Unawareness of Self-interest Bias in Moral Judgments of Others’ Behavior

• Authors: Konrad Bocian , Bogdan Wojciszke

Abstracts

EN

Previous studies (Bocian & Wojciszke, 2014) showed that self-interest biases moral perception of others’ unethical actions. Moreover, affective changes in attitudinal responses towards the perpetrator of an immoral act drives the bias. In the present studies, we attempted to answer the question whether people are aware of the self-interest bias in their judgments of others’ behavior. We conducted two experiments showing that moral judgments of verbally described and imagined actions were dominated by norms rather than self-interest (Study 1) and that people were not aware that self-interest distorted their moral judgment (Study 2). The unawareness of the self-interest bias among the participants was attributable to omission of their own emotional responses when forecasting their moral judgments. We discuss the importance of emotions presence in studies on moral judgments as well as contribution of the present research to the intuitionist approach to moral judgment.

Keywords

EN

self-interest; moral judgment; egotistic bias

• Publisher: Polska Akademia Nauk
• Journal: Polish Psychological Bulletin
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 45
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 411-417

Dates

published

2014

Contributors

author

Konrad Bocian

• University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Sopot Campus

author

Bogdan Wojciszke

• University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Sopot Campus

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/ppb-2014-0050

Biblioteka Nauki

951959