How social relationships shape moral wrongness judgments

TLDR

Moral wrongness judgments depend on the parties involved and their relationships, yet the mechanisms by which social relationships shape these judgments remain unclear. The study aims to investigate how social relationships influence moral judgments by measuring cooperative expectations and moral wrongness across common relationships such as romantic partners, housemates, and siblings. The authors assessed cooperative expectations and moral wrongness judgments among participants in these relationship contexts to derive relational norms. The findings show that cooperative expectations differ across relationships and that these relational norms accurately predict moral wrongness judgments, outperforming models based on genetic relatedness, social closeness, or interdependence.

Abstract

Abstract Judgments of whether an action is morally wrong depend on who is involved and the nature of their relationship. But how, when, and why social relationships shape moral judgments is not well understood. We provide evidence to address these questions, measuring cooperative expectations and moral wrongness judgments in the context of common social relationships such as romantic partners, housemates, and siblings. In a pre-registered study of 423 U.S. participants nationally representative for age, race, and gender, we show that people normatively expect different relationships to serve cooperative functions of care, hierarchy, reciprocity, and mating to varying degrees. In a second pre-registered study of 1,320 U.S. participants, these relationship-specific cooperative expectations (i.e., relational norms) enable highly precise out-of-sample predictions about the perceived moral wrongness of actions in the context of particular relationships. In this work, we show that this ‘relational norms’ model better predicts patterns of moral wrongness judgments across relationships than alternative models based on genetic relatedness, social closeness, or interdependence, demonstrating how the perceived morality of actions depends not only on the actions themselves, but also on the relational context in which those actions occur.