Morally Diverse Communities More Accepting of Norm Violations

Individuals in a morally diverse community tend to believe that the community’s norms are looser. In turn, norm violations are more accepted, and there is a reduced willingness to police transgressions, according to research by Merrick Osborne, assistant professor of organizational behavior at the ILR School.

“In morally diverse groups, there’s actually less consensus about what is right or wrong, because everybody is prioritizing different things. These different ‘moral priorities’ make it harder for the group to agree on what is right or wrong, and thus group members become more accepting of somebody acting inappropriately,” Osborne said.

“For instance, you could imagine joining a new friend group, and then somebody says something offensive. Instinctually, you look around and see if somebody else is going to say something. You wonder, ‘Is the group okay with this?’ And you can imagine some people in this friend group thinking what was said was appropriate, while others say it wasn’t. So, there’s a lack of consensus, making it harder for the group to come together and agree.”

Osborne is the first author of “Moral Diversity Fosters Cultural Looseness and Reduces Norm Policing,” forthcoming in Social Psychological and Personality Science. His co-author is Mohammad Atari, assistant professor at the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The researchers conducted seven studies using different methods and designs, including analysis of two large-scale datasets and five laboratory studies. Across all seven studies, norm violations, including violent crime, were punished less intensely in contexts characterized by higher moral diversity.

“This finding does play into another recent piece of my research on retaliatory incivility,” Osborne said. “These two papers start to highlight that the way we respond to incivility, including violence and various social ills, is contextually dependent. 

“We’re not making the case that people actually reward violent crime, but what I think this paper illuminates is how we evaluate incivility is actually nuanced. Rather, by virtue of the composition of the group – when people in a group have different moral priorities – it makes them more accepting of somebody acting inappropriately.”

In the first study, the researchers used a dataset from around the world to construct a moral diversity variable based on people’s responses to a series of questions. They then analyzed a separate dataset measuring “cultural looseness” and reactions to norm violations. 

“At a high level, we saw that more morally diverse countries had looser norms, meaning there was less consensus about what was right or wrong,” Osborne said. “Also, morally diverse countries had lower rates of physical confrontations, which we used as a proxy for “accepting norm violations.”

In the second study, participants were asked if the people in their neighborhood shared the same values. They were then presented with a series of statements in which they had to rate if they agreed or disagreed that their neighborhood had too much crime, vandalism or drug use. 

This was a different way to represent moral diversity: participants who were more likely to agree that their neighbors shared the same values seemed to believe that their neighborhood had “lower moral diversity.” In contrast, those who disagreed with the that their neighbors shared the same values likely felt that there was more moral diversity in their neighborhood.

“We found that people who disagreed with the ‘values’ statement were more likely to agree with prompts such as, ‘There’s vandalism in my neighborhood, there’s crime in my neighborhood,’ and so on,” Osborne said. “Now, this study doesn’t necessarily say that people are less likely to punish norm violations. But the study does say that in these morally diverse communities, people are actually seeing things like vandalism, crime, drug use or alcohol use more than those whose neighborhoods seemed more homogenous.”

In the third and sixth studies, the researchers asked test subjects to imagine they lived in the fictional town of Webster Springs, Illinois. The participants were then randomly assigned to one of three moral conditions: 

• low diversity, in which participants were told that their belief in “caring” is the most important moral value and is shared by most people in town. 
• relative diversity, in which participants were told that their belief in “caring” is the most important moral value, but it is not shared by all the people in town. 
• high diversity, in which participants were told that their belief in “caring” is shared by very few other people in town.

Once assigned a moral condition, they were shown a Facebook post condemning Critical Race Theory and asked whether it was inappropriate. 

“We found that those in the high-diversity group were more likely to accept this uncivil post and were less likely to police it,” Osborne said. 

The fourth and fifth studies were similar, but the community shifted from a fictional town to the workplace.

“Here at the ILR School, we have an entire academic department studying how problematic it is to do inappropriate things in the workplace,” Osborne said. “So, we thought we shouldn’t see these same effects, because they would be less welcomed in a setting as professional as the workplace. Yet both studies showed that more moral diversity led people to feel that the norms of the workplace were looser. They were actually less willing to police norms, and they were more accepting of norm violations.”

The final study examined whether moral diversity was equivalent to racial or demographic diversity, but the researchers found that the patterns in the morally diverse condition were not replicated in the racially diverse condition.

Osborne remains curious about the effects of moral diversity on group functioning. “So many of our communities are relatively homogenous in one dimension, such as race, gender, disability status, etc., but diverse in terms of what they actually value. This research starts to hint at the importance of considering what values are represented within a group, and how the convergence of different values could shape how the group responds to problematic behavior.”