Recent Studies in Morality

American teens lie, steal, cheat at 'alarming' rates: study

The attitudes and conduct of some 29,760 high school students across the United States "doesn't bode well for the future when these youngsters become the next generation's politicians and parents, cops and corporate executives, and journalists and generals," the non-profit Josephson Institute said.

Is Crime Contagious?: Experiments vindicate the broken windows theory of how disorder spreads.

In 1982, two social scientists, George L. Kelling at Rutgers University and James Q. Wilson at Harvard University, proposed the "broken windows theory" to explain both how disorder spreads and how it is sustained. In The Atlantic Monthly, the two asserted that "disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken....one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing."
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Now, a new study (additional online info here) published in Science provides some strong experimental backing for the broken windows theory.

Does Religion Make People Nicer?: Only if they think Sky Big Brother is watching.

For example, young men may risk sacrificing themselves in war to protect their tribe. So how does religion encourage prosociality? The answer is that being watched by a Big-Brother-in-the-Sky tends to make believers nervous about being selfish.
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"The cognitive awareness of gods is likely to heighten prosocial reputational concerns among believers, just as the cognitive awareness of human watchers does among believers and non-believers alike," hypothesize the authors. But supernatural oversight is even better because it "offers the powerful advantage that cooperative interactions can be observed even in the absence of social monitoring."

Sexually charged shows such as Sex And The City and Friends to blame for rise in teenage pregnancy:

Teenage girls who watch a lot of TV shows with a high sexual content are twice as likely to become pregnant, a study said yesterday.

Boys watching similar shows are also much more likely to get a girl pregnant.
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Previous studies have found that teenagers who watch TV shows and music videos with a high sex content become sexually active earlier and have an increased risk of contracting diseases.
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The study also found that teenagers living in a two-parent household were less likely to get pregnant, while those with behaviour and discipline problems were more likely.

Teen Motherhood: Celebrity Buzz Belies Its Cost

Teen motherhood has gained a bit of celebrity allure with the pregnancies of Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin, but front-line professionals see a starkly different reality involving poverty, lost opportunities and a cost to taxpayers in the billions of dollars annually.
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"Teen births do have substantial, widespread negative effects, especially for the children of teen mothers," said University of Delaware economist Saul Hoffman, who compiled the estimate.

"The children are more likely to be in foster care, less likely to graduate from high school," he said. "The daughters are more likely to have teen births themselves, the sons are more likely to be incarcerated."