Collective Action in Political and Moral Uncertainty Understanding Moral Foundations of Exemplars and Perpetrators in the Second World War

Abstract

Challenging complexities within increasing global crises such as the Middle East or the Russia/Ukraine war require difficult moral decisions in uncertainty. While previous research suggests that moral foundations such as care and fairness elicit support for prosocial collective action, within contexts of violent conflict, this morality seems to shift towards loyalty and authority. However, there is a lack of studies on real-life high-stakes decisions in violent conflict, and connections to actual behavior remain unclear. To better understand how moral foundations facilitate support for collective action in violent settings, this article examines exceptional moral outliers during the Second World War as described in three autobiographic documents by Dutch Jewish peace activist Etty Hillesum, Christian conscious dissenter Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp Rudolf Hoess. These analyses are conducted by utilizing natural language processing.
The results reveal that all individuals studied were subject to morality shifting. While moral exemplars find agentic ways to creatively compensate for changes based on protective moral foundations and social strategies, the moral perpetrator narrative shows substantially enhanced shifting. Our findings suggest that while morality shifting explains collective action behaviors in challenging intergroup settings, individual nuance exists, and carefully crafted strategies can avert the consequences of moral shifting. Theoretical and applied implications for collective action under political and moral uncertainty are discussed.