5. Moral rebels- stimulating social change or social inertia Clàudia Colom PDF

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Clàudia Colom Balsells !

5. Moral rebels: stimulating social change or social inertia?! ! Acting moraly might be difficult, especially when it implies risking social aprobation and facing crowds. Some studies show that people who have a stronger sense for their own moral identy have more probabilites to behave morally when the are under pression. This could explain why there are moral rebels, they are people who despite what others believe go out and face the consecuences for henacing a moral principle. So personality and circumstances have something to say when acting morally or not. For moral rebels it is easier to do it, but this does not mean that it can be applied to everyone. Those who have a lower sense of moral identity might not be strong enough to face the consequences of moral deviation so easily. That’s why moral rebels might cause a negative effect when confronting the rest of the population, since the fear most of us have for changes and mostly for social rejection can blindsight us when facing this situations. In these cases, the fact that moral rebels try to change how the others think and act might create difficult situations if not done considering the fears. But again, going through history, those who deviate from the norm are the ones that promote change and in the social context it is not different. So moral rebels might also empower others to act different, by leading the changes. Then, how can we understand why a moral rebel can be seen positivley by a certain group of people and also, at the same time, be viewed negatively by others? There where some experiments that tried to give an answer to it. In those experiments a moral rebel was stablished as someone who refused to participate in a certain activity because they considered to be against their beliefs. Those moral rebels where judge by other participants in the experiment. Two groups where established, there was an observer group where participants where univolved in the task, and an other group with participants doing the same activity that the moral rebel considered to be immoral. Those participants who just observed the task had very different opinions of the moral rebel than the participants that where engaged themselves in the same activity. An example of those experiments is: the moral rebel declined to participate in a racial profiling task, participants who had participated in the same activity disliked the moral rebel, while on the other hand, those participants who simply observed saw the moral rebel as moraly right. So being on the same situation to choose from as the moral rebel seemed to change what participants thought about good and bad, “ whereas an observer behind the veil of ignorance sees a brave moral exemplar, an actor down in the trenches sees a self-righteous pest.” According to the results obtained on the experimenta, researchers reached the conclusion that participants who where actively involved in the task felrt

Clàudia Colom Balsells ! resentful with the moral rebels because of their own fear of rejection and also because they felt that their self-confidence was threatened. But there was an other interesting result, if the participants who performed the task where previously reassured of their own morality before being asked to judge the moral rebels, they changed their opinion. In that situation, they saw the moral rebel in a much more similar view to the one that the observer participants had. To sum up, we’ve seen that it’s not easy to determine if moral rebels stimulate or inhibt social change, there are factors like personality that might have a big influence on our morality and, at the same time, circumstances also affect in how we see things. So in orther to achieve the stimulation of social change these factors have to be taken into account for moral rebels, and find ways to solve the complications they might cause....