Moral Concerns Make People More Uncompromising

Having a strong moral compass is often associated with forgiveness. Many religious traditions preach absolution of others’ sins; this is one of Jesus’ central teachings, and it is a central virtue of Hinduism. However, new studies show that people exhibit the opposite tendency in their everyday judgments. Instead of moral values leading to greater leniency in beliefs about others’ moral character, studies show that morality opposes magnanimity.

Source: Midjourney/Open AI

In research that I conducted with my colleagues Emily Foster-Hanson and Sam Bellersen, newly published in the journal Cognition, we presented participants with a series of scenarios about people who faced moral dilemmas. In every case, the central character in the scenario went against a typical moral tendency of theirs (for example, acting loyally) in order to uphold a competing moral goal (for example, being fair). Participants were then asked to evaluate the character’s moral disposition (for example, whether the character is a loyal person deep down). Crucially, we also obtained information about participants’ own moral values. Across a wide range of scenarios, we found that participants with higher values for the character’s typical moral tendencies were most likely to assess the character as having a diminished moral essence after a temporary lapse. For instance, people who valued loyalty more than fairness were especially likely to stop categorizing somebody as a loyal person after a single instance in which loyalty was sacrificed for fairness.

Strikingly, these morally stringent tendencies emerged even when the characters themselves did not prioritize the same values as participants and thus were not acting hypocritically. Regardless of whether the characters who sacrificed loyalty for fairness had expressed a low or high priority for loyalty, their moral character was diminished in the eyes of participants who highly valued loyalty.

Our findings are consistent with the maxim of being safe rather than sorry. Moral interactions require a great deal of trust, so being overly inclined to cooperate with others could quickly lead to misfortune. Vigilantly attending to any indication that another person does not share one’s own moral values is likely to pay off in the long run.

Humans are therefore equipped with a “negativity bias” that leads them to place disproportionate weight on acts that are considered immoral. Therefore, it takes many good deeds for a sinner to start being considered a saint, but only a slight misstep for a good person to be considered bad. These findings are also consistent with research showing that, as actions rise in perceived immorality, there is an associated increase in beliefs that people who engage in these actions are dispositionally immoral themselves and a decrease in beliefs that situational factors caused the actions.

Our results additionally dovetail with other recent studies showing that people harbor strong inclinations to prefer others who take absolutist stances on moral issues, even when these stances are unrealistic. Although we did not measure people’s preferences for absolutism in others, we found strong evidence that people will tend toward such absolutist tendencies in their own lives.

Overall, our research shows that people expect perfection within the moral domain. Even when somebody resolves a moral dilemma by acting in a way that many people would consider morally good, that person’s character is considered tainted by observers who would be inclined to act in accordance with a different moral value.

These findings might lead us to contemplate whether it’s best for us to have such severe moral expectations. Overall, is it beneficial for us to believe that moral values always entail enduring and overriding commitments and thus expect people to be consistently unyielding in their moral commitments? Should we consider somebody to be dishonest merely because they tried to protect somebody’s feelings with a single white lie, or should we allow for exceptions? Should we cease considering somebody to be a vegetarian if they eat a bite of meat after years of abstaining, or would this expectation for perfection backfire and increase overall meat consumption?

The data show that our minds will tend to form stringent evaluations in such cases, especially for those of us who highly value honesty and vegetarianism, but it can’t give us the answers to these ethical questions. Nonetheless, reflection may lead us to conclude that we will likely benefit from admitting that moral situations often require flexibility. If we become more forgiving of people who occasionally act against our own moral inclinations and instead pursue other morally worthy goals, morality could become more aligned with tolerance.