Moral preference for agents acting with well-understood motives performing an additional immoral act compared to agents performing an action in an unusual way (e.g., striking a man with a frozen fish)

Walker, Alexander C., Martin H. Turpin, Jonathan A. Fugelsang, Igor Grossmann, and Michal Bialek. 2020. “Better the Two Devils You Know, Than the One You Don’t: Predictability Influences Moral Judgment.” PsyArXiv. March 24. doi:10.31234/osf.io/w4y8f

Abstract: Across four studies (N = 1,806), we demonstrate the role that perceptions of predictability play in judgments of moral character, finding that participants judged agents they perceived as less predictable to also be less moral. In Studies 1-3, participants judged hypothetical agents performing an immoral action (e.g., assault) for an unintelligible reason as less predictable and less moral than agents performing the same immoral action for a well-understood yet immoral reason. Notably, we observed a moral preference for agents acting with well-understood motives despite these agents performing an additional immoral act (e.g., theft) compared to their unpredictable counterparts. In Study 4 we find that agents performing an action in an unusual way (e.g., striking a man with a frozen fish) are judged as less predictable and less moral compared to agents performing the same action in a common manner (e.g., striking a man with their fist). These results challenge dominant monist theories of moral psychology, which reduce morality to a single dimension (e.g., harm) as well as pluralist accounts which fail to consider the role predictability plays in moral judgments. We propose that predictability contributes to judgments of moral character for its ultimate role in facilitating cooperation and discuss how the present findings may be accommodated by theories of morality-as-cooperation.