(Mis)Leading Morality: Understanding the Impact of Perceived Threat and Motive Attribution on Trait-Behavior Relations

The perceived moral character of a target person is critical for others to anticipate the target’s potential behaviors. These anticipations serve as the basis for how perceivers act towards the target. Prior research has shown that when considering traits and behaviors of moderate evaluative extremity, people judge it to be more likely that a moral target would engage in immoral behaviors rather than that an immoral target would engage in moral ones. Yet, to date it has never been systematically investigated whether this asymmetry in trait-behavior relations is functional in terms of maintaining well-being of the perceiver. Likewise, it has not been examined how perceivers deal with the dissonance caused by an observed/expected trait-behavior inconsistency. The present work aimed to address these open issues. We proposed that people might be prone to expect immoral behaviors from targets perceived as moral to avoid an omission error and minimize potential threats in case one acts in a trait-inconsistent way. We also assumed that people attribute trait-consistent motives for trait-inconsistent behaviors so as to mitigate cognitive dissonance and preserve the already formed impressions. We tested our hypotheses in 8 studies (total N = 1196). The results revealed that, indeed, threat influences probability estimates of moderate morality-related trait-inconsistent behaviors. Besides, as expected, people tend to justify moral target’s immoral behaviors with prosocial motives and explain immoral targets’ trait-inconsistent behaviors with selfish motives. Theoretical and practical implications as well as limitations of the present work and prospects for future research are discussed.