Morality & Social Affiliations at the Workplace

Workplace discrimination and the effects it has on people have been widely studied. However,  individual behaviours stemming from implicit beliefs and underlying mechanisms of the tendency to distance oneself from others that translate to enable large-scale institutionalized discrimination are often overlooked. 

This study aims to understand the effects of an individual’s moral values, specifically on the purity dimension, on how closely they choose to socialize with others within a professional setting. This is examined through the following conditions: (i) preferred level of affiliation with others they perceive to have a high morality score vs those who have a low morality score, regardless of high skills and competencies. (ii) preferred level of affiliation when the moral position of others comparative to their own. (iii) whether those on one end of the moral spectrum are preferred over others. The study is currently in the process of obtaining ethics approval and data has not yet been collected. We predict that participants will prefer to associate more closely with people they perceive to have similar moral values. 

We hope that understanding the effects of moral judgements on social affiliations can provide insight into how we implicitly perpetuate prejudices at institutional levels. This would serve to better understand the intersectionality of individual beliefs and organizational practices, and how that might affect people from different social strata.