Linda Skitka is a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She's been studying people's moral convictions--the opinions that we connect to our core sense of moral right and wrong. Two people might agree about universal healthcare, for example, but they might disagree about how much their positions on this issue are drawn from their personal moral compass. Over the years, Linda and her colleagues have found that our opinions take on a different character if we've attached a feeling of moral significance to them.

 A few things than come up in this episode:

• Bernie Sanders’ 2016 speech urging people to treat inequality as a moral issue.
• In the opening, I discuss some research I did on how the mere perception of moral relevance makes opinions harder to change (Luttrell et al., 2016)
• For a summary of the research on moral conviction, Linda and her colleagues recently published a great overview in Annual Review of Psychology (Skitka et al., 2021)
• The early days of distinguishing moral conviction from other characteristics (Skitka et al., 2005)
• People resist conformity when they hold a morally convicted attitude (Aramovich et al., 2012)
• The question of how emotion plays a role in moralized opinions (Brandt et al., 2015; Skitka & Wisneski, 2011; Skitka et al., 2018; Wisneski & Skitka, 2016)

For a transcript of this episode, visit: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episode/moral-conviction-with-linda-skitka/

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