title: Moral Vitalism: Seeing Good and Evil as Real, Agentic Forces.
abstract: Moral vitalism refers to a tendency to view good and evil as actual forces that can influence people and events. We introduce a scale designed to assess the belief in moral vitalism. High scorers on the scale endorse items such as "There are underlying forces of good and evil in this world." After establishing the reliability and criterion validity of the scale (Studies 1, 2a, and 2b), we examined the predictive validity of the moral vitalism scale, showing that "moral vitalists" worry about being possessed by evil (Study 3), being contaminated through contact with evil people (Study 4), and forfeiting their own mental purity (Study 5). We discuss the nature of moral vitalism and the implications of the construct for understanding the role of metaphysical lay theories about the nature of good and evil in moral reasoning.
authors.affiliation: University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia b.bastian@uq.edu.au.
authors.forename: Brock
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Bastian
authors.affiliation: University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Bain
authors.affiliation: University of Oxford, UK.
authors.forename: Michael D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Buhrmester
authors.affiliation: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Ángel
authors.initials: Á
authors.lastname: Gómez
authors.affiliation: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Alexandra
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Vázquez
authors.affiliation: University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia.
authors.forename: Clinton G
authors.initials: CG
authors.lastname: Knight
authors.affiliation: University of Texas, Austin, USA.
authors.forename: William B
authors.initials: WB
authors.lastname: Swann
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009014:Morals; D012067:Religion; D014799:Vitalism; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: contagion; essentialism; evil; morality; spirit possession; vitalism