From impure to harmful: Asymmetric expectations about immoral agents

Abstract

How does information about agents' past violations influence people's expectations about their future actions? We examined this question, with a focus on the contrast between past harmful and past impure actions. Participants' judgments reflected two independent influences: action consistency and expectation asymmetry. An expectation asymmetry was observed across seven studies, including two pilot studies and two supplemental studies: impure agents were judged as more likely to be harmful than harmful agents were judged likely to be impure. This expectation asymmetry is not due to an expectation that impure agents will be globally deviant, i.e., likely to commit all kinds of violations (Study 1), nor is it due to differences in the perceived wrongness or weirdness of harmful versus impure acts (Study 2). Study 3 demonstrated that this asymmetry is not attributable to the perceived harmfulness of impure actions; only impure agents, and not harmful agents, were expected to be more harmful than they were previously. These findings highlight an important asymmetry in the way people make predictions about future wrongdoing: immoral agents are expected to behave consistently, and are also expected to be harmful, regardless of their prior violation

Illuminating the conceptual structure of the space of moral violations with searchlight representational similarity analysis

“…The present findings strengthen these associations from a different angle, showing that not only do these regions, PC and LIFG, show increased activation for harm and purity respectively, but also they represent information about the categories themselves, in the form of convergent neural representations across items within each domain. Across domains, our results further bolster a harm-purity dissociation observed previously in behavioral (Dungan and Young, 2012; Chakroff et al, 2013, 2016b; Chakroff and Young, 2015; Graham et al, 2011) and neural work (Chakroff et al, 2016a; Parkinson et al, 2011; Borg et al, 2008). Crucially, each domain was primarily encoded within at least one distinct region, suggesting that specific functional regions may handle representation of moral violation categories.…”

“…Did she do it on purpose (Young et al, 2007)? At a higher level, the act may be represented as an instance of a more abstract conceptual category, such as ‘harm-based’ or ‘purity-based’ violations, and judged accordingly (Graham et al, 2012; Dungan and Young, 2012; Chakroff et al, 2016b). …”

“…Similarity among representations can reveal basic clustering structure within the space of violations, while assessing hierarchy can illuminate how the mind nests similarity-based clusters to achieve balance between structural parsimony and complexity. We use searchlight representational similarity analysis (RSA) to test a particular model of organization, based on a two-domain model derived from past work (Dungan and Young, 2012; Chakroff, 2015; Chakroff et al, 2016a, 2016b), as a case study to investigate how experimentally determined similarity and hierarchy manifest in converging neural representations across the cortex. Further, in exploratory analyses, we examine representational similarity based on a limited set of psychologically plausible features, as a first effort to determine whether morally relevant features are also being represented in the cortical areas most responsible for representing moral-violation concepts.…”

Moral judgment toward relationship betrayals and those who commit them

“…This is especially important to consider given that recent research has revealed that people may view someone who commits a harmless yet impure action as having greater potential for future harm. That is, impure actions may cause people to judge the person as generally harmful (see Chakroff, Russell, Piazza, & Young, ; Pizarro & Tannenbaum, ; Pizarro, Tannenbaum, & Uhlmann, ). We also sought to account for the various manifestations of harm/care.…”

Moral Judgment Toward Relationship Betrayals and Those Who Commit Them

“…This is especially important to consider given that recent research has revealed that people may view someone who commits a harmless yet impure action to have greater potential for future harm. That is, impure actions may cause people to judge the person as generally harmful (see Chakroff, Russell, Piazza, & Young, 2017;Pizarro, Tannenbaum, & Uhlmann, 2012). We also sought to account for the various manifestations of harm/care.…”