Mores
To Escape Blame, Don't be a Hero - Be a Victim
Kurt Gray & Daniel Wegner
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In situations where people (or their lawyers) seek to escape blame for wrongdoing, they often use one of two strategies: frame themselves as a hero (hero strategy) or as a victim (victim strategy). The hero strategy acknowledges wrongdoing, but highlights previous good deeds to offset blame. The victim strategy also acknowledges wrongdoing, but highlights the harms suffered by the perpetrator to deflect blame. Although commonsense suggests that past good deeds can offset blame from transgressions, moral typecasting (Gray & Wegner, 2009) suggests otherwise. Despite past good deeds, heroes remain blameworthy as moral agents. On the other hand, victims are moral patients and thus incapable of blame. Three studies found that victim strategy consistently reduced blame, while the hero strategy was at best ineffectual and at worst harmful. This effect appeared to stem from how the minds of victims and heroes are perceived.
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Blind ethics: Closing one's eyes polarizes moral judgments and discourages dishonest behavior
Eugene Caruso & Francesca Gino
Cognition, forthcoming
Abstract:
Four experiments demonstrate that closing one's eyes affects ethical judgment and behavior because it induces people to mentally simulate events more extensively. People who considered situations with their eyes closed rather than open judged immoral behaviors as more unethical and moral behaviors as more ethical. In addition, considering potential decisions with closed eyes decreased stated intentions to behave ethically and actual self-interested behavior. This relationship was mediated by the more extensive mental simulation that occurred with eyes closed rather than open, which, in turn, intensified emotional reactions to the ethical situation. We discuss the implications of these findings for moral psychology and ethical decision making.
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How Important Is an Apology to You? Forecasting Errors in Evaluating the Value of Apologies
David De Cremer, Madan Pillutla & Chris Reinders Folmer
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Apologies are commonly used to deal with transgressions in relationships. Results to date, however, indicate that the positive effects of apologies vary widely, and the match between people's judgments of apologies and the true value of apologies has not been studied. Building on the affective and behavioral forecasting literature, we predicted that people would overestimate how much they value apologies in reality. Across three experimental studies, our results showed that after having been betrayed by another party (or after imagining this to be the case), people (a) rated the value of an apology much more highly when they imagined receiving an apology than when they actually received an apology and (b) displayed greater trusting behavior when they imagined receiving an apology than when they actually received an apology. These results suggest that people are prone to forecasting errors regarding the effectiveness of an apology and that they tend to overvalue the impact of receiving one.
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Effects of eye images on everyday cooperative behavior: A field experiment
Max Ernest-Jones, Daniel Nettle & Melissa Bateson
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Laboratory studies have shown that images of eyes can cause people to behave more cooperatively in some economic games, and in a previous experiment, we found that eye images increased the level of contributions to an honesty box. However, the generality and robustness of the eyes effect is not known. Here, we extended our research on the effects of eye images on cooperative behavior to a novel context - littering behavior in a university cafeteria - and attempted to elucidate the mechanism by which they work, by displaying them both in conjunction with, and not associated with, verbal messages to clear one's litter. We found a halving of the odds of littering in the presence of posters featuring eyes, as compared to posters featuring flowers. This effect was independent of whether the poster exhorted litter clearing or contained an unrelated message, suggesting that the effect of eye images cannot be explained by their drawing attention to verbal instructions. There was some support for the hypothesis that eye images had a larger effect when there were few people in the café than when the café was busy. Our results confirm that the effects of subtle cues of observation on cooperative behavior can be large in certain real-world contexts.
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Organizational Structure, Communication, and Group Ethics
Matthew Ellman & Paul Pezanis-Christou
American Economic Review, December 2010, Pages 2478-2491
Abstract:
This paper investigates experimentally how a group's structure affects its ethical behavior towards a passive outsider. We analyze one vertical and two horizontal structures (one requiring consensus, one implementing a compromise by averaging proposals). We also control for internal communication. The data support our main predictions: (1) horizontal, averaging structures are more ethical than vertical structures (where subordinates do not feel responsible) and than consensual structures (where responsibility is dynamically diffused); (2) communication makes vertical structures more ethical (subordinates with voice feel responsible); (3) with communication, vertical structures are more ethical than consensual structures (where in-group bias hurts the outsider).
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Transgressions and Expressions: Affective Facial Muscle Activity Predicts Moral Judgments
Peter Robert Cannon, Simone Schnall & Mathew White
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent investigations into morality suggest that affective responses may precede moral judgments. The present study investigated, first, whether individuals show specific facial affect in response to moral behaviors and, second, whether the intensity of facial affect predicts subsequent moral judgments. Muscle activity relating to disgust (levator labii), anger (corrugator supercilii), and positive affect (zygomaticus major) was recorded while participants considered third-person statements describing good and bad behaviors across five foundations of morality (purity, fairness, harm, authority, and ingroup). Facial disgust was highest in response to purity violations, followed by fairness violations. In contrast, harm violations evoked anger expressions. Importantly, the extremity of subsequent moral judgments was predicted by facial affect, such that judgments about purity and fairness correlated with facial disgust, harm correlated with facial anger, and ingroup correlated with positive facial affect. These results demonstrate that individuals spontaneously exhibit domain-specific moral affect that allows inferences about their moral judgments.
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Do Theories of Implicit Race Bias Change Moral Judgments?
Daryl Cameron, Keith Payne & Joshua Knobe
Social Justice Research, December 2010, Pages 272-289
Abstract:
Recent research in social psychology suggests that people harbor "implicit race biases," biases which can be unconscious or uncontrollable. Because awareness and control have traditionally been deemed necessary for the ascription of moral responsibility, implicit biases present a unique challenge: do we pardon discrimination based on implicit biases because of its unintentional nature, or do we punish discrimination regardless of how it comes about? The present experiments investigated the impact such theories have upon moral judgments about racial discrimination. The results show that different theories differ in their impact on moral judgments: when implicit biases are defined as unconscious, people hold the biased agent less morally responsible than when these biases are defined as automatic (i.e., difficult to control), or when no theory of implicit bias is provided.
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Andrea Glenn et al.
Judgment and Decision Making, December 2010, Pages 497-505
Abstract:
Several scholars have recognized the limitations of theories of moral reasoning in explaining moral behavior. They have argued that moral behavior may also be influenced by moral identity, or how central morality is to one's sense of self. This idea has been supported by findings that people who exemplify moral behavior tend to place more importance on moral traits when defining their self-concepts (Colby & Damon, 1995). This paper takes the next step of examining individual variation in a construct highly associated with immoral behavior - psychopathy. In Study 1, we test the hypothesis that individuals with a greater degree of psychopathic traits have a weaker moral identity. Within a large online sample, we found that individuals who scored higher on a measure of psychopathic traits were less likely to base their self-concepts on moral traits. In Study 2, we test whether this reduced sense of moral identity can be attributed to differences in moral judgment, which is another factor that could influence immoral behavior. Our results indicated that the reduced sense of moral identity among more psychopathic individuals was independent of variation in moral judgment. These results suggest that individuals with psychopathic traitsmay display immoral behavior partially because they do not construe their personal identities in moral terms.
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April Bleske-Rechek et al.
Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, September 2010, Pages 115-127
Abstract:
We investigated men's and women's responses to variations of an ethical thought experiment known as the Trolley Problem. In the original Trolley Problem, readers must decide whether they will save the lives of five people tied to a track by pulling a lever to sacrifice the life of one person tied to an alternate track. According to W. D. Hamilton's (1964) formulation of inclusive fitness, people's moral decisions should favor the well-being of those who are reproductively viable, share genes, and provide reproductive opportunity. In two studies (Ns = 652 and 956), we manipulated the sex, age (2, 20, 45, and 70 years old), genetic relatedness (0, .125, .25, and .50), and potential reproductive opportunity of the one person tied to the alternate track. As expected, men and women were less likely to sacrifice one life for five lives if the one hypothetical life was young, a genetic relative, or a current mate.
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Educational Imposters and Fake Degrees
Paul Attewell & Thurston Domina
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, forthcoming
Abstract:
We develop a sociological context for understanding the phenomenon of falsely claimed educational credentials and analyze national data that cast light on the incidence of false degrees. We find that about 6% of Bachelor's degrees and 35% of Associate's degrees are falsely claimed. Most individuals who falsely claim degrees have attended the college in question. Many have nearly completed the required credits, but claim a degree without having finished. The socio-demographic profile of persons falsely claiming credentials is consistent with Merton's theory of innovative deviance, but not with the theory of status inconsistency.
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Matthew Pearsall & Aleksander Ellis
Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The purpose of this study was to uncover compositional and emergent influences on unethical behavior by teams. Results from 126 teams indicated that the presence of a formalistic orientation within the team was negatively related to collective unethical decisions. Conversely, the presence of a utilitarian orientation within the team was positively related to both unethical decisions and behaviors. Results also indicated that the relationship between utilitarianism and unethical outcomes was moderated by the level of psychological safety within the team, such that teams with high levels of safety were more likely to engage in unethical behaviors. Implications are discussed, as well as potential directions for future research.
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Charles Bellemare, Alexander Sebald & Martin Strobel
Journal of Applied Econometrics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We estimate structural models of guilt aversion to measure the population level of willingness to pay (WTP) to avoid feeling guilt by letting down another player. We compare estimates of WTP under the assumption that higher-order beliefs are in equilibrium (i.e., consistent with the choice distribution) with models estimated using stated beliefs which relax the equilibrium requirement. We estimate WTP in the latter case by allowing stated beliefs to be correlated with guilt aversion, thus controlling for a possible source of a consensus effect. All models are estimated using data from an experiment of proposal and response conducted with a large and representative sample of the Dutch population. Our range of estimates suggests that responders are willing to pay between €0.40 and €0.80 to avoid letting down proposers by €1. Furthermore, we find that WTP estimated using stated beliefs is substantially overestimated (by a factor of two) when correlation between preferences and beliefs is not controlled for. Finally, we find no evidence that WTP is significantly related to the observable socio-economic characteristics of players.
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Luck or Cheating? A Field Experiment on Honesty with Children
Alessandro Bucciol & Marco Piovesan
Journal of Economic Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We run an experiment to study the relationship between honesty, age and self-control. We focus on children aged between 5 and 15 as the literature suggests that self-control develops within such age range. We ask each child to toss a fair coin in private and to record the outcome (white or black) on a paper sheet. We only reward children who report white. Although we are unable to tell whether each child was honest or not, we speculate about the proportion of reported white outcomes. Children report the prize-winning outcome at rates statistically above 50% but below 100%. Moreover, the probability of cheating is uniform across groups based on child's characteristics, in particular age. In a second treatment we explicitly tell children not to cheat. This request has a dampening effect on their tendency to over-report the prize-winning outcome, especially in girls. Furthermore, while this effect in boys is constant with age, in girls it tends to decrease with age.