ABSTRACT
Our aim in this chapter is to shed light on the psychological process by which people determine whether another person is worthy of moral praise. To do so, we first define moral praise and consider theoretical backgrounds on the topic, drawing largely on psychological traditions but also incorporating insight from philosophy and theology. In particular, we emphasize how praise is a judgment of moral responsibility directed at agents who have performed acts that exceed the call of duty and obligation. At its core, moral praise is a communicative tool used to highlight noteworthy acts of moral goodness. In this way, moral praise can foster and develop self-transcendence: praise is for when people defeat their selfish tendencies and transcend the self in order to help others.
After defining moral praise, we next examine the psychology of blame—the negatively valenced couterpart to praise—since the most influential theories of moral attribution focus on blame at the expense of praise. We directly compare praise to blame and consider situations when the two operate similarly and when the two operate differently. Specifically, research suggests that people use cues like decision speed and affective displays made during moral actions to infer an agent’s intentions for assigning both praise and blame. However, the processes of praise and blame also differ such that the severity of an act matters more for blame than praise and that people assume others are motivated to appear moral and thus deviations from that assumption are used as stronger signals of character. Finally, we conclude by linking the function of moral praise to the development of self-transcendence by examining how praise can shape children’s behavior. In a practical sense, children lack the duties typically ascribed to others and one function of praise may be to instill these duties. In this way, moral praise can help foster individuals with self-transcendence that act for the benefit of others.
