Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner — Moral Typecasting: Divergent Perceptions of Moral Agents and Moral Patients

45 published claims from this book.

• A moral versus nonmoral context shifts who is seen as vulnerable to pain.
• Casting someone as a moral agent reduces perceived sensitivity to pain
• Enhancing perceived patiency reduces perceived agency, and vice versa
• Experimental vignettes decouple general agency from moral agency in perception of a target
• Factor-analytic orthogonality of mind dimensions does not rule out inverse moral perception
• Forced comparison of moral targets reveals effects that solitary ratings mask
• Higher agency confers reduced perceived patiency even for moral saints.
• Judgments of pain sensitivity reveal a target’s perceived moral patient status
• Mere association with a moral agent or patient shifts a target’s perceived moral standing
• Moral agency and patiency are distinct from general agency and patiency.
• Moral agency and patiency are perceived along continuous dimensions rather than as binary categories.
• Moral agency and patiency can be cleanly measured through resistance-to-pain and responsibility scenarios
• Moral agency and patiency perceptions are inversely related, not linked.
• Moral agency specifically, not general agency, reduces perceived moral patiency.
• Moral agent and moral patient categories are mutually exclusive yet overlapping.
• Moral patiency is fundamentally the capacity to receive moral action
• Moral patiency is operationalizable through perceived vulnerability to harm.
• Moral patiency rests on a target’s perceived capacity for pain and pleasure.
• Moral typecasting may reflect a general person-perception tendency.
• Moral typecasting operates independently of whether actions are good or bad
• Moral typecasting overrides self-presentational reluctance to inflict pain
• Moral typecasting predicts neutral agents are victimized, contradicting just-world logic
• Moral typecasting theory divides targets into agents, patients, and neutral roles for experimental comparison
• Only moral agency, not instrumental competence, suppresses perceived patiency
• People exploit agent-and-patient casting to manage their own moral reputations
• People more readily punish good moral agents than moral patients.
• People rationally allocate pain and pleasure by target moral sensitivity.
• Perceived agency and patiency shift based on whom a target is paired with
• Perceived moral agency and perceived moral patiency vary inversely across targets
• Perceived moral agency and perceived patiency may trade off inversely even at extreme levels.
• Perceived moral agency is measured as deviation from moral neutrality, not direction.
• Perceived moral agency predicts expected behavioral tolerance of pain
• Perceived moral agency uniquely suppresses perceived victimhood, separable from general agency
• Perceived moral standing tracks where entities fall on the two mind dimensions.
• Perceiving someone as a moral agent may preclude perceiving them as a moral patient
• Perceiving someone as a moral agent reduces perceived moral patiency.
• Perceiving someone as an agent shifts how we categorize a paired neutral person
• Perceptions of moral agency are studied across varied human and celebrity targets.
• Recategorizing a target by morally relevant features alters perceived agency.
• Recategorizing a target only along one agency dimension shifts both responsibility and sensitivity judgments
• Recategorizing a target’s status shifts perceived agency and victimhood in complementary directions
• Recategorizing someone as a victim shifts them toward moral-patient perceptions while suppressing perceived agency.
• Researchers assess perceived pain sensitivity through fictional vignettes of foot injury.
• Scheler’s ethics holds that growth and love are inseparable from pain and sacrifice.
• Solicited moral judgments risk demand effects.