From impure to harmful: Asymmetric expectations about immoral agents

Article history: Received 16 March 2016 Revised 10 August 2016 Accepted 10 August 2016 Available online 15 August 2016 How does information about agents' past violations influence people's expectations about their future actions? We examined this question, with a focus on the contrast between past harmful and past impure actions. Participants' judgments reflected two independent influences: action consistency and expectation asymmetry. An expectation asymmetry was observed across seven studies, including two pilot studies and two supplemental studies: impure agents were judged as more likely to be harmful than harmful agents were judged likely to be impure. This expectation asymmetry is not due to an expectation that impure agents will be globally deviant, i.e., likely to commit all kinds of violations (Study 1), nor is it due to differences in the perceived wrongness or weirdness of harmful versus impure acts (Study 2). Study 3 demonstrated that this asymmetry is not attributable to the perceivedharmfulness of impure actions; only impure agents, and not harmful agents, were expected to be more harmful than they were previously. These findings highlight an important asymmetry in the way people make predictions about futurewrongdoing: immoral agents are expected to behave consistently, and are also expected to be harmful, regardless of their prior violation. © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.