Chelsea Schein, Kurt Gray (2018), Personality and Social Psychology Review 22(1), 32–70; online 14 May 2017 — DOI-10.1177/1088868317698288
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 in the morality-as-cooperation batch (ADR-018), as the harm-based rival. No anthology topic holds it, and by its abstract it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice.
Unfetched because no full text could be read (see the status note), so no
NOTE is filed. What is known, to scope it until somebody reads it:
- From the abstract. Harm is redefined as “an intuitively perceived continuum”. The constructionist Theory of Dyadic Morality (TDM) holds that acts are condemned in proportion to three elements, norm violations, negative affect and perceived harm. Perceived harm is dyadic, an intentional agent causing damage to a vulnerable patient. Causation runs both ways: harm to immorality (“dyadic comparison”) and immorality to harm (“dyadic completion”), together the “dyadic loop”, which is offered to explain moral acquisition and polarization. TDM “argues against intuitive harmless wrongs and modular ‘foundations’, but embraces moral pluralism through varieties of values and the flexibility of perceived harm”.
- From readings in this batch. Graham et al. 2013 (LIT-499) answer the earlier version of the theory (Gray, Young & Waytz 2012) as harm monism that cannot explain disgust’s effects. The MFQ-2 paper (LIT-500) lists Gray and Schein as monists. Bloom’s commentary on LIT-047 (read in NOTE-034) cites Gray, Schein and Ward 2014 for the view that sexual morality reflects intuitions about harm. Fitouchi, André and Baumard (LIT-101, read in NOTE-132) cite Schein et al. 2016 for the finding that disgust–condemnation correlations vanish once perceived harm is controlled for.
Why it matters to morality-as-cooperation. It is the third answer to Bloom’s purity and sex objection, beside the cooperative answers (the Reply in LIT-047; LIT-101; relationship regulation, LIT-507): purity and sex violations are condemned because they are perceived as harmful. It also bears on Bloom’s battery point, since it puts harm, not cooperation, at the centre. Whether TDM’s “perceived harm” is a rival to a cooperative function, or a proximate mechanism compatible with one, cannot be said without reading it.
What a reading should check: how “perceived harm” is measured, so that it is not simply condemnation restated; the evidence for dyadic completion; and whether the 2018 statement engages morality-as-cooperation or mutualism at all.