Who did it? Moral wrongness for us and them in the UK, US, and Brazil

Abstract

ABSTRACTMorality has traditionally been described in terms of an impartial and objective “moral law”, and moral psychological research has largely followed in this vein, focusing on abstract moral judgments. But might our moral judgments be shaped not just by what the action is, but who is doing it? We looked at ratings of moral wrongness, manipulating whether the person doing the action was a friend, a refugee, or a stranger. We looked at these ratings across various moral foundations, and conducted the study in Brazil, US, and UK samples. Our most robust and consistent findings are that purity violations were judged more harshly when committed by ingroup members and less harshly when committed by the refugees in comparison to the unspecified agents, the difference between refugee and unspecified agents decays from liberals to conservatives, i.e., conservatives judge them more harshly than liberals do, and Brazilians participants are harsher than the US and UK participants. Our results suggest that purity violations are judged differently according to who committed them and according to the political ideology of the judges. We discuss the findings in light of various theories of groups dynamics, such as moral hypocrisy, moral disengagement, and the black sheep effect.KEYWORDS: Moral foundations theoryblack sheep effectmoral hypocrisymoral judgmentrefugeesingroupoutgroup Disclosure statementThere were no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with a direct financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. All authors contributed to manuscript writing and approved the final version of the manuscript for submission.Open practices statementData, materials, and analysis codes can be found in the OSF website via the following link: https://osf.io/ge2mk/?view_only=82e54b480c5e40a38cd5530ab7032c77Supplementary materialSupplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2023.2278637Additional informationFundingThis research was supported by CAPES - PRINT (Programa Institucional de Internacionalização; Grant # 88887.310255/2018-00), CAPESP – PROEX (Grant 3 04236/2021), CNPq - INCT (National Institute of Science and Technology on Social and Affective Neuroscience, grant #. 406463/2022-0). PSB is supported by a CNPq researcher fellowship (309905/2019-2). GVB was supported by a scientific initiation grant: nº 2017/11131-0, São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). GGR was supported by a postdoc grant: nº 2019/26665-5 (FAPESP). WSA was supported by John Templeton Foundation grant 62280. JACE was supported by a Philip Leverhulme Prize from the Leverhulme Trust (PLP-2021-095).