Arguments and deontic decisions

Moral Foundations, Himpathy, and Punishment Following Organizational Sexual Misconduct Allegations

We build on deontic justice and moral foundations theories to shed light on responses to sexual misconduct at work by proposing a model that explains why some third parties punish accusing victims and support alleged perpetrators. We theorize that when third parties are given conflicting he-said, she-said information, they intuitively evaluate organizational injustice based on moral values. We further theorize that binding moral foundations (loyalty, authority, purity) give rise to sympathy toward men accused of sexual misconduct and anger toward female accusers. Across five studies (total n = 5,413) utilizing archival, field, and vignette designs, we examined third-party responses to sexual misconduct accusations ranging in severity across several industries. Third-party endorsement of binding moral foundations was linked to increased perpetrator-directed sympathy and victim-directed anger (Studies 1–4). These emotions jointly mediated the relationship between binding values and credibility perceptions of the accusing victim and the alleged perpetrator (Studies 2 and 3). Moreover, victim credibility was negatively associated with social sanctions and punishment severity levied toward the accusing victim, and perpetrator credibility was negatively associated with the same punishment outcomes for the alleged perpetrator (Studies 3 and 4). In Study 5, we found that managers framing the accusing victim as disloyal exacerbated negative judgments and emotions toward the victim and positive judgments and emotions toward the perpetrator for individuals who highly ascribe to binding moral foundations. We discuss the theoretical contributions and practical implications of moral concerns on third parties’ emotions, judgments, and motivations to punish actors involved in sexual misconduct allegations.

Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1652 .

Moral dilemmas in females: children are more utilitarian than adults

Influential theories on moral judgments propose that they rely either on emotions or on innate moral principles. In contrast, the mental model theory postulates that moral judgments rely on reasoning, either intuition or deliberation. The theory allows for the possibility that intuitions lead to utilitarian judgments. This paper reports two experiments involving fifth-grade children, adolescents, and adults; the results revealed that children reason intuitively to resolve moral dilemmas in which action and inaction lead to different outcomes. In particular, the results showed female children to be more utilitarian than female adults in resolving classical moral dilemmas: they preferred an action that achieved a good outcome for a greater number of people. Within the mental model theory's framework there is no reason to expect that females and males differ in their ability to reason, but at the moment the results for females cannot be generalized to males who were not properly represented in the adults groups of the two experiments. The result revealing that (female) children are more utilitarian than (female) adults, which is hard to explain via many current theories, was predicted by the mental model theory.

Mental models and human reasoning

To be rational is to be able to reason. Thirty years ago psychologists believed that human reasoning depended on formal rules of inference akin to those of a logical calculus. This hypothesis ran into difficulties, which led to an alternative view: reasoning depends on envisaging the possibilities consistent with the starting point--a perception of the world, a set of assertions, a memory, or some mixture of them. We construct mental models of each distinct possibility and derive a conclusion from them. The theory predicts systematic errors in our reasoning, and the evidence corroborates this prediction. Yet, our ability to use counterexamples to refute invalid inferences provides a foundation for rationality. On this account, reasoning is a simulation of the world fleshed out with our knowledge, not a formal rearrangement of the logical skeletons of sentences.

Naïve deontics: a theory of meaning, representation, and reasoning

Deontic assertions concern what one ought to do, may do, and ought not to do. This paper proposes a theory of their meanings and of how these meanings are represented in mental models. The meanings of deontic assertions refer to sets of permissible and impermissible states. An experiment corroborated the ability of individuals to list these states. The most salient were those corresponding to the mental models of the assertions. When individuals reason, they rely on mental models, which do not make all states explicit. The theory predicts the most frequent conclusions drawn from deontic premises. It also predicts the occurrence of illusory inferences from assertions of permission, i.e., inferences that seem highly plausible but that are in fact invalid. Assertions of prohibitions, according to the theory, should reduce the illusions. Further experiments corroborated these predictions.