The Tipping Point of Moral Change: When Do Good and Bad Acts Make Good and Bad Actors?

Abstract

Moral and immoral behaviors often come in small doses. A person might donate just a few dollars to charity or cheat on just one exam question. Small actions create ambiguity about when they might reflect a permanent change in an actor's moral character versus simply a passing trend. At what sum of good or bad behaviors do observers believe that others have transformed for better or worse, when their actions begin to reflect "them"? Five experiments reveal that this moral tipping point is asymmetric. People require more evidence to perceive improvement than decline; it is apparently easier to become a sinner than a saint, despite exhibiting equivalent evidence for change. This asymmetry emerges more strongly when targets commit new actions (e.g., begin treating others well or poorly) than when targets cease existing actions (stop treating others well or poorly). This asymmetry in moral judgment fosters inequitable thresholds for reward and punishment.

Moral Judgment as Categorization (MJAC)

“…Participants were asked to indicate how many consecutive instances of the new behavior would need to occur to convince them that the actor's "moral character had transformed" (Klein & O'Brien, 2016, p. 152). Participants perceived negative transformations much quicker than positive transformations, and this was true for commencing negative behaviors and for ceasing positive behaviors (Klein & O'Brien, 2016). A general heightened sensitivity to negative information means that people appear to be quicker to categorize an actor as "bad" (vs.…”

“…Success in social interactions involves successfully predicting the actions of others (Waytz & Young, 2018). As such, a key goal of moral categorization is to distinguish "good" from "bad" people (Uhlmann et al, 2015), by attempting to identify a person's moral "essence" (e.g., Dunlea & Heiphetz, 2020;Heiphetz & Dunlea, 2019), or "character" (e.g., Klein & O'Brien, 2016;Siegel et al, 2017Siegel et al, , 2018. This enables people to establish relationships or pursue continued interactions with "good" people, and to limit their interactions with "bad" people (or at least treat interactions with "bad" people with caution).…”

“…Indeed, this has been shown to be the case. Klein and O'Brien (2016) presented participants with vignettes describing changes in patterns of behavior. Participants were asked to indicate how many consecutive instances of the new behavior would need to occur to convince them that the actor's "moral character had transformed" (Klein & O'Brien, 2016, p. 152).…”

The preference for potential in competence, not in morality: Asymmetric biases regarding a group's potential for moral improvement and decline

“…However, at least two lines of research suggest that individuals may have a non-preference for the potential for a group's moral improvement, but an aversion to the potential for a group's moral decline. The first line includes experiments evaluating beliefs about others' moral improvement and decline, which showed that people's evaluations of moral and immoral behaviors are asymmetric [29][30][31][32][33]. For example, Klein and Epley [33] described a situation in which an accomplished professor who received an $80,000-grant for his research decided to donate $10,000 to a nonprofit institution dedicated to research on poverty; this action was rated as "nice" as donating the whole sum of $80,000.…”

“…Research shows that people do not force others to become more moral, but they cannot tolerate others becoming more immoral [29]. Consequently, people who perform different degrees of good deeds may be perceived to have the same degree of kindness, but the more bad things they do, the worse they are [31,32]. In addition, bad actions are often more powerful than good ones [43].…”