Temporal Distance and Moral Concerns: Future Morally Questionable Behavior is Perceived as More Wrong and Evokes Stronger Prosocial Intentions

Abstract

Prior research on temporal construal has shown that core values become more salient when people think about distant- as compared to near-future events. The present research shows that greater temporal distance of an event also results in greater moral concern. More specifically, it was found that people make harsher moral judgments of others' distant-future morally questionable behavior than near-future morally questionable behavior. Moreover, it was shown that people increasingly attribute distant vs. near future behavior to abstract dispositional relative to concrete situational causes, and that this attribution bias is partially responsible for the temporal distance effect on moral judgments.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank Carl Martin Allwood for providing valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

¹Initially, as part of a more explorative research question, we examined the “the identifiable victim effect” (see e.g., Loewenstein & Small, 2007), and more specifically, whether temporal distance would interact with various aspects of vividness. For this purpose, each of the scenarios in Experiment 1 and 2 appeared in different versions varying in vividness on a between-subjects basis. However, there was no support for this conjecture. Separate statistical analyses showed that temporal distance did not interact with vividness with respect to any of the dependent measures in any of the three experiments. Thus, this is not discussed further. If anything, the inclusion of several scenario versions shows the robustness of the temporal distance effect.

²Notably, temporal distance increased both wrongness and anger, ps < .02 and .01, respectively. A mixed ANOVA with temporal distance (near vs. distant) as a between-subjects factor and scenario (UNICEF vs. Road) as a within-subjects factor showed that scenario type did not moderate the temporal distance effect on moral reactions, F(1, 135) = 1.26, p = .26. The temporal distance effect was found to be consistent across scenarios.

³A mixed ANOVA with temporal distance (near vs. distant) as a between-subjects factor and scenario (UNICEF vs. Road) as a within-subjects factor showed that scenario type did not moderate the temporal distance effect on attributions, F(1, 136) = .19, p = .66. The effect of temporal distance on attributions was consistent across scenarios.