Ogres have layers. And apparently so too blame more than praise!
This explored whether we judge negative behaviour differently from positive behaviour via blame & praise.
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Tl;dr: blame and praise aren’t opposite versions of the same moral judgement. Blame is stronger and more sensitive to how close someone is to actually committing a negative act, whereas praise depends heavily on whether a positive act has **actually** occurred.
E,g, blame helps prevent negative behaviour whereas praise reinforces positive behaviour that has occurred.
Extracts:
· “The amplified blame hypothesis predicts that people will assign greater blame for negative behaviors than praise for positive behaviors”
· “results illustrate systematic asymmetries between blame and praise, generally revealing that blame is more extreme and differentiated than praise”
· “[B]lame is applied in a graded fashion, with greater blame for mental states such as negative intentions, which are temporally close to and more diagnostic of transgressions, and less blame for mental states such as negative thoughts”
· “When assigning blame … perceivers care about how close a target is to acting negatively (prevention becomes more urgent), but when assigning praise, they care primarily about whether the target has acted positively”
· “Targets earn a minimal degree of praise for positive (not yet acted-upon) mental states, but not in a differentiated way depending on the particular mental state”
· “[F]or negative (but not positive) behavior, as one’s specific mental state becomes a clearer indicator of one’s commitment to and likelihood of acting, blame increases correspondingly”
· “negative thoughts and intentions were judged less likely to be acted upon than positive thoughts and intentions, indicating that the greater extremity of blame was not simply due to negative mental states being perceived as more likely to lead to action”
· “Blame and praise are not mirror images: blame is more extreme and more finely differentiated among mental states, reflecting the different social regulatory functions of preventing negative behaviour and reinforcing positive behaviour”
· “people’s blaming of a thought or plan might serve to preemptively steer a person away from committing bad acts that they were tempted to commit”
· “Since negative information is more readily detected and attended to than positive information … blame is likely to be used more frequently than praise”
· But reversal is possible, like how education have “found success by positively reinforcing socially desirable behavior, rather than punishing socially problematic behavior”
· But, “Doling out too much praise preemptively—merely for positive thoughts or desires—might … be counterproductive, disincentivizing the target from following through on the behavior that the perceiver wanted to encourage in the first place”
Study link: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0213544
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