New research published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology We discovered that people think of themselves as moral, individuals as decent, and groups as immoral.
For decades, psychologists have documented the “better-than-average effect,” or the tendency for people to believe that they have more positive qualities than others. This effect is particularly strong in the moral realm, where people often believe that they are kinder, more fair, and more principled than the typical person. However, most research on moral self-enhancement relies on comparisons between the self and others, leaving important questions unanswered. The question is: do people actually see themselves and others as morally good or bad in an absolute sense?
André Vaz and colleagues conducted a series of five studies using different participant samples and experimental designs. Throughout the study, participants were asked to estimate how often certain daily behaviors occur, including both moral behaviors (e.g., helping someone in need) and immoral behaviors (e.g., littering or miskeeping spare change).
Importantly, participants were not only asked about the behavior of specific targets, such as themselves or others, but were also required to indicate a “moral threshold.” This threshold represented the point at which the frequency of the behavior was considered morally acceptable rather than morally inappropriate.
For example, participants could indicate what percentage of their time they would need to recycle or help others in order to be considered a morally good person. By comparing estimates of people’s behavior to these thresholds, researchers can determine whether a person or group is perceived to be above or below a standard of moral adequacy.
The first study introduced this moral threshold measure. Undergraduate participants rated several everyday moral and immoral behaviors and estimated how often those behaviors were performed by themselves or other participants in the study. Another group identified moral thresholds for each action. Subsequent studies extended this design. In a large online study of participants in the United States, individuals re-evaluated their own behavior and moral standards, but also judged the behavior of several types of social targets.
These include specific individuals in the study, impersonal individuals identified only by ID numbers, other participants in the study as a group, and society at large. Participants also reported two additional criteria: how often a person should ideally perform a certain behavior and how often a person should perform that behavior, allowing researchers to examine how moral thresholds differ from other moral expectations.
Subsequent research further investigated why people judge individuals more positively than groups. In some experiments, participants rated either randomly selected individuals from the study or a collective of all participants. This design visually emphasized the differences between these targets by highlighting a group of people representing a population, or a single randomly selected individual from that group. Participants again estimated how often the target would engage in moral and immoral behavior and then indicated how confident they were in these judgments.
In the final study, the researchers experimentally tested psychological explanations for differences between individuals and groups. Participants were asked to consider how unpleasant or negative it would feel to make a sarcastic judgment about a particular person or group of people. These studies investigated whether anticipating such negative emotions leads people to judge individuals more generously.
A clear pattern emerged throughout the study. Participants consistently believed that their actions exceeded moral standards. In other words, they reported performing moral actions more often than is considered morally good, and immoral actions less often than is acceptable. This pattern emerges reliably across a variety of behavior sets and participant samples, indicating that people perceive themselves as clearly morally appropriate. better than necessary To meet the standards we have set for ourselves.
Perceptions of others depend on whether those others are described as individuals or as groups. When participants judged groups more broadly, such as other participants in a study or people in society, their evaluations tended to fall below the moral threshold. This suggests a kind of moral pessimism about groups of people, implying that the average person does not meet the standards necessary to be morally good.
In contrast, when participants judged specific individuals, even individuals about whom they knew little, their estimates generally exceeded moral thresholds. Therefore, participants believed that individuals randomly selected from a group were more likely to behave morally than the group itself.
These findings resulted in consistent rankings in moral perception. That is, the self was judged to be the most moral, the individual other was judged to be moderately moral, and the group was judged to be the least moral.
Further research investigated why individuals receive more favorable moral judgments than groups. The researchers found that differences in the confidence levels of these estimates did not explain the effect. People are not just more certain about their judgments of individuals; Instead, participants expected to feel more uncomfortable or uncomfortable being cynical about a particular person than about a group.
Because judging certain individuals harshly can evoke stronger negative emotions, people seem to avoid this emotional discomfort by giving individuals the benefit of the doubt. This tendency leads people to view individuals as morally adequate while believing that groups of people fall short of moral standards.
Of note, this study was conducted primarily in a Western developed country, so the results may not be generalizable to other cultural contexts. They also rely on a limited set of daily behaviors and may not capture the full range of moral behaviors that people consider in real life.
Overall, the findings suggest that people consider themselves to be particularly moral, and although they give stranger individuals the benefit of the doubt, they view groups and societies with moral skepticism.
The study “Absolute Moral Knowledge of Self and Others: I Am Bad, I Am Good, and I Am Great” was authored by Andre Vaz, Andre Mata, and Clayton R. Critcher.
