Penitence congruity effect: even murderers are seen as less immoral when expressing guilt and deontological beliefs

ABSTRACT

In five experiments with a total N = 1558, we studied to which extent the perception of wrongdoers’ morality depends on wrongdoers’ cognitive and emotional penitence on the example of deontological beliefs and guilt. Both types of penitence improved the target’s moral impressions to a similar degree. We established a penitence congruity effect, whereby jointly signaling cognitive and emotional penitence amplifies the strength of each of these types of penitence. The penitence congruity effect was visible when participants compared several wrongdoers (Studies 1, 2, and 5) but disappeared when participants judged them independently (Studies 3 and 4). In a pre-registered Study 5, we showed how the credibility of the statements explained the penitence congruity effect: incongruent penitence (e.g. wrongdoer felt guilt but thought a murder could be justified) decreased the credibility of the positive statements and reduced its impact on the wrongdoer’s moral perception. Taken together, people who judge transgressors do incorporate information about their cognitive and emotional penitence and expect this information to be congruent.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Penitence
• penitence congruity effect
• guilt
• deontology
• moral judgment

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/7tnsw/?view_only=None, https://osf.io/7tnsw/?view_only=None and https://aspredicted.org/uf9ny.pdf.

Acknowledgments

The first author thanks Geoffrey Goodwin, Jonathan Baron, and Corey Cusimano for fruitful conversations about morality during her stay at the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. Both authors thank Geoffrey Goodwin for his feedback on the manuscript and Paweł Niszczota for his statistical help.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We shifted the scale to 1–8 because of required log-transformation which would fail if one of the parameters would be 0.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the grant ‘Moral Coherence: the relationship between people’s behavior and their moral views and emotions’ [grant number: 2017/01/X/HS6/01332] from NCN Miniatura 1 and by the grant ‘Moral thinking and unethical behavior’ [grant number: PN/BEK/2020/1/00058/DEC/1] from the NAWA Bekker Programme.