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Coming to suspect that someone has engaged in wrongdoing based on their unexpected behavior is a common phenomenon—yet, little is known about what triggers initial suspicion. We investigated how violating expectations for high emotionality during a traumatic event can trigger suspicion that one has engaged in immoral—or even criminal—activity through moral typecasting. Five studies demonstrate this theory in a criminal context with dire real-world consequences: 911 callers reporting violent crimes generating suspicion by exhibiting unexpected behavior, which could trigger confirmation bias in investigations leading to wrongful convictions. Using both real and tightly controlled simulated 911 calls, we demonstrated that failing to express the expected level of emotion on a 911 call reporting a violent crime led laypeople and police to morally typecast the caller as more of a moral agent capable of perpetrating immoral acts and less of a moral patient capable of being the victim of immoral acts—ultimately increasing suspicion that they were involved in the crime and support for treating them as a suspect. We advance moral psychological theory by demonstrating that failing to express expected levels of emotion about a moral violation can shape moral inferences about someone’s capacity to commit versus be the victim of moral wrongs, thereby generating suspicion that they might have engaged in wrongdoing. We demonstrated this theory in criminal settings to explain how one tragedy can become two: altruistic witnesses calling 911 to plead for help on behalf of another person becoming suspects of the crime they reported because they failed to exhibit the expected emotional demeanor. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
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Repeatedly Encountered Descriptions of Wrongdoing Seem More True but Less Unethical: Evidence in a Naturalistic Setting
When news about moral transgressions goes viral on social media, the same person may repeatedly encounter identical reports about a wrongdoing. In a longitudinal experiment ( N = 607 U.S. adults from Mechanical Turk), we found that these repeated encounters can affect moral judgments. As participants went about their lives, we text-messaged them news headlines describing corporate wrongdoings (e.g., a cosmetics company harming animals). After 15 days, they rated these wrongdoings as less unethical than new wrongdoings. Extending prior laboratory research, these findings reveal that repetition can have a lasting effect on moral judgments in naturalistic settings, that affect plays a key role, and that increasing the number of repetitions generally makes moral judgments more lenient. Repetition also made fictitious descriptions of wrongdoing seem truer, connecting this moral-repetition effect with past work on the illusory-truth effect. The more times we hear about a wrongdoing, the more we may believe it—but the less we may care.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2122640
- PAR ID:
- 10527667
- Publisher / Repository:
- Sage
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Psychological Science
- Volume:
- 34
- Issue:
- 8
- ISSN:
- 0956-7976
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 863 to 874
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976231180578
