Recategorizing a target’s status shifts perceived agency and victimhood in complementary directions

Evidence

We assessed the perceptions of the moral agency and patiency of child and adult targets and expected that children would be seen to be less agentic and more patient-like than adults (cf. Buldain et al., 1982). … As would be expected from the moral typecasting hypothesis, perceptions of harm-doer agency (as indexed by responsibility and intentionality) and victim pain were influenced in a complementary way by age. People rated the child as less responsible than the adult, t(68) 3.32, p .01, and as having less intentionality than the adult for the moral transgression, t(68) 2.20, p . (see Figure 1). Just as children were seen as less agentic, they were also seen as more patient-like. Relative to the adult, children were rated as experiencing more pain, t(68) 3.49, p .01. These findings indicate that age of harm-doer and age of victim have complementary effects on perceptions of moral agency and moral patiency— the older victim is seen as more responsible, and the younger victim is seen as more harmed. When moral agency and patiency vary in response to variations in age of target, then, they vary inversely. — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting, 37

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to testing whether recategorizing a religious group as ‘ideological’ rather than ‘religious’ shifts perceived threat — same inverse-complementarity logic of moral typecasting applied to a different identity dimension. — connects to: Study 1 manipulated agent category through contrasting crime and charity vignettes — Mansur Khamitov, Jeff D. Rotman, and Jared Piazza, Perceiving the Agency of Harmful…, 220; Recategorizing someone as a victim shifts them toward moral-patient perceptions while suppressing perceived agency. — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting: Divergent…, 29; Recategorizing a target by morally relevant features alters perceived agency. — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting: Divergent…, 51 (+5 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting: Divergent…, 37

Broader Connections

• Recategorizing a target by morally relevant features alters perceived agency. #expands (0.88) — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting, 51
• Perceived moral agency uniquely suppresses perceived victimhood, separable from general agency #expands (0.84) — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting, 105
• Perceived agency and patiency shift based on whom a target is paired with #expands (0.82) — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting, 128
• Recategorizing a target only along one agency dimension shifts both responsibility and sensitivity judgments #qualifies (0.78) — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting, 43