Revising impressions with the authority moral foundation

Abstract

Past research argues that judgments of morality supersede warmth or competence when forming impressions, and that some people will revise an impression based on highly diagnostic moral information. Moral Foundations Theory proposes that people will differ in the endorsement of five moral domains (Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity). Impression research has been mostly focused on moral situations that would categorically fall into the endorsement of Care and Fairness (Individualizing Foundations). This would be the first experiment to isolate a Binding Foundation in impression research. I hypothesize participants would update their impressions to a greater degree when given new authority-violation information as their endorsement of the Authority Foundation (a Binding Foundation) grows. In this experiment, I used qualitative analysis through a Qualtrics survey to gather data. I used Individuating Foundations information to guide participants to create a positive moral first impression of a target. Then, I attempted to provoke participants to update their impressions by presenting some with new information concerning a violation of the Authority Foundation (vs. neutral information). A hierarchical regression revealed my hypothesis was partially supported as there was a significant main effect between the Negative Authority Condition and the participants’ final impression. However, regardless of their measured Authority endorsement, participants rated the target more negatively after reading the target’s authority-violating acts. It’s possible the results imply the use of the Authority Foundation could cause a negative impression from authority-violation information. In future studies, implicit measures should be added to determine moral impressions. The current experiment is a first step towards understanding how specific moral considerations affect and change impressions and further research could expand current arguments about Moral Foundations Theory and impression research.