People have different reasons for their position on contentious political issues. One reason is a view that their position reflects a moral principle of importance to them even if the issue is not inherently a moral matter. We explored the origins and prevalence of moral justification for political positions. U.S. participants stated their position on gun control then rated a set of reasons for their position. They also described a personal memory of an event related to their position. We rated memory narratives for moral content and correlated ratings with participants’ position and their ratings of reasons for their position.

Morality is central to human behaviour and societal interactions. Research shows that moral considerations are prevalent in autobiographical memory, consistent with its role in reinforcing moral awareness. In contrast, there is no evidence indicating the prominence of morality in future simulations, which share key similarities with autobiographical memories. In a series of studies, we investigated the relationship between future simulations and morality, demonstrating they support the retrieval of moral instances, similar to autobiographical memories. However, we found moral frequency and content to be significantly different compared to autobiographical memories, suggesting a unique role for future simulations in moral reasoning.

Shame, tonic immobility(freezing), are phylogenetically conserved, obligatory, submissive, defense reactions following well-supported theories of behavior, biology, genetics, and evolution based on humans and species that existed before them. They share negative effects similar to depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and general submissiveness that operate outside conscious awareness to enforce cooperation. In doing so, they encourage sharing skills and materials and minimize lethal conflicts allowing the formation of large groups and providing the basis of modern morality. Classic literature and new memory experiments are presented to support this view, which is mostly absent from psychological discussions of morality.

Across four studies, we examined how often people remember events that relate to moral issues. We used open-ended autobiographical sampling techniques, followed by objective coding of memory content, to obtain insights into the general frequency and characteristics of morally charged memories, their distribution across different moral themes and how this varies with type of memory cue. We found that autobiographical memories with a moral content account for a considerable part of randomly sampled autobiographical memories and that their frequency increases with more self-relevant cues, aligning with research showing that moral traits are central to defining the self.