ABSTRACT
This chapter examines recent social psychological research on the moralization process by which people go from having a preference for an issue to a moral conviction. Moral conviction is a person's subjective Meta cognitive belief that a particular attitude or value is connected to his or her fundamental sense of right or wrong. Investigations of moralization have typically focused on emotions and cognitions because these are the same type of constructs adopted by the original moral psychologists. Emotions, connections with the self-concept and in some cases harms and benefits may be possible routes to moral conviction. These routes may be distinct pathways, but they may also represent three different ways that moral convictions can be embedded into a person's identity. Social psychologists are not exempt from such pitfalls of their moral convictions. The ideological conflict hypothesis, however, predicts that both liberals and conservatives will be intolerant of people with opposing worldviews.
