People generally view others' “true selves” as good; however, people may show promiscuous condemnation and often judge acts as immoral when they are ambiguous

Promiscuous condemnation: People assume ambiguous actions are immoral. Neil Hester, B. Keith Payne, Kurt Gray. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 86, January 2020, 103910. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2019.103910

Highlights
• Mixed evidence exists for whether people generally view others as good or evil.
• People generally view others' “true selves” as good.
• However, people may show promiscuous condemnation and often judge ambiguous acts as immoral.
• Nine experiments using ambiguous acts support promiscuous condemnation.
• We consider cognitive and functional reasons for promiscuous condemnation.

Abstract: Do people view others as good or evil? Although people generally cooperate with others and view others' “true selves” as intrinsically good, we suggest that they are likely to assume that the actions of others are evil—at least when they are ambiguous. Nine experiments provide support for promiscuous condemnation: the general tendency to assume that ambiguous actions are immoral. Both cognitive and functional arguments support the idea of promiscuous condemnation. Cognitively, dyadic completion suggests that when the mind perceives some elements of immorality (or harm), it cannot help but perceive other elements of immorality. Functionally, assuming that ambiguous actions are immoral helps people quickly identify potential harm and provide aid to others. In the first seven experiments, participants often judged neutral nonsense actions (e.g., “John pelled”) as immoral, especially when the context surrounding these nonsense actions included elements of immorality (e.g., intentionality and suffering). In the last two experiments, participants showed greater promiscuous condemnation under time pressure, suggesting an automatic tendency to assume immorality that people must effortfully control.

Keywords: Moral judgmentsSuspicionAmbiguityAltruismDual process models

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1. Introduction

Morality often seems black and white. After all, most people agree that cheating, lying, and murder are wrong. Although this consensus suggests that judging others' actions is easy, real life is rife with ambiguous cases in which people's actions are unclear. Consider these examples:

A man walks behind a woman on a dark city street.

A girl screams in your neighbor's basement.

A teenager looks around with their hands in their pockets before leaving a store.

In each of these examples, the most likely explanation is relatively benign: A man and a woman are walking home from work and happen to live on the same block. A girl moves a box and discovers a cockroach. A surly teenager looks around for her friends. Despite these innocuous explanations, people may not be able to resist assuming something more nefarious—a nighttime predator, a kidnapping victim, or a shoplifter. Of course, these are only a few carefully selected examples, but we suggest that the human mind has a general tendency to jump to conclusions of immorality. When judging ambiguous actions—that is, actions that have unclear intents and/or outcomes—we propose that people demonstrate promiscuous condemnation and assume that these acts are immoral. Promiscuous condemnation is not only consistent with the functional and cognitive underpinnings of morality, but also provides perspective on an emerging idea that people view others as intrinsically good.

1.1. Do people view others as generally evil or good?

People have long disagreed about whether humans are generally evil or good. Advocating for “generally evil” was Thomas Hobbes, who wrote that people were intrinsically evil and that, without some absolute and authoritarian government, the life of man would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes, 1651, pp. i. xiii. 9). In contrast, Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that people were born good and instinctively compassionate (Rousseau, 1750). Social psychology long seemed to side with Hobbes, revealing the darker side of human nature. Humans show callous obedience to authority (Milgram, 1963) and easily form into combative groups that distrust each other (Sherif, 1961). Large groups of people fail to help others in need (Latané & Darley, 1968) and even supposedly good people ignore suffering when they are in a rush (Darley & Batson, 1973). Many people willingly express prejudice toward other races and religions (e.g., Allport, 1954), which in extreme cases has devastating consequences such as genocide and slavery.

The implicit negativity in early social psychological work was so strong that “positive psychology” arose explicitly as a counterpoint (Sheldon & King, 2001). Accordingly, recent work on the moral nature of humans has arced toward Rousseau. People often endorse that the “true self” of humans is good (De Freitas, Cikara, Grossmann, & Schlegel, 2017; Newman, De Freitas, & Knobe, 2015). In situations involving cooperation, people appear motivated to act prosocially, even toward non-relatives; they contribute their resources to help others and sacrifice resources to punish wrongdoers (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003; Fehr & Gächter, 2000; Gintis, 2003; Van Vugt & Van Lange, 2006). Of course, there are questions about how well these structured economic games translate to the real world. How do we square these tightly-controlled situations with real-world tragedies, such as when George Zimmerman fatally shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager? Although Martin was simply walking to the store to get some Skittles, Zimmerman assumed that the hoodie-wearing student was engaging in criminal activity.

The Trayvon Martin case does not stand alone. Police often stop, frisk, and attack unarmed suspects who are acting innocently. One explanation for these assumptions of evil is prejudice: white people may just assume the worst when interacting with black people, and numerous other forms of prejudice may account for other cases. However, even within their own groups, people readily suspect others of cheating or lying given minimal evidence of infidelity (Shackelford & Buss, 1997) or deception (DePaulo et al., 2003). In these ambiguous situations, a mere cue suggesting foul play may be enough to invite assumptions of immorality.

The idea of promiscuous condemnation is that people are quick to assume that others are acting immorally. This idea might seem to contradict people's altruistic actions and belief that others are intrinsically good. However, judgments of the “true self” differ from judgments of individual acts. Even if people believe that others are generally virtuous and cooperative, individual acts might still seem suspicious. Furthermore, people's generous or penny-pinching decisions in economic games need not translate to real-world examples of immorality, such as murder, fraud, and abuse. These games are unambiguous and leave little room for one's partner to cause “harm” in the common sense. When people talk about moral decay, they likely refer to the spread of crime and the corruption of children, not uncooperative decisions in anonymous economic games.

People seem to have a rosy outlook on people's deep-seated goodness; and, people generally seem to trust and cooperate with others in economic games. However, as soon as people judge an ambiguous action that might be immoral based on contextual cues, we suggest that people assume wrongdoing—that is, show promiscuous condemnation. We draw on recent research and theory in morality to consider the contextual cues that might make an ambiguous action seem immoral.

1.2. Cognitive elements of morality

Moral psychologists have long debated what basic elements constitute moral judgment and how they combine with each other (Cushman, 2013; Haidt, 2012; Mikhail, 2007; Schein & Gray, 2018). Though different theoretical perspectives disagree on some aspects of moral cognition, the influence of certain elements on moral judgments—such as intentional action and suffering—is relatively undisputed. Intentionally killing someone is murder, whereas accidentally killing them is manslaughter and elicits less blame (Cushman, 2008; Malle, Guglielmo, & Monroe, 2014). Attempted assault is a crime, but successful assault elicits more blame and punishment because it actually causes physical suffering (Cushman, 2008; Young & Saxe, 2010).

One theory of morality--the theory of dyadic morality--posits that people rely on a harm-based cogntive template when making moral judgments across diverse domains (Schein & Gray, 2018). This template is called the "moral dyad" because it involves two interacting people, an intentional actor (i.e., agent) causing damage to a suffering target(i.e., patient). Studies suggest that the moral dyad exerts a kind of cognitive gravity, such that the hint of immorality--through the implied presence of intention and/or suffering--leads people to infer the presence of other elements of immorality. This phenomena is called "dyadic completion" because people cognitively complete an incomplete dyad, seeing evidence of suffering when presented with intentional counternormative acts. This is why people see “victimless wrongs” such as defiling a holy book or watching animals as nevertheless having victims and causing suffering (especially under time pressure (Gray, Schein, & Ward, 2014). Another example of dyadic completion includes when someone with bad intentions (e.g., a drug dealer) is assigned greater causal responsibility for crashing into someone's car and causing them to suffer (Alicke, 2000). Also consistent with this idea is when, in the wake of suffering, people look for agents to blame, often turning to powerful entities such CEOs (Knobe, 2003) or God (Gray & Wegner, 2010).

Dyadic completion suggests that promiscuous condemnation should be appear more when more of these moral elements are present. As a bystander, it should seem more likely that an action is immoral if it is directed toward someone rather than performed alone? Likewise, people should assume more immorality when an action is done intentionally versus accidentally, and when an action seems to involve suffering versus not. Conversely, when people receive clear cues suggesting otherwise (e.g., the act is clearly performed alone or accidentally), we expect people to adjust their perceptions accordingly, only rarely judging these actions as immoral.

1.3. Differentiating between immorality and negativity

Manipulating these important elements of morality—the dyad (presence of both agent and patient), the agent's intention, and the patient's suffering—serves the key purpose of differentiating promiscuous condemnation from a more general “valence effect” in which people tend to rate ambiguous actions as negative instead of positive (see Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001). We expect large effects of these morality-specific elements on participants' judgments—effects that we would not expect if people tend to assume negativity more broadly. In particular, we expect people to mostly assume that accidental actions are not immoral in their responses, because immorality typically requires intention (Schein & Gray, 2018). Finding this effect would help differentiate between immorality and negativity as the “driving force”, as accidents can still be quite negative.

To further clarify that our effects pertain to judgments of immorality, we also include experiments that ask about the actor's positive and negative character traits. If ambiguous actions are simply seen as more negative, rather than more immoral, then these actions should have limited influence on participants' evaluations of character. However, if participants show promiscuous condemnation and assume immoral actions, then these actions should strongly influence their judgments of character, as moral character is a powerful driver of global evaluations (e.g., Goodwin, Piazza, & Rozin, 2014; Uhlmann, Pizarro, & Diermeier, 2015).

1.4. The prosociality of promiscuous condemnation

At first glance, promiscuous condemnation appears to be an antisocial tendency: is it really fair to assume someone is acting immorally if he or she is parked in front of the neighbor's driveway or hanging out near the playground? In these situations, the base rate for immorality seems quite low: the strange car might just an unexpected visit from a friend, and the person at the playground might just be waiting for his wife and kids to arrive. However, showing promiscuous condemnation might actually be a prosocial tendency in these cases—not necessarily at odds with the altruistic cooperation and punishment observed in economic games (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003; Fehr & Gächter, 2000). Promiscuous condemnation prepares bystanders to quickly provide aid if needed, preserving the well-being of family members, friends, and others (Schroeder, Penner, Dovidio, & Piliavin, 1995). Providing this aid not only protects others but also enhances one's own moral character, which is valuable for maintaining a good reputation (Brambilla & Leach, 2014; Goodwin et al., 2014). Even when it is not feasible to provide help, quickly identifying immorality can make it easier to avoid guilt-by-association (Fortune & Newby-Clark, 2008; Walther, 2002), also maintaining one's moral reputation.