Committing a small act of kindness, like holding the door for a harried stranger, often prompts the recipient to extend a hand to others, but it comes at a cost, psychologists have long argued. People who have done the good deed are primed to commit a rude one later on, as if drawing on moral credit from their previous act.
Now, in a novel survey of everyday moral behavior, researchers have tested whether that theory holds up in real life. It does, though the effects appear small.
The findings come from a survey of everyday morality in which researchers tracked people’s moral judgments and attitudes at regular intervals throughout a typical day, using text messages. Previous research on moral behavior had been confined mostly to the laboratory, with subjects making hypothetical, life-or-death decisions that they would never encounter in daily life.
The new paper, published in the journal Science on Thursday, not only gives psychologists a way to test their theories of moral behavior in the real world, it also provides a rough idea of just what constitutes the moral content of a random day: the frequency of good and bad behaviors, what those mitzvahs and misdemeanors actually are, and how observers’ political and religious views color their judgments.
“This paper is a great example of how we can drill down and study micromorality, all those judgments we make in daily life, about how people treat each other, about how we size up other people in the moment and size up ourselves,” said Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia, who was not involved in the research.
Dr. Nosek and other experts who did not work on the study caution that it provides more a rough draft of daily moral life than a detailed script; its findings are still tentative. “But it shows what kind of insights can be obtained by studying events in their natural, spontaneous context,” said Harry Reis, a psychologist at the University of Rochester.
A research team led by Wilhelm Hofmann of the University of Cologne recruited 1,252 people who agreed to respond to text messages asking about “good” and “bad” incidents they experienced firsthand, witnessed or heard about. The texts pinged participants’ phones five times a day for three days, about once every couple hours. Each message asked if something good or bad had just occurred, and if so, what it was, who was responsible, and how bad or good it was. The recipients generally replied within minutes.
“I didn’t find it intrusive at all, compared to the onslaught of other emails and texts coming in,” said one of the participants, Evelyn Behar, 36, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Answering the texts “made me more aware of what was going on around me and more self-aware.”
Participants reported about one moral incident a day on average, and recorded about as many good as bad ones. Those incidents tended to fall into several categories, including “care/harm” (assisting a tourist with directions, for example, or rudely pushing past one); “fairness/unfairness” (tipping generously or not, or Congress cutting funding for poverty programs); and “loyalty/disloyalty” (going to family dinner rather than out with cronies, or arranging an adulterous tryst).
“We were really able to get a sense of the moral baseline of a typical day in terms of how many moral events occurred, and the relative frequencies, the slice of the moral pie occupied by each of these categories,” said Daniel C. Wisneski, one of the study authors. He was at the University of Illinois at Chicago when working on the project and is now an assistant professor at St. Peter’s University in Jersey City. His co-authors were Mark J. Brandt of Tilburg University and Linda J. Skitka of the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as Dr. Hofmann.
The survey found no significant differences in moral behavior or judgment between religious people and nonreligious ones.
It did find some evidence to support theories developed in lab experiments. For instance, psychologists describe good deeds as “contagious,” and so it appeared in the new data. People on the receiving end of an act of kindness were about 10 percent more likely than the average person to do something nice themselves later in the day. On the other hand, those who granted that kindness were slightly more likely than average (about 3 percent) to commit a small act of rudeness or dismissiveness later in the same day — granting themselves “moral license” to do so.
Psychologists have also contended that a fundamental difference between the political right and the left is that conservatives tend to think of morality in terms of loyalty and faith, while liberals focus on fairness and liberty. And so it was in the survey. Participants to the right identified more breaches and affirmations of loyalty, and those to left saw more examples of unfair and generous treatment.
“Some of the effects are stronger than others, but they all present us with exciting areas to follow up and research,” Dr. Nosek said. “I think of this as a first look of how morality plays out in real life. The first telescopes didn’t tell us everything about the galaxy, but they gave us a tantalizing sense of what’s out there.”