Moral Motivation: A Scoping Review Protocol

Moral motivation, the translation of moral judgments into actions, can result from many different processes including deliberate reasoning, emotional responses, and social pressures. Across existing literature, moral motivation is neither concretely defined nor consistently conceptualized, but instead attributed to diverse sources across disciplines. The objectives of this scoping review are to synthesize and examine how moral motivations are defined across the literature, how methodologies are used to study moral motivations, which populations the literature has examined, which cognitive mechanisms and moral domains are implicated in moral motivation, which theoretical frameworks and models are used to interpret findings, and where further research is needed to fill gaps in the current literature. An iterative approach to searching scholarly databases will be conducted using various search terms (e.g. “moral drive*”) in addition to “moral motiv*” to examine moral motivations and related terminologies that may be related or describe the same processes. Studies will be included if moral motivations or related terms are specifically addressed or measured. Studies will be excluded if they address moral motivations in a metaphorical or non-moral sense, as well as if they address moral motivation in contexts unrelated to psychology. A structured charting form was created to systematically extract data from the relevant literature. The main outcome will simply be a mapping of the literature on the topic. As a result, this scoping review will synthesize the widely dispersed accounts of moral motivation and inform the development of new frameworks and future research.