LAS Emerita Professor on her research of the psychology of morally convicted beliefs

Name: Linda J. Skitka

Title: Emerita Professor

Department: Psychology

Tell me a little bit about your history at UIC?

I started at UIC in the fall semester of 1994 as an assistant professor. I was promoted to associate professor in 1996 and full professor in 2003. I was awarded the title of LAS Distinguished Professor in 2020 and retired from UIC as an emerita professor in 2022. During my years at UIC, I taught numerous undergraduate sections of social psychology. I was also the primary instructor of the first-year required statistics and methods courses for our doctoral-level students in psychology. I was recognized with several awards for teaching while at UIC, including the Silver Circle Award, the University Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Council for Excellence in Teaching and Learning Award. I also received awards for advising and graduate mentorship at UIC.

In addition to teaching, I was actively engaged in research during my career at UIC (and to some degree, still am). I have 100+ publications in scientific journals, including papers in Nature and Science. My research was well-funded over the years by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, and NASA Ames.

What role does research and furthering your own education play in your career and life?

Although my formal education ended when I earned my Ph.D. in 1989 from the University of California, Berkeley, one of the most exciting things about being a professor is that your education never ends. I was always (and am!) learning new things that got incorporated into my classes and lectures or my research. Education at this stage happened and continues to occur in many ways, including reading peers’ research papers, attending conferences and workshops, informal discussions with peers and students, or as new developments came out in the field in either theory, research methods, or analysis. Excitement about research was one of the major things that attracted me to my profession in the first place, starting when I worked on directed research as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. Although there is no end to the number of armchair psychologists who will happily speculate on human behavior, I was lucky enough to be able to collect data that allowed me to empirically test my guesses about what causes what and what or why people do what they when placed in X, Y or Z situations. Best job ever!

What interests you about Liberal Arts and Sciences?

I’ve always been fascinated by the human condition—what makes people tick. The Liberal Arts and Sciences are uniquely positioned to answer precisely these questions, whether it is through literature, art, philosophy, history, anthropology, political science, sociology, and, of course, my own discipline of psychology.

What do you hope your students will get out of an LAS degree?

An education grounded in the liberal arts and science provides students with considerable depth and breadth of knowledge, critical thinking skills, and an ability to skeptically consider new information, a background, and a set of skills that I think are especially valuable today given the vast degree of misinformation being disseminated, and therefore a greater need for well-informed and critical information consumers. People today also live in a more global world than they once did, and therefore, need to be adaptable and have a high degree of cultural awareness and understanding of different societies, histories, and belief systems. A strong background in the liberal arts and sciences prepares people to live in an increasingly complex and globally connected world.

How did you become interested in psychology?

I started my undergraduate career as a pre-med student. However, I fell in love with psychology when I took an Introduction to Psychology course as a breadth requirement. Until taking that course, I didn’t appreciate how broad the study of psychology was beyond Freud and helping people deal with their neuroses. Psychology includes the study of lifespan development, personality, how people interact with and understand other people, how people think, learn, and remember, and so much more. I found it fascinating and kept taking additional psychology courses on top of my pre-med requirements until it finally made more sense for me to major in psychology. It was final once I was introduced to psychological research—I knew I found what I wanted to do with the rest of my career.

I’ve noticed that a lot of your work has to do with morality/moral convictions. How did your interest in this area arise? And how much of a role does this concept play in your work?

Brace yourself for a longish answer!

My dissertation research explored ideological differences in people’s willingness to help other people under conditions of scarcity and abundance. For example, there are always long lists of people who need organ transplants and never enough organs to help all who need them. How do people think available organs should be distributed? My dissertation research discovered that liberals’ and conservatives’ priorities are very similar when resources are scarce. People who are personally responsible for needing an organ transplant (e.g., whose personal habits, such as over-drinking or smoking, contributed to their organ failure) should not receive one, and others should be prioritized according to their need and the likelihood that receiving treatment will be effective. Where things get more interesting is when resources are relatively abundant. Here, I observed an ideological divide. Under these conditions, liberals tend to want to help everyone who needs it, regardless of why they do so. Conservatives, however, continue to deny help to those who are personally responsible for their plight. I observed the same pattern regardless of the resource under consideration—housing for the poor, foreign aid, disaster assistance, etc. Conservatives seemed to have a moral objection to helping people in need when they had any personal responsibility for needing help, whereas liberals did not.

Broadly conceived, my dissertation research studied how people think about distributive justice—who should get what? However, at the time, a prominent theory of how people think about justice or fairness challenged the idea that people care about the distribution of outcomes. According to this view, people care more about the procedures used to decide who gets what than they care about questions of who gets what (in other words, the idea was that people care more about procedural than distributive justice). These researchers discovered what they called “the fair process effect,” that is, that people will accept even negative outcomes so long as the procedure used to decide them is fair (i.e., it treats people with dignity and respect and provides them with opportunities for voice in the decision).

I reasoned that if people really care about procedural fairness more than decision outcomes, then Supreme Court decisions, like Roe v. Wade, should be universally accepted as fair and final. Controversy about the legal status of abortion, however, has never been accepted as fair or final—not now, since the decision to turn over the legal status of abortion to the states since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, or post-1974 when the Roe v. Wade decision led to the legal status of abortion in the United States. Why would this be the case, especially in when the U.S. Supreme Court (until recently) enjoyed being perceived as one of the most legitimate government institutions? I hypothesized that people do not care about the fairness or legitimacy of procedures when they are morally convicted about decision outcomes. I ran several studies to test this hypothesis, including a longitudinal investigation of people’s reactions to real Supreme Court decisions. I found evidence supporting what I called the “moral mandate effect.” Consistent with my hypothesis, people’s perceptions of the legitimacy and fairness of the Supreme Court (or any other decision-making procedure) do not predict how fair, binding, or acceptable the decision outcome is when they have strong moral convictions about the decision outcome: What matters is whether the decision is consistent or inconsistent with perceivers’ morally preferred outcome.

Much of my subsequent research followed up on this initial set of findings to more generally study the psychology of morally convicted beliefs. I have discovered considerable individual variation in the degree to which people see any given issue as a personal moral conviction, and this variation matters. Among other things, the strength of moral conviction about an issue (such as abortion) is associated with higher levels of political engagement related to that issue (e.g., cause-related activism, volunteerism, voting, and voting intentions). But it is also associated with a greater inability to generate procedural solutions to resolve disagreements about the issue; greater distrust of otherwise legitimate authorities, such as the U.S. Supreme Court, to get the issue “right;” and greater acceptance of any means—including vigilantism and violence—if it achieves one’s morally preferred ends. The normative implications of these findings are both reassuring (e.g., moral conviction can act as protection against obedience to potentially malevolent authorities) and terrifying (e.g., moral convictions are associated with rejection of the rule of law and can provide a motivational foundation for violent protest and acts of terrorism).

Why did you choose to come to UIC and LAS specifically?

My first job post-Ph.D. was at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, a position I loved. However, SIUE is a primarily undergraduate-serving institution with a comparatively higher teaching load than a more research-focused university like UIC. I started bringing in external funding to support my research at SIUE, something not very common among the faculty in my department there, so I had limited support with grant management. For this reason, I began applying to larger universities with grant support and Ph.D. programs, where I could also work with graduate students. UIC made me an excellent offer, which I was happy to accept.

Advice for new students?

Consider getting involved in research while an undergraduate. Psychology and many other programs offer credit hours for participating in directed research. Directed research consists in working on research projects under the direction of a faculty member or a graduate student. You can work closely with others on all stages of research and find out whether a research career might suit you. Moreover, in many fields, having research experience is essential to be competitive in getting into a graduate degree program. Getting some experience early rather than late in your undergraduate career also provides more opportunities to get research experience working with different people. As your proficiency increases, you can also do more exciting aspects of research, including an independent research project of your own. Working closely with faculty and graduate students on research also includes the possibility of being mentored through the process of applying to graduate school. Finally, working closely with faculty and graduate students on research can lead to more informed letters of recommendation for either graduate school or jobs upon graduation.