INGROUP LOVE IS BLIND: VIEWING MORAL LEGITIMACY THROUGH ROSE-TINTED LENSES IN THIRD-PARTY SIDE-TAKING

Abstract

Third-party observers often preferentially take sides in intergroup conflicts despite personal costs. In two studies (N = 457) involving a side-taking variant of the Intergroup Prisoner’s Dilemma economic game, we distinguished the nature of side-taking when third-parties seek to show ingroup love and pursue moral justice separately. We then examined how third-parties’ social and moral motives interact when faced with an intergroup conflict. In our main study, we hypothesised that besides taking into consideration situational factors of morality (e.g. who was the aggressor) in determining moral legitimacy, group status would serve as an additional aspect of third-party moral judgements, which we term chronic morality. Interestingly, we found that when the ingroup was the situational aggressor, a lower status outgroup gained moral legitimacy as the victim, but third-party participants expressed moral punishment toward the higher status outgroup as though they were the moral transgressors. These findings provide deeper insights into moral condemnation and punishment by third-parties in intergroup conflicts and suggests that third-parties adopt a dynamic nature of morality judgements. In morally ambiguous situations, third-parties’ choice to focus on situational or chronic aspects of morality is contingent on which perspective provides them the moral legitimacy to take sides with their ingroup.