Jillian J. Jordan

The desire to appear virtuous can motivate people to punish wrongdoers, a desirable outcome when punishment is clearly deserved. Yet claims that "virtue signaling" is fueling a culture of outrage suggest that reputation concerns may inspire even potentially unmerited punishment. Moreover, might reputation do more to drive punishment in ambiguous situations, where punishment is less clearly deserved, eroding punishers' sensitivity to moral nuance? Across eight studies focused on the U.S. political context (total n= 15,472 Americans from MTurk and Prolific), we show that reputation can drive ambiguously deserved punishment. In situations involving politicized moral transgressions, including those where the case for punishing the transgressor is judged to be relatively ambiguous, subjects expect punishers to be perceived positively by co-partisans, and punish at higher rates when punishing is observable to a co-partisan audience. Moreover, reputation can drive punishment in ambiguous situations even among individuals who personally question the morality of punishment, highlighting the power of reputation to push people away from their values. Yet we find no evidence that reputation erodes sensitivity to nuance by doing more to drive punishment in more ambiguous situations. Instead, subjects expect punishment to look better when more unambiguously deserved, and making punishment observable does as much or more to drive punishment in unambiguous than ambiguous situations-even when the co-partisan audience is strongly ideological (and so might have been expected to encourage undiscerning punishment). We thus suggest that reputation can make people more punitive, even in ambiguous situations, but does not diminish sensitivity to nuance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Across 11 experimental studies (n= 12,257), we show that female victims of sexual assault are blamed more and seen as less morally virtuous if their assault follows voluntary sexual intimacy, a factor we term “adjacent consent”. Moreover, we illuminate a psychological mechanism contributing to this penalty: When a woman who provided no consent whatsoever is assaulted, people tend to see her as more moral than if she were not victimized (the “Virtuous Victim Effect”)—yet people do not extend the same moral elevation to victims who consented to sex-adjacent activity before they were assaulted. Adjacent consent plays a unique role in undermining the moral elevation of rape victims; respondents continue to elevate victims when, in the absence of adjacent consent, we introduce other information that makes the perpetrator seem less abhorrent or that makes the victim seem promiscuous, reckless, or sexually interested in her perpetrator. Furthermore, adjacent consent disqualifies rape victims from moral elevation in the eyes of a wide swath of respondents—including political liberals and undergraduates who, when no assault occurs, have no moral objection to (or even applaud) the victim’s voluntary sexual intimacy. Our results thus illuminate how sexual assault victims may be penalized for adjacent consent by even progressive or “sex-positive” communities. Finally, we identify a potential real-world consequence of adjacent consent: using field data from over 180,000 students across 33 U.S. universities, we find evidence that victims are less likely to report their sexual assaults in cases involving adjacent consent.

A frequently invoked explanation for the sharing of false over true political information is that partisans are motivated by their reputations. In particular, it is often argued that by indiscriminately sharing news that is favorable to one’s political party, regardless of whether it is true–or perhaps especially when it is not true–partisans can signal loyalty to their group, and improve their reputations in the eyes of their online networks. Across three survey studies (total N = 3,038), and an analysis of over 26,000 tweets, we explored these hypotheses by measuring the reputational benefits that people anticipate and receive from sharing different content online. In the survey studies, we showed participants actual news headlines that varied in (a) veracity, and (b) favorability to their preferred political party. Across all three studies, participants anticipated that sharing true news would bring more reputational benefits than sharing false news. Critically, while participants also expected greater reputational benefits for sharing news favorable to their party, the perceived reputation value of veracity was no smaller for more favorable headlines. We found a similar pattern when analyzing engagement on Twitter: among headlines that were politically favorable to a user’s preferred party, true headlines elicited more approval than false headlines.

Punishing wrongdoers can confer reputational benefits, and people sometimes punish without careful consideration. But are these observations related? Does reputation drive people to people to “punish without looking”? And if so, is this because unquestioning punishment looks particularly virtuous? To investigate, we assigned “Actors” to decide whether to sign punitive petitions about politicized issues (“punishment”), after first deciding whether to read articles opposing these petitions (“looking”). To manipulate reputation, we matched Actors with copartisan “Evaluators,” varying whether Evaluators observed i) nothing about Actors’ behavior, ii) whether Actors punished, or iii) whether Actors punished and whether they looked. Across four studies of Americans (total n = 10,343), Evaluators rated Actors more positively, and financially rewarded them, if they chose to (vs. not to) punish. Correspondingly, making punishment observable to Evaluators (i.e., moving from our first to second condition) drove Actors to punish more overall. Furthermore, because some of these individuals did not look, making punishment observable increased rates of punishment without looking. Yet punishers who eschewed opposing perspectives did not appear particularly virtuous. In fact, Evaluators preferred Actors who punished with (vs. without) looking. Correspondingly, making looking observable (i.e., moving from our second to third condition) drove Actors to look more overall—and to punish without looking at comparable or diminished rates. We thus find that reputation can encourage reflexive punishment—but simply as a byproduct of generally encouraging punishment, and not as a specific reputational strategy. Indeed, rather than fueling unquestioning decisions, spotlighting punishers’ decision-making processes may encourage reflection.

People see victims as morally virtuous—not because of anything that they have done, but because others have mistreated them.

COVID-19 prevention behaviors may be seen as self-interested or prosocial. Using American samples from MTurk and Prolific (total n = 6850), we investigated which framing is more effective—and motivation is stronger—for fostering prevention behavior intentions. We evaluated messaging that emphasized personal, public, or personal and public benefits of prevention. In initial studies (conducted March 14–16, 2020), the Public treatment was more effective than the Personal treatment, and no less effective than the Personal + Public treatment. In additional studies (conducted April 17–30, 2020), all three treatments were similarly effective. Across all these studies, the perceived public threat of coronavirus was also more strongly associated with prevention intentions than the perceived personal threat. Furthermore, people who behaved prosocially in incentivized economic games years before the pandemic had greater prevention intentions. Finally, in a field experiment (conducted December 21–23, 2020), we used our three messaging strategies to motivate contact-tracing app signups (n = 152,556 newsletter subscribers). The design of this experiment prevents strong causal inference; however, the results provide suggestive evidence that the Personal + Public treatment may have been more effective than the Personal or Public treatment. Together, our results highlight the importance of prosocial motives for COVID-19 prevention.