Protzko John, Schooler Jonathan W
Department of Psychological Science, Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, CT, United States.
Department of Brain and Biological Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States.
Front Psychol. 2023 Jan 19;13:1025214. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1025214. eCollection 2022.
In the majority of moral decision-making research, we are asked to consider the action of someone we know little about-an anonymous actor. This is inconsistent with our everyday judgments of the actions of others. Here we test the novel prediction of whether actions are considered as comparably virtuous or malignant when performed by a good person, an immoral person, or the standard anonymous actor. Across four sets of experiments (nine studies in total), we show that the moral status of the actor contaminates peoples' evaluations of the virtue of their actions. Even without ulterior motives, people do not judge good acts consistently across actors. We also discover a dose-response relationship where the more immoral the actor has been in the past-the less credit they are given for a good action in the present. This process does not occur for good people performing bad acts, however. Bad acts are bad regardless of who commits them. These results give new insights into the way people evaluate the behaviors of others.
在大多数道德决策研究中，我们被要求去考虑一个我们知之甚少的人的行为——一个匿名行为者。这与我们在日常生活中对他人行为的判断不一致。在此，我们测试一个新的预测，即当一个行为由好人、不道德的人或标准的匿名行为者实施时，该行为是否会被视为具有同等的善或恶。在四组实验（总共九项研究）中，我们表明行为者的道德地位会影响人们对其行为善恶的评价。即使没有不可告人的动机，人们对不同行为者的善举也不会做出一致的评判。我们还发现了一种剂量反应关系，即行为者过去越不道德，他们当前的善举所获得的赞誉就越少。然而，对于实施恶行的好人来说，这种情况不会发生。恶行就是恶行，无论谁实施它。这些结果为人们评估他人行为的方式提供了新的见解。
