Legislating Morality

I've been reading in my Social Psychology book about attitudes and beliefs, and how it (doesn't) predict behavior. Truly, we end up justifying our behaviors by adjusting our attitudes than the other way around.

But I found it interesting, two days before this presidential election, that I had to think about politics while reading my psych text. A whole section talks about interracial behavior and racial attitudes, and what stuck out to me was the effect of social psychology in our legal system, and then our society in general.

Because to be honest, creating laws that establish and encourage certain behaviors ends up influencing how we, as a nation and a society, create our beliefs and attitudes towards something. Examples? It wasn't until a law mandating seatbelts was instituted that we all eventually found it to be something that was necessary, acceptable, and understandable-- the creation of a law changed our behavior, which made us have more favorable attitudes.

And again-- when desegregation was an issue before the U.S. Supreme Court, social scientists were asked to explain the ramifications. They said that waiting for the public's opinion to change would take a long time-- changing the law gave our attitudes impetus to change more quickly.

"If we legislate moral action, we can, under the right conditions, indirectly affect heartfelt attitudes."

It's not talking about fleeting feelings-- but people's convictions and beliefs.

So with this upcoming election in mind... with any politics in mind, I have to support candidates that support creating legislature that will change attitudes for a better moral community. Enacting laws against abortion might not be a favorable thing now, just as some people opposed the desegregation of schools. But, in essence, it could truly create new perspectives about unborn children and abortion. Our behavior could change our attitude, cultivating a culture of life-- of responsibility and solidarity. We, as a society, and in a general sense, would begin to respect life and reject our current culture of death.

And I have to believe in psychology more than I believe in our political system.

What would happen if we enacted laws that invited immigrants to come to our soil? What if refugees were welcomed with open arms, as mandated by legislature? Would our attitudes about them and their situations change? Theoretically, yes.

I'm interested to see, in my lifetime, what laws are passed and what legislature is created. Hopefully, the majority of it will create situations in which our mindset about many things will change for the better, where attitudes will become more positive or more negative towards specific things in order to create a better community for us all.