Zhansheng Chen, Department of Psychology, University of Hong Kong, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 15 April).

When people permit the innocent to suffer: A generalized compensation belief hypothesis

The current research proposed a generalized compensation belief hypothesis that individuals, as observers, would grant moral permission to someone paying forward unfair treatment to an innocent person as a means to compensate for the perpetrator’s previously experienced mistreatment. Across nine studies, we showed that participants were more likely to morally permit and engage in the same negative act once they knew about previous maltreatment to which an actor was subjected. Required compensation acted as the mediator to account for the effect of previous treatment on moral permission. Besides, this belief was less pronounced when the maltreatment was received a long (versus short) time ago. When it comes to downstream consequences, such generalized compensation belief results in subsequent unethical behavior via moral relativism.