Three key elements that drive character judgments: behavior (good vs. bad, norm violations, & deliberation), mind (intentions, explanations, capacities), & identity (appearance, social groups, & warmth).

Deconstructing Moral Character Judgments. Rachel Hartman, Will Blakey, Kurt Gray. Current Opinion in Psychology, July 28 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.07.008

Abstract: People often make judgments of others’ moral character—an inferred moral essence that presumably predicts moral behavior. We first define moral character and explore why people make character judgments before outlining three key elements that drive character judgments: behavior (good vs. bad, norm violations, and deliberation), mind (intentions, explanations, capacities), and identity (appearance, social groups, and warmth). We also provide a taxonomy of moral character that goes beyond simply good vs. evil. Drawing from the Theory of Dyadic Morality, we outline a two-dimensional triangular space of character judgments (valence and strength/agency), with three key corners—heroes, villains, and victims. Varieties of perceived moral character include saints and demons, strivers/sinners and opportunists, the non-moral, virtuous and culpable victims, and pure victims.

Keywords: moralitymind perceptionsocial identitydyadic moralityagency

Box 1: Why people make moral character judgments

-  The Descriptive Reason: Because it is How People Think Exploring moral character is important because people naturally tell stories about their moral world with other people as characters. People generally create narratives to explain the world [5] and make sense of other people’s behaviors [69]—and characters are the stars of narratives. When people witness an immoral act, they construct stories about the agent committing the act. People are also essentialists: they view others as having an enduring essence, particularly when it comes to their morality [70] and use this essence to explain their behavior.

-  The Normative Reason: Because it is Useful for Predicting the Future In our evolutionary past, our survival depended on identifying cooperative partners [6,7]. We needed to know who to befriend and who to avoid, but cooperative situations are often complex [71]. Perceiving internal essences helps to make sense of our complex world [72] and seeing another’s behavior as driven by moral character helps to connect their underlying thoughts, feelings, motivations, desires, and intentions into a simple explanatory framework— they do good/evil because they are good/evil. Moral character perceptions therefore help reduce unwanted uncertainty [73, M.H. Turpin et al.].