Perceived moral agency predicts expected behavioral tolerance of pain

Evidence

It is worth noting that we replicated these findings in a second study varying some aspects of the experimental situation. Instead of describing targets stepping on a piece of glass and assessing experienced pain, we described them submerging their hand in ice water and asked participants to indicate how long they felt the targets could keep their hand in the water. We used the inverse of this time estimation as our measure of pain sensitivity, along with the same measures of moral agency used in this study, and we found it to be negatively correlated with moral agency (blame/ praiseworthiness), r(12) .78, p .001. Apparently, perceivers expect that a moral agent’s insensitivity to pain extends to behavior as well—leading the agent to tolerate greater pain behaviorally than would the moral patient. — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting, 75

Individual contrasts between target groups within each of the pleasure and pain conditions revealed that for both pain and pleasure pills, the allocation to each group was significantly different from every other group (all ps .05). As shown in Figure 6, with pain, bad agents got the most, followed by good agents, neutral targets, and patients, whereas assignments of pleasure followed an opposite pattern. Importantly, good agents received significantly more pain, F(1, 43) 7.44, p .01, 2 .15, and less pleasure, F(1, 37) 48.51, p .01, 2 .57, than did neutral targets. As predicted, people assign both positive and negative outcomes on the basis of perceived moral patiency, giving the most pain to the agents, the least to the patients, and an intermediate amount to neutral targets. These results reveal a paradoxical effect of moral typecasting; namely, doing good deeds can lead others to perceive you as less sensitive to pain, thereby making them more likely to hand out pain to the good-doer. Comments from participants reflect this idea; as one person said of the Dalai Lama, “With all he’s done, I figure he can take the pain.” — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting, 143

Categorization

• XREF: Directly the template for the reader’s own paradigm: recategorizing a group (religious versus ideological) as agent-type shifts perceived sensitivity and hence assigned threat/outcomes. — connects to: Judgments of pain sensitivity reveal a target’s perceived moral patient status; Perceived moral agency and perceived moral patiency vary inversely across targets — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting: Divergent…, 39; Moral agency and patiency can be cleanly measured through resistance-to-pain and responsibility scenarios — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting: Divergent…, 126
• SEED: The ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ result is an article angle on how moral elevation backfires by coding the do-gooder as impervious to suffering.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting: Divergent…, 75; Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting: Divergent…, 143

Related

• People rationally allocate pain and pleasure by target moral sensitivity. (similarity 0.86)
• Moral typecasting overrides self-presentational reluctance to inflict pain (similarity 0.86)
• Moral typecasting operates independently of whether actions are good or bad (similarity 0.85)
• Judgments of pain sensitivity reveal a target’s perceived moral patient status (similarity 0.85)
• People more readily punish good moral agents than moral patients. (similarity 0.85)
• Only moral agency, not instrumental competence, suppresses perceived patiency (similarity 0.85)
• Perceived moral agency and perceived moral patiency vary inversely across targets (similarity 0.84)
• A moral versus nonmoral context shifts who is seen as vulnerable to pain. (similarity 0.84)
• Perceiving someone as a moral agent reduces perceived moral patiency. (similarity 0.84)
• Moral agency and patiency can be cleanly measured through resistance-to-pain and responsibility scenarios (similarity 0.84)
• Moral patiency rests on a target’s perceived capacity for pain and pleasure. (similarity 0.83)
• Casting someone as a moral agent reduces perceived sensitivity to pain (similarity 0.83)
• Perceived moral agency uniquely suppresses perceived victimhood, separable from general agency (similarity 0.83)
• Higher agency confers reduced perceived patiency even for moral saints. (similarity 0.82)
• Moral agency specifically, not general agency, reduces perceived moral patiency. (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Moral agency and patiency can be cleanly measured through resistance-to-pain and responsibility scenarios #corroborates (0.80) — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting, 126