Descriptive Norms Influence Reactions To Anger-Related Moral Events

Based on recent theories of normative influence, we hypothesize that knowing how most people in the community view a certain moral event would shift individuals' emotional reactions to the event in the direction of the descriptive norms. We conducted two studies to test this hypothesis. The participants in these studies were asked to indicate their moral judgement or emotional reactions to ambiguous events that could be construed as violations of justice-/harm-related morality, loyalty-/authority-related morality or purity-related morality. In Study 1, after the participants had indicated their emotional reactions, they received bogus feedback on how most people reacted to the event, and the normative emotional reaction was either the same as or different from the participants' choice. The results show that bogus feedback weakened the intensity of anger reaction when the participant's response was an unpopular one. In Study 2, participants received bogus feedback on other people's moral concerns for morally ambiguous events. As expected from moral foundation theory, perceived violation of justice- or harm-related morality evoked anger. More important, participants who were concerned about injustice or harm in an event reported more (less) anger when they learned that most (few) people also viewed the events as justice- or harm-related. These results contribute to our understanding of the role of descriptive norms in shaping individuals' anger reactions to the justice- or harm-related events.