urban Mayan people and Western internet users judge actions to be substantially worse than omissions.

Though we are not convinced by Fraser and Hauser’s interpretation of the Nisbett and Cohen data, we agree that the Abarbanell and Hauser study provides a compelling example of a systematic cultural difference in moral judgement. Barrett et al. (2016) provides another example. That study looked at the extent to which an agent’s intention affected the moral judgments of people in eight traditional small-scale societies and two Western societies, one urban, one rural. They found that in some of these societies, notably including both Western groups, the agent’s intention had a major effect, while in other societies agent intention had little or no effect.

As we said at the outset, realists defending conjectures about convergence may attempt to explain away evaluative diversity by arguing that the diversity is to be attributed to shortcomings of discussants or their circumstances. If this strategy can be made good, moral realism may survive an empirically informed argument from disagreement: so much the worse for the instance of moral reflection and discussion in question, not so much the worse for the objectivity of morality. While we cannot here canvass all the varieties of this suggestion, we will briefly remark on some of the more common forms. For concreteness, we will focus on Nisbett and Cohen’s study.

Impartiality . One strategy favored by moral realists concerned to explain away moral disagreement is to say that such disagreement stems from the distorting effects of individual interest (see Sturgeon 1988: 229–230; Enoch 2009: 24–29); perhaps persistent disagreement doesn’t so much betray deep features of moral argument and judgment as it does the doggedness with which individuals pursue their perceived advantage. For instance, seemingly moral disputes over the distribution of wealth may be due to perceptions—perhaps mostly inchoate—of individual and class interests rather than to principled disagreement about justice; persisting moral disagreement in such circumstances fails the impartiality condition, and is therefore untroubling to the moral realist. But it is rather implausible to suggest that North/South disagreements as to when violence is justified will fail the impartiality condition. There is no reason to think that southerners would be unwilling to universalize their judgments across relevantly similar individuals in relevantly similar circumstances, as indeed Nisbett and Cohen’s “letter study” suggests. One can advocate a violent honor code without going in for special pleading. [ 29 ] We do not intend to denigrate southern values; our point is that while there may be good reasons for criticizing the honor-bound southerner, it is not obvious that the reason can be failure of impartiality, if impartiality is (roughly) to be understood along the lines of a willingness to universalize one’s moral judgments.

Full and vivid awareness of relevant nonmoral facts . Moral realists have argued that moral disagreements very often derive from disagreement about nonmoral issues. According to Boyd (1988: 213; cf. Brink 1989: 202–3; Sturgeon 1988: 229),

careful philosophical examination will reveal … that agreement on nonmoral issues would eliminate almost all disagreement about the sorts of moral issues which arise in ordinary moral practice.

Is this a plausible conjecture for the data we have just considered? We find it hard to imagine what agreement on nonmoral facts could do the trick, for we can readily imagine that northerners and southerners might be in full agreement on the relevant nonmoral facts in the cases described. Members of both groups would presumably agree that the job applicant was cuckolded, for example, or that calling someone an “asshole” is an insult. We think it much more plausible to suppose that the disagreement resides in differing and deeply entrenched evaluative attitudes regarding appropriate responses to cuckolding, challenge, and insult.

Savvy philosophical readers will be quick to observe that terms like “challenge” and “insult” look like “thick” ethical terms, where the evaluative and descriptive are commingled (see Williams 1985: 128–30); therefore, it is very difficult to say what the extent of the factual disagreement is. But this is of little help for the expedient under consideration, since the disagreement-in-nonmoral-fact response apparently requires that one can disentangle factual and moral disagreement.

It is of course possible that full and vivid awareness of the nonmoral facts might motivate the sort of change in southern attitudes envisaged by the (at least the northern) moral realist. Were southerners to become vividly aware that their culture of honor was implicated in violence, they might be moved to change their moral outlook. (We take this way of putting the example to be the most natural one, but nothing philosophical turns on it. If you like, substitute the possibility of northerners endorsing honor values after exposure to the facts.) On the other hand, southerners might insist that the values of honor should be nurtured even at the cost of promoting violence; the motto “death before dishonor”, after all, has a long and honorable history. The burden of argument, we think, lies with the realist who asserts— culture and history notwithstanding —that southerners would change their mind if vividly aware of the pertinent facts.

Freedom from “Abnormality ”. Realists may contend that much moral disagreement may result from failures of rationality on the part of discussants (Brink 1989: 199–200). Obviously, disagreement stemming from cognitive impairments is no embarrassment for moral realism; at the limit, that a disagreement persists when some or all disputing parties are quite insane shows nothing deep about morality. But it doesn’t seem plausible that southerners’ more lenient attitudes towards certain forms of violence are readily attributed to widespread cognitive disability. Of course, this is an empirical issue, but we don’t know of any evidence suggesting that southerners suffer some cognitive impairment that prevents them from understanding demographic and attitudinal factors in the genesis of violence, or any other matter of fact. What is needed to press home a charge of irrationality is evidence of cognitive impairment independent of the attitudinal differences, and further evidence that this impairment is implicated in adherence to the disputed values. In this instance, as in many others, we have difficulty seeing how charges of abnormality or irrationality can be made without one side begging the question against the other.

Nisbett and colleagues’ work may represent a potent counterexample to any theory maintaining that rational argument tends to convergence on important moral issues; the evidence suggests that the North/South differences in attitudes towards violence and honor might well persist even under the sort of ideal conditions under consideration. Admittedly, such conclusions must be tentative. On the philosophical side, not every plausible strategy for “explaining away” moral disagreement and grounding expectations of convergence has been considered. [ 30 ] On the empirical side, this entry has reported on but a few studies, and those considered, like any empirical work, might be criticized on either conceptual or methodological grounds. [ 31 ] Finally, it should be clear what this entry is not claiming: any conclusions here—even if fairly earned—are not a “refutation” of all versions of moral realism, since there are versions of moral realism that do not require convergence (Bloomfield 2001; Shafer-Landau 2003). Rather, this discussion should give an idea of the empirical work philosophers must encounter, if they are to make defensible conjectures regarding moral disagreement.

Progress in ethical theorizing often requires progress on difficult psychological questions about how human beings can be expected to function in moral contexts. It is no surprise, then, that moral psychology is a central area of inquiry in philosophical ethics. It should also come as no surprise that empirical research, such as that conducted in psychology departments, may substantially abet such inquiry. Nor then, should it surprise that research in moral psychology has become methodologically pluralistic , exploiting the resources of, and endeavoring to contribute to, various disciplines. Here, we have illustrated how such interdisciplinary inquiry may proceed with regard to central problems in philosophical ethics.

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Social media: a digital social mirror for identity development during adolescence

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• Vanesa Pérez-Torres   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6027-2233 1  

According to recent studies, social media are settings where adolescents construct their identities while engaging in social interactions. In digital spaces, adolescents can interact with, display, and receive feedback about themselves, contributing to the development of a clear and integrated sense of self. This paper reviews the available empirical evidence and discusses four overarching themes related to identity construction in social media: self-presentation (attempting to control images of self to others), social comparison (compare themselves with others, especially evaluating the self), role model (media figures that are social references for behavior), and online audience (friends, peers, unknow/know referents with whom users may interact online). Moreover, it proposes a new contextual perspective on identity development on social media. Informed by research on these themes that social media features allow adolescents to perform self-presentations, offering the opportunity to express interests, ideas, and beliefs about themselves (identification and role exploration). The image presented on social media exposes them to feedback, online audiences, and social comparison with peers or social models. Audiences have an impact on how adolescents think about themselves (self-concept validation). Role models can facilitate the learning of behaviors through imitation and identification (exploration and commitment). Thus, the digital world provides a context for the development of adolescents’ personal identity. This proposal aims to contribute to the construction of future theories on identity in social media and advance this area of research.

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Introduction

Adolescence is an important stage for identity development (Branje et al., 2021 ), a lifelong process that is influenced by settings, people, and social context. Erikson ( 1968 ) defines personal identity such as extent to which a person has adopted clear and consistent goals, beliefs, and values. Marcia ( 1980 ) describes the formation of identity as a process that can involve different statuses of development based on the amount of exploration (experimentation with different values, beliefs, or goals, questioning and weighting different identity options) and commitment (personal interest in those values, beliefs, or goals, engaging in significant activities) that the adolescent experiences or has experienced. The statuses of development are: (1) diffusion : in this status adolescents have not taken an active role in exploring different alternatives or committing to a specific identity domain; (2) moratorium : adolescents are actively exploring multiple alternatives, but they have not yet made any commitment; (3) foreclosure : adolescents have made a commitment without exploring it; and (4) achievement : after a period of active exploration, adolescents have committed to a specific identity domain (Marcia, 1980 ).

Researchers have recently broadened the two core processes of exploration and commitment into several developmental trajectories and models. The three-factor model (Crocetti, 2017 ; Crocetti et al., 2008 ; Crocetti & Meeus, 2015 ) proposes an identity explanation comprising three structural processes: commitment (choices made by individuals), in-depth exploration (reflection, seeking information about their commitments), and reconsideration of commitment (individuals compare their commitments with other options). Similar to Erikson’s proposal (identity vs. identity confusion), this model assumes that there are two opposing forces in the dynamics of identity construction: (1) commitment and in-depth exploration, and (2) reconsideration of commitment. Considering that the identity process is dynamic (unlike the sequential model proposed by Marcia, 1980 ), this model includes a dual-cycle process in which adolescents form, evaluate, and revise their identities. Adolescents in the identity formation period consider various alternatives (exploration process), maintain, and reinforce their chosen commitments (maintenance stage), or revise their decisions in a dynamic cycle (Crocetti, 2017 ; Crocetti et al., 2008 ; Crocetti & Meeus, 2015 ). In summary, personal identity refers to a subjective sense of self in diverse situations and times (distinctiveness and uniqueness) where adolescents explore and experiment with who wants to be, roles in adulthood, and their place in society (Branje et al., 2021 ).

According to Erikson`s ( 1968 ) theoretical models, in this article identity is understood as being constructed at the intersection of individual personality, self-concept Footnote 1 , interpersonal relations, and context (e.g., historical, social). At present, a relevant context for exploring and building identity in adolescents is social media and online activities (Raiziene et al., 2022 ). Adolescents are the most active group of social media users, especially through internet connections on their mobile phones. Adolescents use social media to express themselves, generate links and bonds with peers, and with social online referents, such as influencers, YouTubers, or Instagrammer (online audience). Recent studies have suggested that social media is a scenario of identity construction in which adolescents socialize (Lajnef, 2023 ; Meier & Johnson, 2022 ; Shankleman et al., 2021 ;Valkenburg, 2022 ). In digital spaces, adolescents can interact, display, and receive feedback about themselves, immediately contributing to the formation of their self-concept and exploration of their identity (Cingel et al., 2022 ; Shankleman et al., 2021 ).

Given the importance of the psychosocial task of identity, there has been a great amount of theoretical and empirical attention within psychology (for a review, see Branje et al., 2021 ). Nevertheless, they have placed little emphasis on digital context and its influence on identity development. In the last decade, the number of publications on social media and adolescents has increased considerably (for a review, see Davis et al., 2020 ), although the focus has been on the influence on well-being and negative consequences (e.g., problematic social media use, depression symptoms, risky behaviors) rather than on identity (Shankleman et al., 2021 ). This study addressed the influence of social media and online activities on identity formation during adolescence. Four central themes were analyzed in accordance with recent literature (Davis et al., 2020 ; Hollenbaugh, 2021 ; Meier & Johnson, 2022 ; Shankleman et al., 2021 ): self-presentation, social media audience, social comparison, and the role of models in an online context. This paper presents the findings thematically and includes a contextual perspective relating to social media use and identity formation. This perspective can be used to understand identity formation on social media as well as to guide future research.

Self-presentation on social media

Self-presentation is a behavior that attempts to transmit information about oneself or an image of oneself to other people, is activated by the evaluative presence of other people (Baumeister & Hutton, 1987 ), and plays a relevant role in identity development (Yang et al., 2018 ).

Self-presentation concerns how individuals control the image they portray to others, and social media has provided new contexts for selective self-presentation (representation of the personal image that individuals want others to perceive, common in selfies, and online profiles). Moreover, social media offers adolescents the opportunity to have multiple social interactions that broaden their perceptions and assessments they make about themselves, contributing to the construction of their self-concept (one’s overall view of oneself), given that the perceptions of the individual about themselves are based on their experiences with others and their own attributions of their own behavior (Meier & Johnson, 2022 ; Schreurs & Vandenbosch, 2021 ).

Research suggests that the relationship between self-presentation on social media and identity development is dynamic. Adolescents engage in identity exploration, and social media facilitates this process (e.g., through images, videos, and text), given that their self-presentation shows an image specifically for these media, often positively biased (de Lenne et al., 2020 ). The audience and characteristics of social media are central to self-presentation (and self-concept) because adolescents can craft and edit their images with more possibilities than offline interactions, and they can vary some aspects of themselves depending on the audience to which their messages are addressed (Hollenbaugh, 2021 ). By presenting themselves online, adolescents also regulate their impressions of themselves intentionally, usually to obtain the approval of others (management or handling of impressions) and test their self-concept for different audiences (Hollenbaugh, 2021 ; Meier & Johnson, 2022 ).

Adolescents act intentionally to regulate their impressions of themselves on social media to shape an attractive image and obtain approval from other users and followers (e.g., peers, friends). Social media self-presentation allows selective because them can edit their profile to a self-selected audience (Hollenbaugh, 2021 ). Nevertheless, social media also allows for expressing in a way more true or authentic self because adolescents can edit before posting to show a mood state or a thought about themselves (Shankleman et al., 2021 ). Hollenbaugh ( 2021 ) suggest «the effectiveness of self-presentation may be used as feedback to influence future impression management» (p. 84). Common types of self-presentation related to impression management include ingratiation and self-promotion. Ingratiation is the most frequent and aims to present a pleasant image of the self and a likable image on social media. For example, being friendly, funny, or saying positive things to others. Self-promotion includes highlighting skills, talents, competencies, and knowledge. For example, individuals are knowledgeable and skilled in sports, music, etc. Adolescents use these types of self-presentation and strive to create a positive image of themselves on social media (positivity bias) because they have a strong tendency to compare themselves with their peers and need peer acceptance (Schreurs & Vandenbosch, 2021 ), which is essential in the construction of identity.

Self-presentation is a transactional process that includes reflections on an individual’s identity and possible selves, as well as the audience and social context (Schlenker, 2003 ). Additionally, audience feedback about self-presentation on social media contributes to shaping self-concept and identity through multiple social interactions (Hollenbaugh, 2021 ; Meier & Johnson, 2022 ).

Online social media audience

The formation of identity and shaping of beliefs (self-concept), values, and behaviors can be influenced by social interactions with others as an audience (Schlenker, 2003 ). On social media, the audience (e.g., friends and followers) allows adolescents to connect with other people who are experiencing the same process (Shankleman et al., 2021 ).

Adolescents prioritize an ideal or desired identity image in the digital context (related to social desirability and the need for acceptance). Moreover, social media offer many opportunities to curate and present one’s identity to a wider audience. Therefore, users craft their profile thinking about who will see them, and they are conscious of the audience on social media (Marwick & Boyd, 2011 ). This audience can be real (friends, peers, family), proximal (an unknown referent or referents with whom social users may have offline interactions), or distal (an unknown referent or referents with whom they interact in their imagination). (Marwick & boyd, 2011 ).

Peer feedback (real audience) on social media is very important for adolescents’ identity. In early adolescence, there is an increase focus on the self (Elkind, 1967 ), and adolescents are highly sensitive to peer feedback. Social media permits the adjustment and optimization of online profiles (self-presentation) to elicit positive feedback, usually through comments and likes (Koutamanis et al., 2015 ). This feedback is more public, persistent, and visible to others (online audiences); therefore, negative feedback can influence self-esteem and the subjective evaluation of one’s worth as a person (Koutamanis et al., 2015 ). Instead, positive peer feedback can strengthen self-esteem, validate self-concept, and provide a sense of acceptance (Cingel & Krcmar, 2014 ; Peters et al., 2021 ).

Adolescents try to imagine the audiences’ perspective on their online profiles and posts and «act toward, react to, and thereby reinforce, a perceived Imaginary Audience»(Cingel & Krcmar, 2014 , p.156). An imaginary audience is the belief that others are thinking and judging you all time, that you are at the center of others’ attention (admiring or critical), and this process is heightened during adolescence (Elkind, 1967 ). In the construction of identity, the imaginary audience allows, on the one hand, to express one’s identity and, on the other, it relates to the need to belong, mainly to those who are not linked to the closest social ties, such as the family (Lapsley et al., 1989 ).

To understand how adolescents present their identity online and interact with each other through social media, an imaginary audience is a useful lens. Adolescents use impression-management strategies to determine their post and comment audiences, using content-based (what to post/comment on and how to post/comment) or network-based (tailoring or limiting access to their posts) strategies (Ranzini & Hoek, 2017 ). Intensified self-consciousness due to an imaginary audience becomes a broad online audience on social media, and users can feel surveillance and constantly observed (Ranzini & Hoek, 2017 ). This imaginary online audience makes adolescents overemphasize their positive traits (positive bias on self-presentation) and more frequently post selfies on social media (de Lenne et al., 2020 ; Ranzini & Hoek, 2017 ). However, social media audiences also play a role in adolescents’ self-expression, and these spectators can produce an empowering feeling regarding their self-concept (Shankleman et al., 2021 ).

Imaginary audiences have also been related to risky online behaviors (e.g., sexting, and friending strangers online), mainly adding users based on a profile picture to increase followers and, consequently, the audience (Popovac & Hadlington, 2020 ). In addition, the number of followers and likes on social media could intensify the imaginary audience: «a larger online audience may serve to increase social status among peers but also likely contributes further to the Imaginary Audience ideation itself» (Popovac & Hadlington, 2020 , p. 286). In this manner, the feeling of having an online audience can generate expectations in adolescents and influence their behavior. Online audiences can impact behavior by stimulating different outcomes: warning (when new behaviors are favored by online audiences) and chilling effects, when behaviors are restricted by the online audiences (Marder et al., 2016 ; Lavertu et al., 2020 ). The impact of online audiences on offline behavior can be either warming or chilling, depending on the individual’s goal. Therefore, the extended chilling effect of social media is «the constraining of behavior in reality (i.e., offline) as a consequence of the perceived expectation these online audiences hold» (Lavertu et al., 2020 , p.1); for example, people would avoid smoking in the fear that a photo would be posted on social media (Marder et al., 2016 ). In accordance with Marder et al. ( 2016 ), «people could respond in a ‘chilling’ manner for a number of reasons, including fear of external sanctions and social disapproval, regardless of whether or not that threat of sanction is real or not» (p.582). Moreover, Lavertu et al. ( 2020 ) proposed that public self-awareness (based on imaginary and real audiences online) can also be a positive self-referent (warning effect), for an individual’s behavior (e.g. participating in prosocial behavior offline).

Social comparison on social media

Social comparison is relevant in building adolescent identity because it has been suggested as a significant process of self-knowledge and a means of self-improvement or self-evaluation (Lajnef, 2023 ). In other words, «social comparison are often motivated by individuals’ desire to evaluate, improve, or enhance the self» (Noon et al., 2023 , p. 292). Social comparison is a natural process of self-evaluation, in which individuals tend to choose those who are perceived as similar to themselves as targets for comparison (Festinger, 1954 ). This tendency uses other people as sources of information to determine how we behave, feel, or think relative to others (Festinger, 1954 ). The social comparison process relies on the choice of comparison target (upward: superior other versus downward: inferior other) and the outcomes of the comparison (assimilation versus contrast). Social comparison can be upward when others are considered better or in better condition, or downward when the people we compare ourselves to are seen as worse (Festinger, 1954 ). In assimilation, the self-evaluation of the comparer shifts in favor of the comparison target, becoming more positive after upward comparison and more negative after downward comparison. Contrast is the process of a comparer’s self-evaluation shifting away from the target, which can become more negative when compared upward, and more positive when compared downward (Verduyn et al., 2020 ). Therefore, comparisons between the self and others can have judgmental, affective, and behavioral consequences.

Adolescents compare themselves with their peers and are concerned about building a personal identity, so they frequently use social media to present themselves in a favorable or positive way. In the digital world, social comparison is a frequent process (especially upward social comparisons) because these networks allow for an idealized image of others, share more self-enhancing information about themselves, and explain more successes than failures (Verduyn et al., 2020 ).

Social media posts increase the discrepancy between the actual self and the ideal self, eliciting a greater number of comparisons to others in an upward manner and highlighting dissimilarity (Midgley et al., 2021 ). Comparisons on social media often include identity domains such as peer relationships and physical appearance. For example, social media users choose the most attractive photos and usually edit them using filters (positivity bias) to represent their idealized self (Schreurs & Vandenbosch, 2021 ). In addition, users of social media also expect «likes» of the images published, which is often related to an adolescent’s search for social approval (Feltman & Szymansky, 2018 ). Social media places a great deal of importance on the exchange of popular pictures (with the most «likes») and receiving comments, and pictures that are retouched with filters to make them more attractive to their observers, normally representing ideals of beauty that are shared socially, such as being thin and in shape (Baker et al., 2019 ; Fardouly et al., 2018 ; Feltman & Szymanski, 2018 ).

Cultural standards of beauty refer to acknowledgement of the predominant social standards of physical attractiveness, appearance, and weight, which are supported by significant individual beliefs and objectives (de Lenne et al., 2020 ; Feltman & Szymanski, 2018 ). In internalization, individuals incorporate the ideals of beauty or other media ideals (e.g., academic or professional success) established by society into their own beliefs (de Lenne et al., 2020 ; Feltman & Szymanski, 2018 ), although not to the same degree. In this process, individuals cognitively adopt as personal, a socially defined ideal (de Lenne et al., 2020 ; Feltman & Szymanski, 2018 ). In Western society, these standards of beauty are associated with the desire to be thin, fashionable, and fit (healthy and muscular). (Feltman & Szymanski, 2018 ).

Social networks usually offer unrealistic skinny or muscular models or celebrities with an ideal body image that is virtually unattainable and may result in a negative self–image (de Lenne et al., 2020 ; Vandenbosch et al., 2022 ). This is particularly relevant in adolescence, when body changes are most evident and require greater effort to be incorporated into the construction of identity. The presence of unrealistic models on social networks, which respond to cultural ideals of beauty (being fit, thin, fashionable), usually represents an ideal self-model for most adolescents (Fardouly et al., 2018 ). This content offers more opportunities for internalization by applying an observer´s perspective to their own appearance or other media ideals (de Lenne et al., 2020 ; Vandenbosch et al., 2022 ). Thus, posts on social media also provide an idealized view of reality in other domains, such as professional, social, or romantic lives. These media permits obtaining information about others in their profiles, frequently more popular, or with more follows. This process increases the social needs acceptance of adolescents and the social comparison and internalization of media ideals (de Lenne et al., 2020 ). This emphasis on a positive version of oneself online can lead to a comparison effect (especially upward comparisons) which can impair well-being. For example, it can reduce self-esteem (Cingel et al., 2022 ; Midgley et al., 2021 ).

The most active users of social networks often have more upward social comparison (Feltman & Szymanski, 2018 ). Nevertheless, the current review indicates that the use of social media (passive or active) has positive effects (Meier & Johnson, 2022 ; Shankleman et al., 2021 ; Valkenburg, 2022 ). For example, an investigation suggests positive consequences (e.g., inspiration and pride) in other self-presentation types, such as leisure, work, health, or travel, especially when comparisons focus on assimilation or contrast with the target. Upward assimilation (more similarities with the target) and downward contrast (fewer differences from the target) improve well-being. Conversely, downward assimilation and upward contrast are expected to decrease well-being (Meier & Johnson, 2022 ).

Social comparison promotes self-knowledge, self-improvement, and self-evaluation in adolescence (Lajnef, 2023 ). However, social comparison (upward social comparison) with peers on issues related to ideal body image and physical appearance, produces more negative effects on well-being (Cingel et al., 2022 ; Midgley et al., 2021 ). In other domains, such as leisure or health, the consequences of this social comparison (upward assimilation and downward contrast) can be positive (Meier & Johnson, 2022 ).

Roles models on social media: imitation and identification

Meaningful relationships and social connections in adolescents’ face-to-face interactions are extended to social media and provide a referent or role model of behavior (e.g. influencers) to develop their sense of identity (Berger et al., 2022 ). Social media presents a different type of role model: celebrities, influencers and micro-influencers, who are famous because of their large followers (influencers) and personal branding strategies (micro-influencers). These influencers are frequently identified by a specific audience, create content that centers around lifestyle topics such as food, travel, or beauty, share significant parts of their lives on their social media platforms, and engage with their followers to maintain their status (Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ; Lajnef, 2023 ).

Media figures are social references for different identity domains that offer inspiration for self-development, self-esteem, and the exploration of different roles: vocational, gender, and sexual orientation (Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ; Lajnef, 2023 ). According to social cognitive theory (Bandura, 2001 ), social norms are learned (imitate) and accepted by observing the behavior of role models (e.g., peers or influencers) on social networks, principally when they are rewarded (de Lenne et al., 2020 ). Because adolescence is a stage characterized by the need to belong to a social group or be accepted by peers, these relationships with media figures can facilitate the learning of certain behaviors through modeling or imitation, which can have a positive or negative influence (Bandura, 2001 ). For example, «adoption of healthy attitudes and behaviors modeled or promoted by the media figures (+)»; «engagement in risky behaviors such as teen alcohol use modeled by media figures (−)» (Hoffner & Bond, 2022 , p.2).

Social media referents are considered identification models because they share similar features with adolescents and young people who follow them; also offers certain attributes that adolescents would like or aspire to have as their ideal self, which represents an identity challenge between the “teens ‘simultaneous need for «mimic» and «differentiation»” (Lajnef, 2023 , p. 5). Consequently, the internalization process of these norms and ideal media (e.g., popular, with large numbers of followers and likes) contributes to the identification of these referents (e.g., influencers) in social networks (Lajnef, 2023 ).

In scientific literature, this identification process is usually explained by parasocial relationships. This process refers to the perception of closeness or intimacy that a viewer or listener has with characters - fictional or presenters - of mass media (Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ). Repeated social media interactions between audiences and influencers create parasocial relationships. These relationships «are socio-emotional connections that people develop with media figures such as celebrities or fictional characters» (Hoffner & Bond, 2022 , p.1). Among the characteristics that favor this type of relationship are the affinity, authenticity, trust, familiarity, or attractiveness of those media referents (Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ) and the processes of identification and ideal or wishful identification (Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ; Lajnef, 2023 ). In the identification, influencers are viewed as someone who shares traits similar to those of adolescents are following them, which are related to the actual self. In ideal identification, influencers have some attributes that the person would like to have or aspire to have, related to the ideal self (Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ; Lajnef, 2023 ). The development of parasocial relationships between adolescents and media figures is a process derived from the search for new roles (exploration stage in identity building) of behavior beyond the family environment and allows them to meet the social needs of attachment and friendship (Gleason et al., 2017 ; Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ; Lajnef, 2023 ).

Adolescents establish this type of relationship with those who consider their peers, role models, or media referents such as influencers or celebrities (Eyal et al., 2020 ; Gleason et al., 2017 ). Social media for their immediacy and the possibility of interaction helps to create and develop parasocial relationships between adolescents and media figures (Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ; Lajnef, 2023 ). Moreover, in this context, users can observe life - and, in many cases, the intimacy - of people who, in normal circumstances, could never (Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ). In adolescents, parasocial interaction can occur more frequently because they experience changes in their relationships with peers and family (Gleason et al., 2017 ), which covers the social needs of attachment, similarity with those who consider their peers, in addition to being associated with the perception of their social world (Eyal et al., 2020 ). Social media provide a scenario for the development of such relationships in adolescents. It offers anonymous people and celebrities a platform where they can develop these relationships with their followers by exposing (self-disclosure) their «private» life, that increases the socio-emotional connections (Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ).

By adopting or imitating behaviors that they attribute to the «traditional» influencer (professionals in using social media’s different channels, careful personal brand with a wider audience), users can develop a parasocial relationship. In imitation, users aspire to act in a manner that is similar to a fictional character; for example, they copy their style (clothes, music) because they are characterized by attractive qualities. Moreover, imagination about media reference evokes and promotes the interaction (Gleason et al., 2017 ; Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ; Lajnef, 2023 ). Thus, the users comments with other fans or discussion groups exclusively dedicated to the figure of the influencer (fanclubs), or through other meetings, such as the interaction imagined with the influencer through images and fanfiction (fictional works written by fans from literary works, television series, film, or other media) or through an attempt to contact the same through comments on their profile, labels, or other calls for attention (Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ; Lajnef, 2023 ). Indeed, in the identity development of adolescents, these types of parasocial relationships allow the exploration of interests that may be common to those of influencers or micro-influencers (due to the process of identification with the media figure and imitation of their behavior). It can also facilitate self-expression, especially in identity domains such as gender and race, which often have limitations in their expression or social recognition in certain cultures (Gleason et al., 2017 ; Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ; Lajnef, 2023 ).

On social media such as YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram, it is very difficult to establish a two-way relationship between the media referent (e.g. influencers) and his/her followers because of the large number of interactions (publications, comments, «like») that exist. Therefore, parasocial relationships with these influencers are based on virtual relationships, considered «real» by viewers though one-sided (Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ). Consequently, the «followers» in social media (especially with celebrities or influencers) are a unilateral concept because these social referents have many followers that make the interaction extremely difficult (Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ). Influencers also may adopt communication practices with followers (posting personal videos or photos) to promotes closeness and reciprocity, although sometimes it can be a strategy to increase the audience (Riles & Adams, 2021 ). However, in the case of micro-influencers, followers are more likely to perceive greater reciprocity (back-and-forth interaction), which can blur the perception of unilaterality in the relationship. Reciprocity contributes to establishing a relationship between users and micro-influencers, given that the followers find commonalities and response to their messages. Thus, when a follower interacts with a media figure, the relationship can change from parasocial to interpersonal (Riles & Adams, 2021 ). Both macro and micro influencers on social media represent a social model of behavior, especially in the adolescent stage (Berger et al., 2022 ). The processes of interaction with these media figures favor the identification and imitation of behaviors related to the identity process (Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ; Lajnef, 2023 ). Adolescents explore different ways of being through models that can be considered as their peers, in which they are reflected (like a mirror), and in which they can share similar experiences and interact in relation to their doubts or identity experiences (Gleason et al., 2017 ; Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ; Lajnef, 2023 ).

Towards a contextual perspective about identity development on social media

The main challenge in adolescence is the formation of an identity. According to Erickson’s ( 1968 ) classic theory proposal, there are two important processes at this stage: identification with tasks and skills and exploration of social roles and experiences. Identity is constantly evolving and constructed based on changes in intrapersonal (individual’s inner perceptions or characteristics), interpersonal (relationships and bonds with others), and social domains (culture, political context, school, social media); and the current context, adolescents have a digital world in which to develop these processes (see Fig.  1 ). A contextual-ecological perspective considers adolescence development as a unitary system with attention to the complex interactions between these domains: intrapersonal, interpersonal, and social. «From this ecological perspective, youth are seen as subject to contextual forces ranging from the proximal influences that operate in their everyday activity settings, to increasingly distal (and abstract) contextual forces» (McHale et al., 2009 , p. 1190).

Contextual perspective about identity development on social media

On the one hand, self-expression (public and private images of themselves) on social media allows them to practice their self-presentation skills, show who they are, and receive feedback from their audiences (de Lenne et al., 2020 ; Hollenbaugh, 2021 ). Social media provides many opportunities to curate (e.g., craft profile) one’s identity to a wider audience (real, proximal, or distal), and the feedback (positive or negative) can strengthen or diminish self-esteem, validate or no self-concept, and provide a sense of acceptance or rejection by peers (Koutamanis et al., 2015 ; Peters et al., 2021 ). Imaginary online audiences can overemphasize positive traits in adolescents and strongly believe that others (audiences on social media) are judging all the time (Elking, 1967; Ranzini & Hoek, 2017 ). On the other hand, social media allows them to experiment with different ways of being, expose their interests, know what others do, identify with certain behaviors, reject others, explore ways of communicating, and show themselves to others (Shankleman et al., 2021 ).

As Marcia ( 1980 ) pointed out, a certain level of exploration and commitment is required to develop a stable identity. Different statuses of identity development (diffusion, moratorium, foreclosure, and achievement), based on the degree of exploration and commitment, are expressed in digital spaces (Cingel et al., 2022 ; Raiziene et al.,  2022 ; Shankleman et al., 2021 ). On social media, adolescents can try various identity alternatives before deciding which values, beliefs, or goals to pursue (self-representation and self-concept construction). It also allows adolescents to establish identity options, such as groups to which they belong, cooperate, or participate in social activism, among others. In this way, the process of identity construction in adolescents is influenced by the processes of individual-society integration, in which they can share or modify the values or identity options important to them (Erikson, 1968 ). Therefore, it is important to recognize the interplay between the social, interpersonal, and psychological aspects of identity development in the digital context. In this sense, role models on social media (peers or influencers) are a social reference for these behaviors (Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ). Peers or influencers on social media are referents of behavior to develop their sense of identity in domains such as vocational, gender, or sexual orientation (Berger et al., 2022 ).

Social comparison on social media influences self-knowledge, self-improvement, and self-evaluation in identity building (Noon et al., 2023 ; Lajnef, 2023 ). An indicator that identity develops properly is the presence of self-concept clarity, a coherent and consistent description of oneself (Campbell, 1990 ), which in social networks involves exploring and experimenting with different ways of being until achieving this integrated self-concept. Negative self-evaluation on social media (mainly upward social comparison) can influence identity development, diminish self-esteem, reduce commitment, confuse exploration, and increase uncertainty (Noon et al., 2023 ).

Social media also demonstrate the dynamic process of identity construction as proposed by Crocetti et al. ( 2008 ). In this relational context, adolescents explore alternatives identities and form commitments based on their interests and values. In addition, it allows these commitments to be strengthened, explored in depth, or dynamically reconsidered (Crocetti & Meeus, 2015 ).

These theories explain identity building in adolescence based mainly on the process or dynamics of exploration and commitment of adolescents. However, it is also important to know where adolescents explore their identity and the context (person-in-context) in which they are developing (McHale et al., 2009 ). Adolescents can connect to social media many hours a day, which is an accessible way to explore and build their identity in this context. The referents of identity construction in the past have been family, friends, and educational centers and currently, social media provides an important context that have effects on development of adolescents’ identity (see Table  1 ).

Discussions

Theoretical models of the construction of the adolescent’s identity have focused their attention on individual processes in which identity alternatives are explored and commitments are made, without major emphasis on how decisions can be influenced by the context and vice versa. In this study, a contextual perspective focused on the role of social media allows the identification of the processes of mutual influence (media and individuals) and their effects on the construction of identity during adolescence. Self-presentation, online audience, social comparison, and the role model (social media domains) have positive and negative consequences on the psychosocial development of adolescents.

Classic questions about identity construction, such as who am I? What do I want to do? relevant during adolescence’s biological, social, and psychological changes are now expressed in a digital scenario. For example, recent research explains that connections on social media support or hinder the relationships that adolescents create with their peers or friends (Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ; Shankleman et al., 2021 ). In addition, feedback about themselves, which they usually receive from people close to them, comes from an online audience without limit (Popovac & Hadlington, 2020 ; Ranzini & Hoek, 2017 ). Online audience produce an empowering feeling of self-presentation (Shankleman et al., 2021 ), negative consequences (e.g. surveillance) and risky behaviors (Popovac & Hadlington, 2020 ). Consequently, the role of social media audiences in adolescent identity process requires further evidence.

Psychosocial changes during adolescence, such as autonomy, need to belong, peer acceptance, self-esteem, and self-concept, interact with a particular digital context that has important implications for identity development. Social networks offer the opportunity to express interests, ideas, and beliefs about themselves (self-concept), with possibility of constant reinvention and the availability of digital tools to manage or handle the impression they make on others (Meier & Johnson, 2022 ; Schreurs & Vandenbosch, 2021 ). Also, social media allows the expression of an adolescent’s distinctiveness (e.g. expressing who you are) to differentiate from others (Shankleman et al., 2021 ), as well as the identification or imitation of social referents (Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ; Lajnef, 2023 ).

Social comparison with peers or social referents (e.g., YouTubers, TikTokers) can be a risk factor for adolescents who are more vulnerable, although they can foster a self-positive image. Thus, they can also be a way to acquire healthier habits and enhance self-esteem and well-being (Cingel et al., 2022 ; Lajnef, 2023 ; Vandenbosch et al., 2022 ). Moreover, parasocial relationships on social media have a positive impact on well-being domains such as social connection and coping (Hoffner & Bond, 2022 ). Therefore, it is necessary to expand research on the effects of social media references (e.g. influencers) on the identity of adolescents.

Social comparison in social networks is a relevant and frequent process because of the characteristics of these media, in which more importance is given to idealized publications about themselves (Verduyn et al., 2020 ). Moreover, it increases dissimilarity with others and the internalization of media ideals (de Lenne et al., 2020 ; Midgley et al., 2021 ). However, they also offer the opportunity to obtain information from other profiles that facilitate self-verification (Swann, 1983 ) and to test the expression of identity for a variety of audiences (Hollenbaugh, 2021 ; Meier & Johnson, 2022 ).

Social media enhances a sense of connection with others and increases peer relationships that are more extensive than they are realized in the «real» world. The exchange that occurs in online communities can facilitate the dynamics of identity construction, offering opportunities to explore, maintain, or reconsider their commitments (Branje et al., 2021 ; Crocetti, 2017 ; Crocetti et al., 2008 ; Noon et al., 2023 ). Digital space transforms and amplifies this process, often too quickly for adolescents to comprehend. Nevertheless, this online communication process represents for many teenagers a space for shared listening (including comments and responding to online publications) and the expression of the different challenges of identity construction (Lajnef, 2023 ; Shankleman et al., 2021 ). Further research is needed on how social media influences the dynamics of identity construction, especially how it relates to the processes of commitment, in-depth exploration, and the maintenance or reconsideration of those commitments (Branje et al., 2021 ; Crocetti, 2017 ; Crocetti et al., 2008 ; Noon et al., 2023 ). It would also be interesting to explore how they perceive the continuity of their identity over time (e.g., comparing old posts/images on social networks vs. the current one) and how this can support a sense of identity affirmation (Shankleman et al., 2021 ).

The significance and prominence of social media in adolescents results from the process of identity building that occurs during these development period (self-expression, friendships, or peer acceptance).The digital world can serve as a platform for adolescents to choose who they are and what activities they prefer without the social pressure of their closest or family environment, as previously mentioned. In turn, it can become a space with difficulties and risks associated with this stage of development, which requires a commitment to reflection, accompaniment, and action on the part of those in the social context of adolescents (e.g. parents).

Data availability

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The shrinking of the middle class has been accompanied by an increase in the share of adults in the upper-income tier – from 14% in 1971 to 21% in 2021 – as well as an increase in the share who are in the lower-income tier, from 25% to 29%. These changes have occurred gradually, as the share of adults in the middle class decreased in each decade from 1971 to 2011, but then held steady through 2021.

The analysis below presents seven facts about how the economic status of the U.S. middle class and that of America’s major demographic groups have changed since 1971. A related analysis examines the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the financial well-being of households in the lower-, middle- and upper-income tiers, with comparisons to the Great Recession era. (In the source data for both analyses, demographic figures refer to the 1971-2021 period, while income figures refer to the 1970-2020 period. Thus, the shares of adults in an income tier are based on their household incomes in the previous year.)

This report analyzes data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplements (ASEC) of the Current Population Survey (CPS) to study how the economic status of the American middle class has changed since 1971. It also examines the movement of demographic groups in and out of the American middle class and across lower- and upper-income tiers from 1971 to 2021.

The CPS is the U.S. government’s official source for monthly estimates of unemployment ; the ASEC, conducted in March each year, is the official source for its estimates of income and poverty . The COVID-19 outbreak has affected data collection efforts by the U.S. government in its surveys, limiting in-person data collection and affecting the response rate. It is possible that some measures of economic outcomes and how they vary across demographic groups are affected by these changes in data collection. This report makes use of updated weights released by the Census Bureau to correct for nonresponse in 2019, 2020 and 2021.

In this analysis, “middle-income” adults in 2021 are those with an annual household income that was two-thirds to double the national median income in 2020, after incomes have been adjusted for household size, or about $52,000 to $156,000 annually in 2020 dollars for a household of three. “Lower-income” adults have household incomes less than $52,000 and “upper-income” adults have household incomes greater than $156,000.

The income it takes to be middle income varies by household size, with smaller households requiring less to support the same lifestyle as larger households. The boundaries of the income tiers also vary across years with changes in the national median income. Read the methodology for more details.

The terms “middle income” and “middle class” are used interchangeably in this analysis for the sake of exposition. But being middle class can refer to more than just income, be it the level of education, the type of profession, economic security, home ownership, or one’s social and political values. Class also could simply be a matter of self-identification.

Household incomes have risen considerably since 1970, but those of middle-class households have not climbed nearly as much as those of upper-income households. The median income of middle-class households in 2020 was 50% greater than in 1970 ($90,131 vs. $59,934), as measured in 2020 dollars. These gains were realized slowly, but for the most part steadily, with the exception of the period from 2000 to 2010, the so-called “ lost decade ,” when incomes fell across the board.

The median income for lower-income households grew more slowly than that of middle-class households, increasing from $20,604 in 1970 to $29,963 in 2020, or 45%.

The rise in income from 1970 to 2020 was steepest for upper-income households. Their median income increased 69% during that timespan, from $130,008 to $219,572.

As a result of these changes, the gap in the incomes of upper-income and other households also increased. In 2020, the median income of upper-income households was 7.3 times that of lower-income households, up from 6.3 in 1970. The median income of upper-income households was 2.4 times that of middle-income households in 2020, up from 2.2 in 1970.

The share of aggregate U.S. household income held by the middle class has fallen steadily since 1970. The widening of the income gap and the shrinking of the middle class has led to a steady decrease in the share of U.S. aggregate income held by middle-class households. In 1970, adults in middle-income households accounted for 62% of aggregate income, a share that fell to 42% in 2020.

Meanwhile, the share of aggregate income accounted for by upper-income households has increased steadily, from 29% in 1970 to 50% in 2020. Part of this increase reflects the rising share of adults who are in the upper-income tier.

The share of U.S. aggregate income held by lower-income households edged down from 10% to 8% over these five decades, even though the proportion of adults living in lower-income households increased over this period.

Older Americans and Black adults made the greatest progress up the income ladder from 1971 to 2021. Among adults overall, the share who were in the upper-income tier increased from 14% in 1971 to 21% in 2021, or by 7 percentage points. Meanwhile, the share in the lower-income tier increased from 25% to 29%, or by 4 points. On balance, this represented a net gain of 3 percentage points in income status for all adults.

Those ages 65 and older made the most notable progress up the income ladder from 1971 to 2021. They increased their share in the upper-income tier while reducing their share in the lower-income tier, resulting in a net gain of 25 points. Progress among adults 65 and older was likely driven by an increase in labor force participation , rising educational levels and by the role of Social Security payments in reducing poverty.

Black adults, as well as married men and women, were also among the biggest gainers from 1971 to 2021, with net increases ranging from 12 to 14 percentage points.

On the other hand, not having at least a bachelor’s degree resulted in a notable degree of economic regression over this period. Adults with a high school diploma or less education, as well as those with some college experience but no degree, saw sizable increases in their shares in the lower-income tier in the past five decades. Although no single group of adults by education category moved up the income ladder from 1971 to 2021, adults overall realized gains by boosting their education levels . The share of adults 25 and older who had completed at least four years of college stood at 38% in 2021, compared with only 11% in 1971.

Progress up the income ladder for a demographic group does not necessarily signal its economic status in comparison with other groups at a given point in time. For example, in 2021, adults ages 65 and older and Black adults were still more likely than many other groups to be lower income, and less likely to be middle or upper income.

Married adults and those in multi-earner households made more progress up the income ladder from 1971 to 2021 than their immediate counterparts. Generally, partnered adults have better outcomes on a range of economic outcomes than the unpartnered. One reason is that marriage is increasingly linked to educational attainment , which bears fruit in terms of higher incomes.

Married men and women were distributed across the income tiers identically to each other in both 1971 and 2021. Both groups nearly doubled their shares in the upper-income tier in the past five decades, from 14% in 1971 to 27% in 2021. And neither group experienced an increase in the share in the lower-income tier.

Unmarried men and women were much more likely than their married counterparts to be in the lower-income tier in 2021. And unmarried men, in particular, experienced a sizable increase in their share in the lower-income tier from 1971 t0 2021 and a similarly large decrease in their share in the middle-income tier. Nonetheless, unmarried men are less likely than unmarried women to be lower income and more likely to be middle income.

Adults in households with more than one earner fare much better economically than adults in households with only one earner. In 2021, some 20% of adults in multi-earner households were in the lower-income tier, compared with 53% of adults in single-earner households. Also, adults in multi-earner households were more than twice as likely as adults in single-earner households to be in the upper-income tier in 2021. In the long haul, adults in single-earner households are among the groups who slid down the income ladder the most from 1971 to 2021.

Despite progress, Black and Hispanic adults trail behind other groups in their economic status. Although Black adults made some of the biggest strides up the income tiers from 1971 to 2021, they, along with Hispanic adults, are more likely to be in the lower-income tier than are White or Asian adults. About 40% of both Black and Hispanic adults were lower income in 2021, compared with 24% of White adults and 22% of Asian adults.

Black adults are the only major racial and ethnic group that did not experience a decrease in its middle-class share, which stood at 47% in 2021, about the same as in 1971. White adults are the only group in which more than half (52%) lived in middle-class households in 2021, albeit after declining from 63% in 1971. At the top end, only about one-in-ten Black and Hispanic adults were upper income in 2021, compared with one-in-four or more White and Asian adults.

The relative economic status of men and women has changed little from 1971 to 2021. Both experienced similar percentage point increases in the shares in the lower- and upper-income tiers, and both saw double-digit decreases in the shares who are middle class. Women remained more likely than men to live in lower-income households in 2021 (31% vs. 26%).

Adults 65 and older continue to lag economically, despite decades of progress. The share of adults ages 65 and older in the lower-income tier fell from 54% in 1971 to 37% in 2021. Their share in the middle class rose from 39% to 47% and their share in the upper-income tier increased from 7% to 16%. However, adults 65 and older are the only age group in which more than one-in-three adults are in lower-income households, and they are much less likely than adults ages 30 to 44 – as well as those ages 45 to 64 – to be in the upper-income tier.

All other age groups experienced an increase in the shares who are lower income from 1971 to 2021, as well as a decrease in the shares who are middle income. But they also saw increases in the shares who are upper income. Among adults ages 30 to 44, for instance, the share in upper-income households almost doubled, from 12% in 1971 to 21% in 2021.

There is a sizable and growing income gap between adults with a bachelor’s degree and those with lower levels of education. In 2021, about four-in-ten adults with at least a bachelor’s degree (39%) were in the upper-income tier, compared with 16% or less among those without a bachelor’s degree. The share of adults in the upper-income tier with at least a bachelor’s degree edged up from 1971 to 2021, while the share without a bachelor’s degree either edged down or held constant.

About half or a little more of adults with either some college education or a high school diploma only were in the middle class in 2021. But these two groups, along with those with less than a high school education, experienced notable drops in their middle class shares from 1971 to 2021 – and notable increases in the shares in the lower-income tier. In 2021, about four-in-ten adults with only a high school diploma or its equivalent (39%) were in the lower-income tier, about double the share in 1971.

Note: Here is the methodology for this analysis.

• Economic Inequality
• Income & Wages
• Middle Class

Rakesh Kochhar is a senior researcher at Pew Research Center

Stella Sechopoulos is a former research assistant focusing on social and demographic trends research at Pew Research Center

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