Forming Evaluations of Moral Character: How Are Multiple Pieces of Information Prioritized and Integrated?

Abstract

Evaluating other people's moral character is a crucial social cognitive task. However, the cognitive processes by which people seek out, prioritize, and integrate multiple pieces of character‐relevant information have not been studied empirically. The first aim of this research was to examine which character traits are considered most important when forming an impression of a person's overall moral character. The second aim was to understand how differing levels of trait expression affect overall character judgments. Four preregistered studies and one supplemental study (total N = 720), using five different measures of importance and sampling undergraduates, online workers, and community members, found that our participants placed the most importance on the traits honest, helpful, compassionate, loyal, and responsible. Also, when integrating the information that they have learned, our participants seemed to engage in a simple averaging process in which all available, relevant information is combined in a linear fashion to form an overall evaluation of moral character. This research provides new insights into the cognitive processes by which evaluations of moral character are formed.

Children's evaluations of empathizers

“…This is consistent with work finding that older children and adults place considerable weight on vicarious emotion in their social evaluations. For instance, older children rate comforting those in distress as both desirable and obligatory (Tavassoli et al, 2023), while adults consider helpful and compassionate traits as similarly important for judging moral character (Landy & Perry, 2024). Future research should also investigate whether, like adults, children's evaluations are sensitive to the costliness of empathy and helping in different situations (Andreoni et al, 2017;Cameron et al, 2016Cameron et al, , 2019.…”