The mere liking effect: Attitudinal influences on attributions of moral character

Humanizing the Transgressor and Lightening the Immoral Behavior: The Role of Likeability Bias and Moral Rationalization

People often perceive their moral judgments as objective and unbiased, yet research indicates that positive interpersonal attitudes lead to more lenient moral character assessments. Here we investigate how likeability towards moral transgressors and the different moral rationalization strategies they may employ impact both the perceived severity of the immoral behavior and the attribution of humanity to the transgressor. In two studies, participants (N = 475) engaged in a 2 (likeability towards the transgressor: high vs. low) × 2 (moral rationalization: reconstruction of agency vs. reconstruction of morality) between-subjects experiment. Participants read information about an individual and an immoral action they engaged in and then evaluated the severity of the behavior and the degree of dehumanization of the transgressor. Results showed that feelings of likeability towards the transgressor, as well as rationalizing by reconstructing agency (compared to morality) reduced behavior severity and transgressor dehumanization. Moreover, likeability and the use of agency reconstruction by the transgressor showed an additive effect, as they combined to generate the most benevolent judgments. Recognizing the influence of these variables enhances our understanding of moral decision-making processes in interpersonal contexts.

Moral character and competence judgments of sexual harassers and fraudsters in academic and business contexts

Fraud and sexual harassment have been haunting academia for years. While the scientific community proposed strategies to overcome misconduct in research, the problem of sexual harassment seems unresolved. One reason for this might be a difference between men and women in the perception of the moral character and competence of sexual harassers. Across four studies (N = 3776), in the UK and the US, men judged the sexual harasser as less immoral than women (Studies 1, 2, and 3a), even though sexual harassment was considered more harmful than fraud (Study 2). Consequently, men demanded less punishment for sexual harassers than women (Studies 1 and 2). This gender difference was not explained by moral rationalization (Study 3a). Further, a sexual harasser was judged as more competent than a fraudster but in an academic, not business, context (Studies 1 and 2). This effect was driven by the moral decoupling process, which participants used to separate competence judgments from moral judgments (Study 3b). Overall, these results suggest that in the academic context, gender interests most likely shape moral and punishment judgments towards sexual harassers, while the decoupling process allows both genders to perceive them as competent and immoral at the same time.

How Likely Is it that I Would Act the Same Way: Modeling Moral Judgment During Uncertainty

Moral rules come with exceptions, and moral judgments come with uncertainty. For instance, stealing is wrong and generally punished. Yet, it could be the case that the thief is stealing food for their family. Such information about the thief's context could flip admonishment to praise. To varying degrees, this type of uncertainty regarding the context of another person's behavior is ever-present in moral judgment. Hence, we propose a model of how people evaluate others' behavior: We argue that individuals principally judge the righteousness of another person's behavior by assessing the likelihood that they would act the same way if they were in the person's shoes. That is, if you see another person steal, you will consider the contexts where you too would steal and assess the likelihood that any of these contexts are true, given the available information. This idea can be formalized as a Bayesian model that treats moral judgment as probabilistic reasoning. We tested this model across four studies (N = 601) involving either fictional moral vignettes or economic games. The studies yielded converging evidence showing that the proposed model better predicts moral judgment under uncertainty than traditional theories that emphasize social norms or perceived harm/utility. Overall, the present studies support a new model of moral judgment with the potential to unite research on social judgment, decision-making, and probabilistic reasoning. Beyond this specific model, the present studies also more generally speak to how individuals parse uncertainty by integrating across different possibilities.

Hypocrisy moderates self-interest bias in moral character judgments

Self-interest bias describes an observer's tendency to judge moral transgression leniently when they benefit from it. However, what factors moderate the self-interest bias is an open empirical question. Here, we investigated to what extent hypocrisy moderates the self-interest bias. Preregistered Study 1a (N = 194) and replication in Study 1b (N = 193) demonstrated that observers' interest impacts moral character judgments of hypocritical transgressors. This effect was explained by observers' goal attainment due to transgression (Study 2, N = 713) and agreement to aid observers' or ingroup interests (Study 3, N = 634). Importantly, transgressors' hypocrisy moderated the impact of observers' interests in moral character judgments (Studies 2 & 3). In summary, when judging hypocritical transgressors, peoples' moral character judgments tend to be biased by their or their group's interests. However, in comparison to non-hypocritical transgressors, this impact is less pronounced.

Perceived Power Polarizes Moral Evaluations

We show an interactive effect of perceiver-target similarity in ideological beliefs and target power on impressions of target morality. Consistent with prior research, perceivers rated targets with dissimilar ideologies as less moral than targets with similar ideologies, but this difference in ratings was magnified for powerful targets relative to less powerful targets. We argue that these results emerged because perceivers expected similar-ideology, powerful (vs. powerless) targets to help the self more, and expected dissimilar-ideology, powerful (vs. powerless) targets to hurt the self more. We establish this effect when people evaluate politicians (Study 1), groups, and individuals (Studies 2a-2b); demonstrate its predictive power over other kinds of interpersonal similarity; and show that it affects morality judgments uniquely when compared with other consequential dimensions of social evaluation. Finally, we manipulated power experimentally and showed the interaction when the difference between high- and low-power manipulations was controlled over just $1 (Studies 3-4).

Forming Evaluations of Moral Character: How Are Multiple Pieces of Information Prioritized and Integrated?

Evaluating other people's moral character is a crucial social cognitive task. However, the cognitive processes by which people seek out, prioritize, and integrate multiple pieces of character-relevant information have not been studied empirically. The first aim of this research was to examine which character traits are considered most important when forming an impression of a person's overall moral character. The second aim was to understand how differing levels of trait expression affect overall character judgments. Four preregistered studies and one supplemental study (total N = 720), using five different measures of importance and sampling undergraduates, online workers, and community members, found that our participants placed the most importance on the traits honest, helpful, compassionate, loyal, and responsible. Also, when integrating the information that they have learned, our participants seemed to engage in a simple averaging process in which all available, relevant information is combined in a linear fashion to form an overall evaluation of moral character. This research provides new insights into the cognitive processes by which evaluations of moral character are formed.

Vaccine Champions Training Program: Empowering Community Leaders to Advocate for COVID-19 Vaccines

Strong community engagement has been critical to support COVID-19 vaccine uptake in Australia and elsewhere. Community engagement builds trust, enables tailored information dissemination and shapes social norms. Engagement is particularly important in communities with greater vaccine hesitancy, lower health literacy and mistrust in authorities. Early in 2021, as a team of vaccine social scientists and clinicians, we developed a program to train and empower community, faith, industry and healthcare leaders to advocate for COVID-19 vaccines as “vaccine champions”. We partnered with the Victorian Department of Health to deliver 91 online Vaccine Champions sessions from March 2021 to June 2022. Over 80 people who received this training were supported by the Department of Health to become formal vaccine champions, independently delivering over 100 locally tailored information sessions. Our survey evaluation of 20 sessions delivered in 2022 found most participants (94%, 118/125) felt more confident to discuss safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines and find relevant information after attending a session. We also recorded >90% participant satisfaction with training content, format and presentation. Qualitative feedback from two group interviews highlighted the value of vaccine communication role plays and opportunities for discussion. In this brief report, we present an overview of the Vaccine Champions program, evaluation and next steps.

Followers forever: Prior commitment predicts post-scandal support of a social media celebrity