When Good People Break Bad: Moral Impression Violations in Everyday Life

The present research investigated the emotional, interpersonal, and impression-updating consequences of witnessing events that violate the moral character impressions people hold of others. Across three studies, moral character violations predicted broad disruptions to participants’ sense of meaning, confidence judging moral character, and expectations of others’ moral characters. Participants who were in real life closer to perpetrators, directly victimized, and higher in preferences for closure and behavioral stability reported more negative outcomes. Moreover, experimental manipulations showed that character violations lead to worse outcomes than the comparable experience of encountering consistently immoral others. The authors discuss implications for research on moral perception and meaning, as well as on understanding responses to everyday revelations about people’s characters.