U.S. citizens' judgments of moral transgressions against fellow citizens, refugees, and undocumented immigrants.

Abstract

Prior work shows that people are often more sensitive to moral transgressions that target ingroup members than outgroup members. But does that depend on which groups are involved? We investigate how lifelong U.S. citizen participants make judgments about moral transgressions that target fellow lifelong citizens, compared with refugees or undocumented immigrants. Across five studies (N = 1,953), we find that participants overall judge moderate transgressions targeting refugees and undocumented immigrants to be more wrong than those targeting fellow lifelong citizens. This pattern emerges specifically for moderate-severity transgressions but occurs across physical harm, emotional harm, deception, fairness, and property violations. Responses are predicted by political orientation; more liberal participants show the pattern more than conservative participants. We find mediational and experimental evidence for perceived vulnerability/welfare and sympathy toward groups as partial mechanisms: People judge it to be worse to harm more victims they perceive to be more vulnerable. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).