The meaning of the desirable attribute “natural” was explored in two samples, American college students and adults in the Philadelphia jury pool. Participants rated the naturalness of a variety of “natural” entities, before and after they were transformed by operations such as freezing, adding or removing components, mixing with other natural or unnatural entities, domestication, and genetic engineering. Results support four hypotheses. First, the principle of contagion accounts for many aspects of the reduction of naturalness by contact with unnatural entities. Second, chemical transformations reduce naturalness much more than physical transformations do. Third, the history of an entity's processing is more important in determining its naturalness than is the nature of the entity's contents. Fourth, mixing like natural entities (e.g., water from different sources) does not markedly reduce naturalness. The insertion of a gene from another species, the process used in producing genetically modified organisms, produces the biggest drop in naturalness; domestication, a human-accomplished activity that changes genotype and phenotype in major ways, is considered much less damaging to naturalness.

Moralization is the process through which preferences are converted into values, both in individual lives and at the level of culture. Moralization is often linked to health concerns, including addiction. It is significant because moralized entities are more likely to receive attention from governments and institutions, to encourage supportive scientific research, to license censure, to become internalized, to show enhanced parent-to-child transmission of attitudes, to motivate the search by individuals for supporting reasons, and, in at least some cases, to recruit the emotion of disgust. Moralization seems to be promoted in predominantly Protestant cultures and if the entity is associated with stigmatized groups or harmful to children. The recent history and current status of cigarette smoking in the United States are used to illustrate moralization.

Moralization refers to the conversion of a preference into a value, within a culture and in individual lives. It is hypothesized that values, because of associated moral meanings, are more likely to produce internalization than instrumental concerns such as health risks. Specifically, it is predicted that liking for and disgust toward a substance or activity will be more extreme if the substance or activity is treated as a value (is moralized). These ideas are tested by attitudes to cigarette smoking, an activity which is undergoing moralization in the United States. Results from questionnaires completed by 715 American participants of 3 generations (college students, their parents, and grandparents) support this hypothesis. Beliefs that smoking is immoral correlate more highly with disgust at and liking for smoking than do beliefs about the health effects of cigarettes. These relations hold across all 3 generations. Retrospective data from the parents and grandparents document decreased liking and increasing health and moral concerns and disgust over the last 20 or 40 years. On the other hand, the history of smoking and living in a society that did not disapprove of smoking seems to have left no residual effects in contemporary judgments of grandparents or parents; their current negative attitudes to smoking are about the same as those of their grandchildren and children. There is weak evidence suggesting that moral attitudes to cigarettes are transmitted more from parent to child than are health beliefs or preferences.

We describe a rather common process that we call moralization, in which objects or activities that were previously morally neutral acquire a moral component. Moralization converts preferences into values, and in doing so influences cross-generational transmission (because values are passed more effectively in families than are preferences), increases the likelihood of internalization, invokes greater emotional response, and mobilizes the support of governmental and other cultural institutions. In recent decades, we claim, cigarette smoking in America has become moralized. We support our claims about some of the consequences of moralization with an analysis of differences between health and moral vegetarians. Compared with health vegetarians, moral vegetarians find meat more disgusting, offer more reasons in support of their meat avoidance, and avoid a wider range of animal foods. However, contrary to our prediction, liking for meat is about the same in moral and health vegetarians.

People seem to think that a unit of some entity (with certain constraints) is the appropriate and optimal amount. We refer to this heuristic as unit bias. We illustrate unit bias by demonstrating large effects of unit segmentation, a form of portion control, on food intake. Thus, people choose, and presumably eat, much greater weights of Tootsie Rolls and pretzels when offered a large as opposed to a small unit size (and given the option of taking as many units as they choose at no monetary cost). Additionally, they consume substantially more M&M's when the candies are offered with a large as opposed to a small spoon (again with no limits as to the number of spoonfuls to be taken). We propose that unit bias explains why small portion sizes are effective in controlling consumption; in some cases, people served small portions would simply eat additional portions if it were not for unit bias. We argue that unit bias is a general feature in human choice and discuss possible origins of this bias, including consumption norms.