People sometimes report feeling “totally” different (complete affectedness) and that “they’ll never be the same again”(continual affectedness) after negative events. It’s been proposed that complete, and continual negative effects characterizecontamination or impurity. Meanwhile, whether impurity is a legitimate moral domain apart from harm has been debated inmoral psychology. We address these matters using novel approaches from cognitive linguistics. First, according to a prominenttheory of verb semantics, verbs that convey impurity (contaminate, taint) belong to a class that implies complete affectedness(the “fill” class), such that contaminated entities are seen as completely contaminated. Second, people rated perpetrators equally,and highly, “contaminated”, “contaminating”, and “injuring”, whereas victims were rated straightforwardly “injured” (Turk;n=126, replicated twice). For ”contaminated” perpetrators, the taint carried on – they were continually ”contaminating”. Insum, impurity is distinct from harm: the process underlying impurity, contamination, involves inferences of complete, continualnegative effects that spread.

How do people make transformative decisions (the outcomes of which are hard to imagine, and which might changeone’s self in lasting ways)? We investigate social psychological factors that contribute to making transformative decisionsin contrast to ordinary decisions (with easily imaginable outcomes). We show that transformative decisions are uniquelypredicted by a desire for self-improvement and forming new social bonds. However, contrary to our expectations, epistemiccuriosity did not play a role in making transformative decisions. In contrast, ordinary decisions are uniquely predicted bythe preferences of the community, and younger age. We identify important differences that point to separate cognitivemechanisms used to evaluate transformative decisions.

Moral judgment often involves pinning causation for harm toa particular person. Since it reveals “who one sides with”, ex-pression of moral judgment can be a costly social act that peo-ple may be motivated to conceal. Here, we demonstrate thata simple, well-studied psycholinguistic task (implicit causal-ity) can be leveraged as a novel implicit measure of morallyrelevant causal attributions. Participants decided whether tocontinue sentences like “Amy killed Bob because...” with ei-ther the pronoun he or she. We found that (1) implicit causal-ity selections predicted explicit causal judgments, (2) select-ing the object (victim) for harm/force events (e.g., kill, rape)predicted endorsement of moral values previously linked tovictim-blame, and (3) higher hostile sexism predicted select-ing the female as the cause in male-on-female harm/force. Theimplicit causality task is a new measure of morally motivatedcausal attribution that may circumvent social desirability con-cerns.