Moral opportunism: A unique genetic grounding associates lesser guilt from perpetrating injustice with greater sensitivity to being the victim of it

Moral opportunism: A unique genetic grounding associates lesser guilt from perpetrating injustice with greater sensitivity to being the victim of it. Nikolai Haahjem Eftedal, Thomas Haarklau Kleppestø, Nikolai Olavi Czajkowski, Jonas Kunst, Espen Røysamb, Olav Vassend, Eivind Ystrøm, Lotte Thomsen. Human Behavior and Evolution Society 31st annual meeting. Boston 2019. http://tiny.cc/aa1w6y

People vary in their general propensity to perceive and react to injustice. However, moral rules of justice may be gamed through selective endorsement depending on one’s own role as victim or perpetrator. Here, we demonstrate a unique genetic grounding for this latter strategy (as well as for injustice sensitivity in general). The Justice Sensitivity (JS) scale distinguishes between four sub-types of injustice sensitivity. A perceiver of an injustice can either be a victim, an observer, a beneficiary, or a perpetrator to this injustice, and sensitivity to these facets correlate robustly. We use a genetically informative sample of 544 monozygotic- and 736 dizygotic twin pairs to estimate the etiological sources of these associations, analyzing the underlying factor structure while separating the contributions of genetic- versus environmental influences. We find evidence for two substantially heritable latent traits influencing responses across the JS-facets: 1) a generalized injustice sensitivity factor leading to increased sensitivity to injustices of all categories, and 2) a moral opportunism factor causing increased victim sensitivity combined with a decreased propensity to feel guilt from being the perpetrator. This latter moral opportunism factor shares further genetic underpinnings with social dominance orientation.