Past research has shown that pain experience reduces feelings of guilt for earlier wrongdoings. In this paper, we aim to investigate whether watching other people in pain can reduce feelings of ...guilt. In Study 1 (N = 60), we found that participants' levels of guilt and sadness decreased after they watched a one-minute movie clip showing a painful medical procedure. Study 2 (N = 156), eliminated an alternative explanation in which pain observation but not the misattribution of unrelated excitation reduced guilt. Finally, in Study 3 (N = 60), pain observation lowered participants' feelings of guilt but not their feelings of shame. Overall, these results suggest that the guilt-reducing effect of pain may appear even without the actual experience of physical pain.
The automatic and affective nature of moral judgments leads to the expectation that these judgments are biased by an observer’s own interests. Although the idea of self-interest bias is old, it has ...never been directly tested with respect to the moral judgments of other individuals’ behaviors. The participants of three experiments observed other individuals’ counternormative behavior (breaking a rule or cheating for gain), which was judged as immoral. However, this judgment became much more lenient when the observers gained from the observed behavior. All three studies showed that the influence of self-interest on moral judgments was completely mediated by the observer’s increased liking for the perpetrator of the immoral acts but not by changes in mood. When the participants were induced to dislike the perpetrator (in a moderation-of-process design), the self-interest bias disappeared. Implications for the intuitionist approach to moral judgment are discussed.
Previous research found evidence for a liking bias in moral character judgments because judgments of liked people are higher than those of disliked or neutral ones. This article sought conditions ...moderating this effect. In Study 1 (N = 792), the impact of the liking bias on moral character judgments was strongly attenuated when participants were educated that attitudes bias moral judgments. In Study 2 (N = 376), the influence of liking on moral character attributions was eliminated when participants were accountable for the justification of their moral judgments. Overall, these results suggest that although liking biases moral character attributions, this bias might be reduced or eliminated when deeper information processing is required to generate judgments of others’ 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.
People believe that their moral judgments are well-justified and as objective as scientific facts. Still, dual-process models of judgment provide strong theoretical reasons to expect that in reality ...moral judgments are substantially influenced by highly subjective factors such as attitudes. In four experiments (N = 645) we provide evidence that similarity-dissimilarity of beliefs, mere exposure, and facial mimicry influence judgments of moral character measured in various ways. These influences are mediated by changes in liking of the judged persons, suggesting that attitudinal influences lay at the core of moral character perceptions. Changes in mood do not play such a role. This is the first line of studies showing that attitudes influence moral judgments in addition to frequently studied discrete emotions. It is also the first research evidencing the affective influences on judgments of moral character.
•The article bridges two classic areas of psychology: moral judgments and attitudes.•Attitudes strongly influence judgments of moral character.•These influences are entirely mediated by changes in liking of the judged persons.•Changes in mood do not play such a role.•Attitudinal influences might lay at the core of moral character perceptions.
Recent research has shown that moral character judgments are prone to the liking bias-well-liked people are seen as morally superior to disliked or neutral ones. However, whether moral information ...about their past behavior would moderate the liking bias is still an open empirical question addressed in present studies. In Study 1 (N = 653), participants updated their biased moral character impressions when moral information about the target was introduced after the liking induction. In preregistered Study 2 (N = 601), when moral information about the target was presented before the liking induction, moral information had a stronger impact on moral character judgments than liking. Study 3 (N = 398) showed that moral character impression updating was three times greater when moral information was presented after (vs. before) the attitude induction. Further analyses of changes in participants' moral judgments certainty revealed that moral information reduced their uncertainty stronger than attitudes. In effect, the latter were more amenable to updating than information-based judgments. Thus, we present evidence that moral information updates moral character impressions biased by liking. Nevertheless, liking also, but to a lesser extent, updates moral character impressions initially grounded on moral information. We propose that certainty about others' moral character explains when and how moral information limits the impact of attitudinal influences on moral character judgments.
We agree with Doliński (2018, this issue) that behavior is disappearing as an object of study of contemporary social psychology and it has been increasingly replaced by verbal declarations of ...imagined behaviors, which are analyzed as dependent variables. We read this as a case of a methodological version of Gresham’s law: “bad methods drive out good”. We notice a complementary trend on the side of manipulations of independent variables. Instead of manipulating real situations, researchers frequently instruct their participants to imagine these situations. In effect, social psychology drifts to studying imaginary behaviors in imagined situations and this poses a serious threat for the validity of our findings. We present one study comparing responses to imagined and actually experienced situations (concerning moral judgment and trust) and find that these two types of situation produce divergent responses. We conclude that imagined situations cannot be a source of knowledge about responses in situations that people really experience.
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