Good for what? Social rank, character, and moral judgment

ABSTRACT

The person-centered account of moral judgment suggests an evolutionary explanation for two puzzling findings from moral psychology: that people judge an act that had bad side effects as more intentional than an act that had good side effects, and that people judge an accident as being more under the control of the target who caused it if that target has good values. In both cases, people’s intuitions are biased by their “fundamental need” to judge a person’s character. People have evolved to judge people not just by specific actions, but by considering whether they would be good cooperative partners and members of a social group. We tested implications of this explanation: people alter their judgments of intention and causal control to benefit people with greater value to the group. In two studies, we examined the moderating role of social value on moral judgment using highly cited and often replicated experimental paradigms. Results do not corroborate this influential theory of moral judgment. High status individuals are not given “moral license.” Instead, results suggest that dominant, but not prestigious, individuals are judged as more efficacious, which may have downstream consequences for moral judgment. Data and analysis scripts available at: https://osf.io/u9pfr/.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral judgment
• moral character
• person perception
• intention
• experimental philosophy

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Simine Vazire, for contributing her discretionary funds to the completion of this research project. Thanks to Sarah Schiavone for assistance with online data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting we consider the possibility of “harmful” leaders.

2. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for helping us to clarify this point and for suggesting several helpful references.

3. Note that B* is used to indicate the standardized regression coefficient. Supplementary materials contain the unstandardized coefficients, for comparison.