New research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology sought to understand how we react when the perpetrator is our best friend.
Four experiments involving over 1100 people were conducted.
Participants in one experiment read a hypothetical scenario in which a romantic partner, a friend, or a stranger committed an unethical or immoral act, such as stealing money from a charity collection jar.
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In another test, they were asked to recall a time when they witnessed an unethical or immoral act committed by a romantic partner, best friend, or stranger.
In a third step, they kept a 15-day log of moral transgressions they witnessed.
In each test, volunteers were asked questions about the transgressor’s identity, the crime’s severity, and the appropriate punishment. they were also asked about their feelings about themselves, including negative emotions and morality.
Researchers discovered that all the study candidates felt less anger, contempt, and disgust toward family and friends who misbehaved in all three experiments. They thought they were more moral than strangers and wanted to punish or criticise them less. When someone near to them committed a moral or ethical violation, however, participants felt more shame, guilt, and embarrassment, and reported slightly more negative evaluations of their own morality.
In the last test, volunteers were physically paired with a romantic partner, a dear friend or a relative stranger. They were then taken to separate rooms and asked to respond in writing to a series of questions about themselves. The pairs then swapped answers (via a research assistant) and were told to transcribe them into a book.
In the first round of the last test, the partners received genuine answers, but in the second round, participants were given fake responses indicating their partner had behaved unethically, by lying, plagiarizing or acting selfishly.
As in previous experiments, participants then answered a series of questions about their partner, the transgression, how harsh the punishment should be and their feelings about themselves.
The results were similar to the first three experiments, but the effect was not as strong.
Forbes believes the less consistent effects observed in the fourth experiment may be because the unethical information presented to participants in this study was not known to the participants prior to the experiment and was first shared with them in a very brazen way by a stranger.
“It’s possible that participants were upset with their close others because they did not tell the participant about the unethical acts beforehand and instead chose to tell the researcher. Hearing about unethical behavior by someone you care about from a stranger is likely to be a bit more jarring than hearing about it directly from your friend or loved one,” she said.
“Across a diverse range of methods with both student and online samples, our findings suggest that having a close relationship with the transgressor heavily affects responses to their bad behavior, supporting the call for social-relational factors to be more strongly incorporated into models of moral judgment,” said lead author Rachel Forbes, MA, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto.
The findings are important because, in everyday life, unethical behaviors are often entwined with social ties, according to co-author Jennifer Stellar, PhD, also from the University of Toronto.
“Identifying that observers are more lenient toward close others who transgress raises deeper concerns about how moral norms are policed by individuals in these situations,” she said.
“This may allow people to either overlook and/or fail to call out transgressions committed by close others, which poses a danger for maintaining the moral norms in society.”
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The researchers focused on close relationships, but Stellar believes that the same processes may apply to other relationships, such as shared group membership, and that should be incorporated in future research.
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