Changing impressions in competence-oriented domains: The primacy of morality endures

The Moral Primacy Model proposes that throughout the multiple stages of developing impressions of others, information about the target's morality is more influential than information about their competence or sociability. Would morality continue to exert outsized influence on impressions in the context of a decision for which people view competence as the most important attribute? In three experiments, we used an impression updating paradigm to test how much information about a target's morality versus competence changed perceivers' impressions of a job candidate. Despite several pilot studies in which people said they would prioritize competence over morality when deciding to hire a potential employee, results of the main studies reveal that impressions changed more when people received new information about a target's immorality than about his incompetence. This moral primacy effect held both for global impressions and willingness to hire the target, but direct effects on evaluations of the target as an employee did not consistently emerge. When the new information about the target was positive, we did not reliably observe a moral primacy effect. These findings provide important insight on the generalizability of moral primacy in impression updating.