When it takes a bad person to do the right thing

You're heartless, I'm less: self-image and social norms in moral judgment

Are moral judgments to sacrificial dilemmas shaped by a latent social norm? The present research addresses this issue. We report a set of six studies (plus a supplementary one) which question the existence of a social norm in the longstanding deontism/utilitarian debate by relying on two original tools, namely substitution technique and self-presentation paradigm. Study 1 showed that American participants asked to answer like most Americans would do gave more utilitarian responses than control participants who answered in their own name (Study 1). Study 2 showed that participants instructed to answer in a disapproval fashion were more utilitarian than both participants instructed to answer in an approval fashion and control participants. Importantly, no difference was observed between the approval and control conditions, suggesting that participants naturally align their moral judgments with a latent norm they think is the most socially desirable. Studies 3-5 explored in addition the effect of the activation of a deontism-skewed norm using the substitution instruction on subsequent impression formation. For the latter task, participants were instructed to evaluate a random participant selected from a previous study who gave utilitarian-like responses (Studies 3a-3b), or to evaluate a fictitious politician who endorsed either a deontic or utilitarian orientation (Studies 4-5). Although we consistently replicated the effect of substitution instruction, we failed to show that attempts to activate a norm in a given individual shaped their evaluation of other people who do not align with this norm. Finally, we report a mini meta-analysis targeting the pooled effect and homogeneity among our studies.

Moral conformity in a digital world: Human and nonhuman agents as a source of social pressure for judgments of moral character

Could judgments about others' moral character be changed under group pressure produced by human and virtual agents? In Study 1 (N = 103), participants first judged targets' moral character privately and two weeks later in the presence of real humans. Analysis of how many times participants changed their private moral judgments under group pressure showed that moral conformity occurred, on average, 43% of the time. In Study 2 (N = 138), we extended this using Virtual Reality, where group pressure was produced either by avatars allegedly controlled by humans or AI. While replicating the effect of moral conformity (at 28% of the time), we find that the moral conformity for the human and AI-controlled avatars did not differ. Our results suggest that human and nonhuman groups shape moral character judgments in both the physical and virtual worlds, shedding new light on the potential social consequences of moral conformity in the modern digital world.

Within your rights: Dissociating wrongness and permissibility in moral judgement

Are we ever morally permitted to do what is morally wrong? It seems intuitive that we are, but evidence for dissociations among judgement of permissibility and wrongness is relatively scarce. Across four experiments (N = 1438), we show that people judge that some behaviours can be morally wrong and permissible. The dissociations arise because these judgements track different morally relevant aspects of everyday moral encounters. Judgements of individual rights predicted permissibility but not wrongness, while character assessment predicted wrongness but not permissibility. These findings suggest a picture in which moral evaluation is granular enough to express reasoning about different types of normative considerations, notably the possibility that people can exercise their rights in morally problematic ways.

Deontology and Utilitarianism in Real Life: A Set of Moral Dilemmas Based on Historic Events

Moral dilemmas are frequently used to examine psychological processes that drive decisions between adhering to deontological norms and optimizing the outcome. However, commonly used dilemmas are generally unrealistic and confound moral principle and (in)action so that results obtained with these dilemmas might not generalize to other situations. In the present research, we introduce new dilemmas that are based on real-life events. In two studies (a European student sample and a North American MTurk sample, total N = 789), we show that the new factual dilemmas were perceived to be more realistic and less absurd than commonly used dilemmas. In addition, factual dilemmas induced higher participant engagement. From this, we draw the preliminary conclusion that factual dilemmas are more suitable for investigating moral cognition. Moreover, factual dilemmas can be used to examine the generalizability of previous results concerning action (vs. inaction) and concerning a wider range of deontological norms.

Is it good to feel bad about littering? Conflict between moral beliefs and behaviors for everyday transgressions

People sometimes do things that they think are morally wrong. We investigate how actors' perceptions of the morality of their own behaviors affects observer evaluations. In Study 1 (n = 302), we presented participants with six different descriptions of actors who routinely engaged in a morally questionable behavior and varied whether the actors thought the behavior was morally wrong. Actors who believed their behavior was wrong were seen as having better moral character, but their behavior was rated as more wrong. In Study 2 (n = 391) we investigated whether perceptions of actor metadesires were responsible for the effects of actor beliefs on character judgments. We used the same stimuli and measures as in Study 1 but added a measure of the actor's perceived desires to engage in the behaviors. As predicted, the effect of actors' moral beliefs on judgments of their moral character was mediated by perceived metadesires. In Study 3 (n = 1092) we replicated these findings in a between-participants design and further found that the effect of actor beliefs on act and character judgments was moderated by participant beliefs about the general acceptability of the behavior.

Who attributes what to whom? Moral values and relational context shape causal attribution to the person or the situation

Eight preregistered studies (total N = 3,758) investigate the role of values and relational context in attributions for moral violations, focusing on the following questions: (1) Do people's values influence their attributions? (2) Do people's relationships with the violator (self, close other, distant other) influence their attributions? (3) Do the principles intrinsic to the violated values (e.g., loyalty to close others) further influence their attributions? We found that participants were more likely to attribute violations by distant others to the person committing the violation, rather than the situation in which the violation occurred, when participants endorsed the violated values themselves. The tendency to make dispositional attributions did not obtain for violations of participants' less highly endorsed moral values or non-moral values. Relationship with the violator also influenced participants' attributions-participants were more likely to attribute their own and close others' moral violations to situational factors, relative to distant others' violations. This relational pattern was pronounced for violations of "binding" moral values, in which protection of personal relationships and groups is primary. Collectively, these results support a relational-values account of causal attribution for moral violations, whereby attributions systematically vary based on (1) the relevance of the violated values to the attributor's moral values, (2) the attributor's personal relationship to the violator, and (3) an interaction between (1) and (2) such that the principles intrinsic to the violated values influence the effects of one's relationship to the violator.

Moral contamination: Perceptions of good (but not bad) deeds depend on the ethical history of the actor

In the majority of moral decision-making research, we are asked to consider the action of someone we know little about-an anonymous actor. This is inconsistent with our everyday judgments of the actions of others. Here we test the novel prediction of whether actions are considered as comparably virtuous or malignant when performed by a good person, an immoral person, or the standard anonymous actor. Across four sets of experiments (nine studies in total), we show that the moral status of the actor contaminates peoples' evaluations of the virtue of their actions. Even without ulterior motives, people do not judge good acts consistently across actors. We also discover a dose-response relationship where the more immoral the actor has been in the past-the less credit they are given for a good action in the present. This process does not occur for good people performing bad acts, however. Bad acts are bad regardless of who commits them. These results give new insights into the way people evaluate the behaviors of others.

The prominence effect in health-care priority setting

People often choose the option that is better on the most subjectively prominent attribute — the prominence effect. We studied the effect of prominence in health care priority setting and hypothesized that values related to health would trump values related to costs in treatment choices, even when individuals themselves evaluated different treatment options as equally good. We conducted pre-registered experiments with a diverse Swedish sample and a sample of international experts on priority setting in health care (n = 1348). Participants, acting in the role of policy makers, revealed their valuation for different medical treatments in hypothetical scenarios. Participants were systematically inconsistent between preferences expressed through evaluation in a matching task and preferences expressed through choice. In line with our hypothesis, a large proportion of participants (General population: 92%, Experts 84% of all choices) chose treatment options that were better on the health dimension (lower health risk) despite having previously expressed indifference between those options and others that were better on the cost dimension. Thus, we find strong evidence of a prominence effect in health-care priority setting. Our findings provide a psychological explanation for why opportunity costs (i.e., the value of choices not exercised) are neglected in health care priority setting.

Heavier Lies Her Crown: Gendered Patterns of Leader Emotional Labor and Their Downstream Effects

Women use power in more prosocial ways than men and they also engage in more emotional labor (i.e., self-regulate their emotions to respond and attend to the needs and emotions of other people in a way that advances organizational goals). However, these two constructs have not been previously connected. We propose that gendered emotional labor practices and pressures result in gender differences in the prosocial use of power. We integrate the literature on emotional labor with research on the psychology of power to articulate three routes through which this happens. First, women may be more adept than men at the intrapersonal and interpersonal processes entailed in emotional labor practices—a skill that they can apply at all hierarchical levels. Second, given women’s stronger internal motivation to perform emotional labor, they construe power in a more interdependent manner than men, which promotes a more prosocial use of power. As a result, female powerholders tend to behave in more prosocial ways. Third, when they have power, women encounter stronger external motivation to engage in emotional labor, which effectively constrains powerful women’s behaviors in a way that fosters a more prosocial use of power. We discuss how, by promoting prosocial behavior among powerholders, emotional labor can be beneficial for subordinates and organizations (e.g., increase employee well-being and organizational trust), while simultaneously creating costs for individual powerholders, which may reduce women’s likelihood of actually attaining and retaining power by (a) making high-power roles less appealing, (b) guiding women toward less prestigious and (c) more precarious leadership roles, (d) draining powerful women’s time and resources without equitable rewards, and (e) making it difficult for women to legitimize their power in the eyes of subordinates (especially men). Thus, emotional labor practices can help explain the underrepresentation of women in top leadership positions.

Many heads are more utilitarian than one

Moral judgments have a very prominent social nature, and in everyday life, they are continually shaped by discussions with others. Psychological investigations of these judgments, however, have rarely addressed the impact of social interactions. To examine the role of social interaction on moral judgments within small groups, we had groups of 4 to 5 participants judge moral dilemmas first individually and privately, then collectively and interactively, and finally individually a second time. We employed both real-life and sacrificial moral dilemmas in which the character's action or inaction violated a moral principle to benefit the greatest number of people. Participants decided if these utilitarian decisions were morally acceptable or not. In Experiment 1, we found that collective judgments in face-to-face interactions were more utilitarian than the statistical aggregate of their members compared to both first and second individual judgments. This observation supported the hypothesis that deliberation and consensus within a group transiently reduce the emotional burden of norm violation. In Experiment 2, we tested this hypothesis more directly: measuring participants' state anxiety in addition to their moral judgments before, during, and after online interactions, we found again that collectives were more utilitarian than those of individuals and that state anxiety level was reduced during and after social interaction. The utilitarian boost in collective moral judgments is probably due to the reduction of stress in the social setting.

What we would (but shouldn't) do for those we love: Universalism versus partiality in responding to others' moral transgressions

Recent work indicates that people are more likely to protect a close (vs. distant) other who commits a crime. But do people think it is morally right to treat close others differently? On the one hand, universalist moral principles dictate that people should be treated equally. On the other hand, close relationships are the source of special moral obligations, which may lead people to believe they ought to preferentially protect close others. Here we attempt to adjudicate between these competing considerations by examining what people think they would and should do when a close (vs. distant) other behaves immorally. Across four experiments (N = 2002), we show that people believe they morally should protect close others more than distant others. However, we also document a striking discrepancy: participants reported that they would protect close others far more than they should protect them. These findings demonstrate that people believe close relationships influence what they morally ought to do-but also that moral decisions about close others may be a context in which people are particularly likely to fail to do what they think is morally right.

Moral Judgments of COVID-19 Social Distancing Violations: The Roles of Perceived Harm and Impurity

Can perceptions of impurity uniquely explain moral judgment? Or is moral judgment reducible to perceptions of harm? Whereas some perspectives posit that purity violations may drive moral judgment distinctly from harm violations, other perspectives contend that perceived harm is an essential precursor of moral condemnation. We tested these competing hypotheses through five preregistered experiments (total N = 2,944) investigating U.S. adults' perceptions of social distancing violations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Perceived harm was more strongly related to moral judgment than was perceived impurity. Nevertheless, over and above perceived harm, perceived impurity reliably explained unique variance in moral judgment. Effects of perceived harm and impurity were significant among both liberal and conservative participants but were larger among liberals. Results suggest that appraisals of both harm and impurity provide valuable insights into moral cognition. We discuss implications of these findings for dyadic morality, moral foundations, act versus character judgments, and political ideology.

Anger and Sadness as Moral Signals

Three studies examined the relationship between emotions and moral judgment from an interpersonal perspective. In Studies 1 and 2, participants justified their decisions in sacrificial dilemmas to an imagined interlocutor. Linguistic analyses revealed that Don’t Sacrifice justifications contained more anger-related language than sadness-related language, whereas Sacrifice justifications contained roughly equal proportions of anger and sadness language. In Study 3, participants made character inferences about an actor who chose to/refused to sacrifice one person to save multiple people. We manipulated the actor’s ratio of anger to sadness. Participants rated the Don’t Sacrifice actor more negatively when they displayed high anger relative to sadness but rated the Sacrifice actor negatively whenever they exhibited high anger (independent of sadness). These data highlight novel ways in which actors and observers use emotions to complement the substance of a moral argument.

Moral dilemmas and trust in leaders during a global health crisis

Trust in leaders is central to citizen compliance with public policies. One potential determinant of trust is how leaders resolve conflicts between utilitarian and non-utilitarian ethical principles in moral dilemmas. Past research suggests that utilitarian responses to dilemmas can both erode and enhance trust in leaders: sacrificing some people to save many others ('instrumental harm') reduces trust, while maximizing the welfare of everyone equally ('impartial beneficence') may increase trust. In a multi-site experiment spanning 22 countries on six continents, participants (N = 23,929) completed self-report (N = 17,591) and behavioural (N = 12,638) measures of trust in leaders who endorsed utilitarian or non-utilitarian principles in dilemmas concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. Across both the self-report and behavioural measures, endorsement of instrumental harm decreased trust, while endorsement of impartial beneficence increased trust. These results show how support for different ethical principles can impact trust in leaders, and inform effective public communication during times of global crisis. PROTOCOL REGISTRATION STATEMENT: The Stage 1 protocol for this Registered Report was accepted in principle on 13 November 2020. The protocol, as accepted by the journal, can be found at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13247315.v1 .

Moralizing mental states: The role of trait self-control and control perceptions

Which attributes of a person contribute to their tendency to moralize others' thoughts? Adopting an individual-difference approach to moral cognition, eight studies (N = 2,033) investigated how people's ability for self-control shapes their moral reactions to others' mental states. Specifically, Studies 1a-2b found positive predictive effects of trait self-control (TSC) on the moralization (e.g., blaming) of another person's fantasies about different immoral behaviors. While ruling out alternative explanations, they furthermore supported the mediating role of ascribing targets control over their mental states. Studies 3a-3b provided correlational evidence of the perceived ability to control one's own mental states as a mechanism in the relationship between TSC and ascriptions of control to others. Studies 4a-4b followed a causal-chain experimental approach: A manipulation of participants' self-perceived ability to control their emotions impacted their control ascriptions to others over their immoral mental states (Study 4a), and targets perceived as high (vs. low) in control over their immoral mental states elicited stronger moralizing reactions. Taken together, the present studies elucidate why people moralize others' purely mental states, even in the absence of overt behavior. More broadly, they advance our knowledge about the role of individual differences, particularly in self-control, in moral cognition.

The Effects of Social Perception on Moral Judgment

When people express a moral judgment, others make inferences about their personality, such as whether they are warm or competent. People may use this interpersonal process to present themselves in a way that is socially acceptable in the current circumstances. Across four studies, we investigated this hypothesis in Chinese culture and showed that college student participants tended to associate others' deontological moral judgments with warmth and utilitarian moral judgments with competence (Study 1, M _age = 21.1, SD = 2.45; Study 2, M _age = 20.53, SD = 1.87). In addition, participants made more deontological judgments after preparing to be interviewed for a job requiring them to be in a warm social role, and more utilitarian judgments after preparing for a job requiring them to be in a competent social role (Study 3, M _age = 19.5, SD = 1.63). This effect held true in moral dilemmas involving different degrees of hypothetical personal involvement, and appeared to be mediated by the perception of others' expectations (Study 4, M _age = 19.92, SD = 1.97). The results suggest an important role for social cognition as an influence on moral judgments in Chinese culture.

The amoral atheist? A cross-national examination of cultural, motivational, and cognitive antecedents of disbelief, and their implications for morality

There is a widespread cross-cultural stereotype suggesting that atheists are untrustworthy and lack a moral compass. Is there any truth to this notion? Building on theory about the cultural, (de)motivational, and cognitive antecedents of disbelief, the present research investigated whether there are reliable similarities as well as differences between believers and disbelievers in the moral values and principles they endorse. Four studies examined how religious disbelief (vs. belief) relates to endorsement of various moral values and principles in a predominately religious (vs. irreligious) country (the U.S. vs. Sweden). Two U.S. M-Turk studies (Studies 1A and 1B, N = 429) and two large cross-national studies (Studies 2-3, N = 4,193), consistently show that disbelievers (vs. believers) are less inclined to endorse moral values that serve group cohesion (the binding moral foundations). By contrast, only minor differences between believers and disbelievers were found in endorsement of other moral values (individualizing moral foundations, epistemic rationality). It is also demonstrated that presumed cultural and demotivational antecedents of disbelief (limited exposure to credibility-enhancing displays, low existential threat) are associated with disbelief. Furthermore, these factors are associated with weaker endorsement of the binding moral foundations in both countries (Study 2). Most of these findings were replicated in Study 3, and results also show that disbelievers (vs. believers) have a more consequentialist view of morality in both countries. A consequentialist view of morality was also associated with another presumed antecedent of disbelief-analytic cognitive style.

Individual variation in role construal predicts responses to third-party biases in hiring contexts

We theorize that individuals’ pre-existing beliefs about the hiring manager role (role construal) are associated with their tendency to condone bias accommodation in hiring contexts, in which a person aligns hiring decisions with the perceived biases of others. In two studies, we focus on human resources (HR) professionals’ endorsement of the role demand to prioritize candidate fit with others (e.g., supervisor) when making hiring decisions. Study 1 examined bias accommodation from a vicarious perspective, revealing that role demand endorsement is positively associated with viewing it as acceptable and common for another hiring manager to accommodate third-party bias against women. Study 2 examined bias accommodation experimentally from an actor’s perspective, showing lower preference for and selection of a female (vs. male) job candidate in the presence of cues to third-party bias against women, but only when role demand endorsement is relatively high. HR professionals in both studies indicated that third-party bias influences in hiring are relatively common. Responses in Study 2 provide preliminary evidence that the phenomenon of third-party bias accommodation might be relevant in the context of employment discrimination based on group characteristics other than gender (e.g., race/ethnicity, age). We discuss the practical implications of our findings for hiring professionals and for organizations seeking to increase diversity in their workforce.

The MAD Model of Moral Contagion: The Role of Motivation, Attention, and Design in the Spread of Moralized Content Online

With more than 3 billion users, online social networks represent an important venue for moral and political discourse and have been used to organize political revolutions, influence elections, and raise awareness of social issues. These examples rely on a common process to be effective: the ability to engage users and spread moralized content through online networks. Here, we review evidence that expressions of moral emotion play an important role in the spread of moralized content (a phenomenon we call moral contagion). Next, we propose a psychological model called the motivation, attention, and design (MAD) model to explain moral contagion. The MAD model posits that people have group-identity-based motivations to share moral-emotional content, that such content is especially likely to capture our attention, and that the design of social-media platforms amplifies our natural motivational and cognitive tendencies to spread such content. We review each component of the model (as well as interactions between components) and raise several novel, testable hypotheses that can spark progress on the scientific investigation of civic engagement and activism, political polarization, propaganda and disinformation, and other moralized behaviors in the digital age.

Fraud and Understanding the Moral Mind: Need for Implementation of Organizational Characteristics into Behavioral Ethics

The development of behavioral ethics has brought forth a detailed understanding of the processes of moral perception, decision-making and behavior within and beyond organizations and communities. However, prescriptive recommendations of behavioral research regarding how to support an ethical environment often underestimate the specifics of organizational characteristics that may encourage the occurrence and persistence of dishonesty, especially regarding deception as a desired action in some instances by some employees and managers. Furthermore, behavioral research does not adequately recognize the notion that dishonesty can be sometimes viewed as an acceptable cost for some expected traits or skills of an employee such as intelligence or creativity. Under some conditions, deception can be even considered a moral, prosocial activity. Finally, formal ethics systems and situational measures to promote honesty may be inefficient or directly harmful. This article highlights questions of how to assess such factors in research on (un)ethical behavior within organizations.

Bright mind, moral mind? Intelligence is unrelated to consequentialist moral judgment in sacrificial moral dilemmas

The dual-process model of moral cognition suggests that outcome-focused, consequentialist moral judgment in sacrificial moral dilemmas is driven by a deliberative, reasoned, cognitive process. Although many studies have demonstrated a positive association of consequentialist judgment with measures of cognitive engagement, no work has investigated whether cognitive ability itself is also related to consequentialist judgment. Therefore, we conducted three studies to investigate whether participants' preference for consequentialist moral judgment is related to their intelligence. A meta-analytic integration of these three studies (with a total N = 675) uncovered no association between the two measures (r = - .02). Furthermore, a Bayesian reanalysis of the same data provided substantial evidence in favor of a null effect (BF_H0 = 7.2). As such, the present studies show that if consequentialist judgments depend on deliberative reasoning, this association is not driven by cognitive ability, but by cognitive motivation.

Do People Believe That They Are More Deontological Than Others?

The question of how we decide that someone else has done something wrong is at the heart of moral psychology. Little work has been done to investigate whether people believe that others' moral judgment differs from their own in moral dilemmas. We conducted four experiments using various measures and diverse samples to demonstrate the self-other discrepancy in moral judgment. We found that (a) people were more deontological when they made moral judgments themselves than when they judged a stranger (Studies 1-4) and (b) a protected values (PVs) account outperformed an emotion account and a construal-level theory account in explaining this self-other discrepancy (Studies 3 and 4). We argued that the self-other discrepancy in moral judgment may serve as a protective mechanism co-evolving alongside the social exchange mechanism and may contribute to better understanding the obstacles preventing people from cooperation.

The costs of being consequentialist: Social inference from instrumental harm and impartial beneficence

Previous work has demonstrated that people are more likely to trust "deontological" agents who reject harming one person to save many others than "consequentialist" agents who endorse such instrumental harms, which could explain the higher prevalence of non-consequentialist moral intuitions. Yet consequentialism involves endorsing not just instrumental harm, but also impartial beneficence, treating the well-being of every individual as equally important. In four studies (total N = 2086), we investigated preferences for consequentialist vs. non-consequentialist social partners endorsing instrumental harm or impartial beneficence and examined how such preferences varied across different types of social relationships. Our results demonstrate robust preferences for non-consequentialist over consequentialist agents in the domain of instrumental harm, and weaker - but still evident - preferences in the domain of impartial beneficence. In the domain of instrumental harm, non-consequentialist agents were consistently viewed as more moral and trustworthy, preferred for a range of social roles, and entrusted with more money in economic exchanges. In the domain of impartial beneficence, preferences for non-consequentialist agents were observed for close interpersonal relationships requiring direct interaction (friend, spouse) but not for more distant roles with little-to-no personal interaction (political leader). Collectively our findings demonstrate that preferences for non-consequentialist agents are sensitive to the different dimensions of consequentialist thinking and the relational context.

People making deontological judgments in the Trapdoor dilemma are perceived to be more prosocial in economic games than they actually are

Why do people make deontological decisions, although they often lead to overall unfavorable outcomes? One account is receiving considerable attention: deontological judgments may signal commitment to prosociality and thus may increase people’s chances of being selected as social partners–which carries obvious long-term benefits. Here we test this framework by experimentally exploring whether people making deontological judgments are expected to be more prosocial than those making consequentialist judgments and whether they are actually so. In line with previous studies, we identified deontological choices using the Trapdoor dilemma. Using economic games, we take two measures of general prosociality towards strangers: trustworthiness and altruism. Our results procure converging evidence for a perception gap according to which Trapdoor-deontologists are believed to be more trustworthy and more altruistic towards strangers than Trapdoor-consequentialists, but actually they are not so. These results show that deontological judgments are not universal, reliable signals of prosociality.

Clarifying Gender Differences in Moral Dilemma Judgments: The Complementary Roles of Harm Aversion and Action Aversion

Moral dilemmas entail situations where decisions consistent with deontological principles (following moral rules) conflict with decisions consistent with utilitarian principles (maximizing overall outcomes). Past work employing process dissociation (PD) clarified that gender differences in utilitarianism are modest, but women are substantially more deontological than men. However, deontological judgments confound two motivations: harm aversion and action aversion. The current work presents a mega-analysis of eight studies ( N = 1,965) using PD to assess utilitarian and deontological response tendencies both when deontology entails inaction and when it requires action, to assess the independent contributions of harm aversion and action aversion. Results replicate and clarify past findings: Women scored higher than men on deontological tendencies, and this difference was enhanced when the deontological choice required refraining from harmful action rather than acting to prevent harm. That is, gender differences in deontological inclinations are caused by both harm aversion and action aversion.

In a moral dilemma, choose the one you love: Impartial actors are seen as less moral than partial ones

Although impartiality and concern for the greater good are lauded by utilitarian philosophies, it was predicted that when values conflict, those who acted impartially rather than partially would be viewed as less moral. Across four studies, using life-or-death scenarios and more mundane ones, support for the idea that relationship obligations are important in moral attribution was found. In Studies 1-3, participants rated an impartial actor as less morally good and his or her action as less moral compared to a partial actor. Experimental and correlational evidence showed the effect was driven by inferences about an actor's capacity for empathy and compassion. In Study 4, the relationship obligation hypothesis was refined. The data suggested that violations of relationship obligations are perceived as moral as long as strong alternative justifications sanction them. Discussion centres on the importance of relationships in understanding moral attributions.

It’s not right but it’s permitted: Wording effects in moral judgement

This study aims to provide evidence about two widely held assumptions in the experimental study of moral judgment. First, that different terms used to ask for moral judgment (e.g., blame, wrongness, permissibility…) can be treated as synonyms and hence used interchangeably. Second, that the moral and legal status of the judged action are independent of one another and thus moral judgment have no influence of legal or other conventional considerations. Previous research shows mixed results on these claims. We recruited 660 participants who provided moral judgment to three identical sacrificial dilemmas using seven different terms. We experimentally manipulated the explicit legal status of the judged action. Results suggest that terms that highlight the utilitarian nature of the judged action cause harsher moral judgments as a mechanism of reputation preservation. Also, the manipulation of the legal status of the judged action holds for all considered terms but is larger for impermissibility judgments. Taken as a whole, our results imply that, although subtle, different terms used to ask for moral judgment have theoretically and methodologically relevant differences which calls for further scrutiny.

Whom to blame and whom to praise

Increasing a company’s short-term profit seems to be still the primary responsibility of business leaders, but profit-oriented decision strategies may also elicit long-term side effects. While positive side effects might be considered as an additional benefit, negative side effects are a crucial problem calling for social responsibility. One central question is how the public evaluates managerial decisions based on an indifferent attitude toward potential side effects. This topical question becomes even more salient when focusing on multinational companies and cross-cultural differences in judgment tendencies. Thus, we explored effects of the boss–employee relationship on attributions of intentionality as well as blame and praise in the case of positive and negative side effects that derive from a solely profit-oriented measure of a company decided by its boss. With participants from Germany and the United Arab Emirates, we investigated whether the social role (boss vs. employee) influences these attributions and whether cross-cultural differences in the perception of social hierarchy moderate the effects. We used an adapted version of a paradigm developed by Knobe (2003), who discovered an asymmetry in the attribution of intentionality: While negative side effects are perceived as intentional and blameworthy, positive side effects do not cause the same intentionality attributions and do not appear as particularly praiseworthy. Across two studies, we were able to replicate the typical asymmetric attribution of blame/praise and intentionality for the boss in both cultures. Moreover, we also demonstrate moderating effects of the social role and the cultural background on these attributions. Overall, the results show that the boss–employee relationship is differently evaluated in different cultures, and this might explain some of the variance in perceived accountability within companies. Moreover, an indifferent attitude toward potential side effects leads to less lenient evaluations of managers and their subordinated employees. We discuss practical and theoretical implications.

An Asymmetric Moral Conformity Effect

The present study investigated whether and to what extent people’s judgments on trolley-type moral dilemmas are subject to conformity pressures. Trolley dilemmas contrast deontological (principled) moral concerns with consequentialist (outcome based) moral reasoning. Subjects were asked to respond to trolley dilemmas in a forced choice format and either simultaneously received bogus information about the base rate of consequentialist and deontological responding for each dilemma or received no distribution information. In the information condition, the bogus distributions showed that either the consequentialist or the deontological choice option was favored by a majority of previous participants. In a set of two independent studies, we showed that subjects exhibit little conformity to a consequentialist majority opinion but strongly conform when confronted with a deontological majority opinion. We suggest this asymmetric conformity effect demonstrates that subjects are less willing to appear consequentialist than deontological, and we explain these results through mutualistic partner choice models.

Moral Learning: Conceptual foundations and normative relevance

What is distinctive about a bringing a learning perspective to moral psychology? Part of the answer lies in the remarkable transformations that have taken place in learning theory over the past two decades, which have revealed how powerful experience-based learning can be in the acquisition of abstract causal and evaluative representations, including generative models capable of attuning perception, cognition, affect, and action to the physical and social environment. When conjoined with developments in neuroscience, these advances in learning theory permit a rethinking of fundamental questions about the acquisition of moral understanding and its role in the guidance of behavior. For example, recent research indicates that spatial learning and navigation involve the formation of non-perspectival as well as ego-centric models of the physical environment, and that spatial representations are combined with learned information about risk and reward to guide choice and potentiate further learning. Research on infants provides evidence that they form non-perspectival expected-value representations of agents and actions as well, which help them to navigate the human environment. Such representations can be formed by highly-general mental processes such as causal and empathic simulation, and thus afford a foundation for spontaneous moral learning and action that requires no innate moral faculty and can exhibit substantial autonomy with respect to community norms. If moral learning is indeed integral with the acquisition and updating of casual and evaluative models, this affords a new way of understanding well-known but seemingly puzzling patterns in intuitive moral judgment-including the notorious "trolley problems."