The Good, The Bad, And The In Between: An Exploration of Moral Perceptions Across Social Contexts

Moral perceptions play an integral role in our social lives by influencing who we choose to interact with and the impressions we form of others. My dissertation aims to advance our understanding of moral perceptions by using experimental and survey methods to examine the factors that inform our moral impressions across social contexts. Chapter 1 of this dissertation introduces the primacy of morality in our social impressions of others. Chapter 2 addresses gaps in our understanding of whether impressions may vary as a function of the types of moral behaviors enacted by a social target. In this research, we found that behaviors related to Equality and Property led to more extreme inferences about a target’s moral character, more dispositional attributions of behavior, and more willingness to cooperate with a social target. Chapter 3 of this dissertation zooms in on moral judgment in the specific context of infectious illness to investigate what aspects of infectious illness concealment inform judgments of concealers. Results showed that one’s motive for concealment, and whether it was self- or other-focused, were stronger predictors than harm in judgments of concealers, and that motives may potentially cushion the reputational consequences of concealment. Each of these studies was informed by participants’ own experiences of and ideas about morality, building on the ecological validity present in the field of moral judgment and contextualizing broader ideas about morality within everyday life.