The Role of Moral Conviction in Neural, Attentional, and Metacognitive Processes

Moral conviction refers to the extent to which attitudes are experienced as moral commitments, rooted in one’s core values and concerns about right and wrong. It can promote civic engagement and collective action, but also lead to dogmatism, polarization, and even violence toward those who disagree. Yet the mechanisms through which moral conviction affects behaviors are less understood. This dissertation addresses this gap by examining the role that moral conviction plays in neural, attentional, and cognitive processes during sociopolitical decisions and metacognitive judgments. Across studies, results show that: 1) moral conviction engages both regions in the salience network and lateral prefrontal cortex, supporting the theoretical account that moral conviction consists of both cognitive and affective dimensions; 2) moral conviction may have distinct effects depending on its relation to participants’ prior beliefs: overall moral conviction, agnostic to belief congruence, speeds up decisions and attracts attention, whereas moral misalignment, the extent to which a belief-incongruent position is moralized, slows responses, increases dwell count and promotes decision caution; and 3) moral conviction boosts confidence without improving accuracy in factual judgments, with confidence-accuracy coupling being especially poor when facts conflict with individuals’ strongly moralized beliefs. Together, this work illuminates the attentional and neural mechanisms by which moral conviction shapes sociopolitical decisions. It also demonstrates that moral conviction biases both factual judgments and metacognitive monitoring, offering psychological explanations for broader societal dynamics, such as factual disagreement and polarization.