Health Behaviors are Moralized when they Seem to Cause Harm

People readily moralize health, whether by denigrating smokers or treating exercise as noble. Drawing from the theory of dyadic morality, we theorized that people moralize health most strongly when they perceive poor health as a source of harm and suffering. Through four studies (total N = 1,694), we document a positive relationship between perceived harm and moralizations of health. We identified three types of harm—personal, interpersonal, and collective—that people perceive as relevant to health and evaluated the psychometric properties of a 15-item measure to capture each type. Perceived interpersonal harm reliably predicted moralizations of health, whether health was conceived broadly as a concept or specifically as a concrete health issue (e.g., smoking, eating healthfully, infectious disease prevention). These findings outline a research agenda for studying moralization in the health domain. We suggest that targeting moral cognition has potential to explain and perhaps change health behaviors.