“If Immoral Then Unable”: Asymmetric Generalizations in Social Judgment

Abstract

Morality and ability are two key dimensions of social judgment. Across four experiments (total N = 1,418, three preregistered), we examined how information about one dimension shapes impressions in the other. In Experiment 1, participants generated positive and negative behaviors related to either morality or ability and then evaluated each behavior on the other dimension. Negative moral behaviors led to stronger inferences of low ability than negative ability behaviors led to inferences of immorality (i.e., asymmetric Horn effect). No asymmetry emerged for positive behaviors (i.e., symmetric Halo effects). Experiments 2a and 2b confirmed the asymmetric Horn effect and showed it was stronger for extreme versus moderate negative behaviors. Experiment 3 showed that immoral behaviors elicited more perceived threat than unable behaviors, which partly explained the asymmetric horn effect. These findings complement and extend prior models of impression formation by highlighting the primacy of morality in influencing judgments on other fundamental content dimensions.