What Makes Us Judge Something As Being Wrong?

Usually most of us would describe our values as a combination of what we have learned from our families and what we have built from our own experiences. What we don’t usually appreciate is just how much the legality of some things might affect how we see them. A new study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology focused on this intersection and offered these insights:

Participants read ten scenarios describing morally relevant behaviors carried out in fictitious countries, such as burning a national flag, using a racial slur, hunting deer, or abandoning a shopping cart, among others. Depending on the experiment and condition, the same behaviors were described as illegal or “not illegal.” Participants rated identical actions as more morally wrong when they were described as illegal rather than not illegal, and they also evaluated the people performing those actions as less moral. Taken together, our findings suggest that laws may do more than regulate behavior or reflect existing moral values: legal status itself can become part of the information people use to decide what is morally right or wrong and how they evaluate the people involved.

The findings offer an interesting explanation for the diverging way that some people see similar actions and judge them as more or less moral. For example, for years it was not illegal to create social media platforms that were proven to be addictive. Then countries started banning social media for teens and the recent landmark settlement from Meta agreeing to pay up to $16.7B to settle its social media harms case illustrates the shift. In a relatively short period of time, something that was long considered a personal choice (how long to use social media for) has now become legislated and forced a huge change in public perception AND policy from Meta. Perhaps more significant than the financial settlement itself are the anticipated platform changes that may result from the case:

Pending judicial approval, teens on Instagram and Facebook will have a two-hour time limit by default across both platforms; they’ll need parental approval to turn it off. Parents will also have more control over how teens interact with Instagram and Facebook. They can set the default experience to a chronological feed rather than algorithmic and can similarly turn off autoplay by default. Similarly, Meta won’t display the number of likes and reactions on posts by default for teen users.

Taken together, these stories show the powerful connection between laws and perception ... and demonstrate that one of the most effective ways to change our cultural norms around what is considered wrong or right might be to pass some laws quantifying it.