Inspirations or incitements? Ethical mind-sets and the effect of moral examples

- We investigate effect of moral examples on moral path dependency.
- Subjects mind-set predicts their reaction to observing others moral behavior.
- Rule-oriented subjects are incited by bad examples, but do not react to good ones.
- Results call for precaution when informing people about antisocial behavior.

Rule-based people strive to conform to a moral norm. Outcome-based people, on the other hand, adjust their behavior to the concrete consequences of their acts. We argue that the categorization of the mind-set may also be informative when it comes to explaining the effects that good and bad moral examples have on the moral behavior of the observer. To test this, we play a dictator game after dictators observed prosocial and antisocial third-party actions in a different domain. The consequences of these actions affected dictator and receiver identically. We hypothesized that this makes it unnecessary for an outcome-minded dictator to intervene correctively, while it influences a rule-minded dictator to follow the example by aligning her behavior. In line with our hypothesis, we find that only rule-minded dictators reacted to the example set by others. They are, however, asymmetrically incited by moral transgressions, while being left uninspired by praiseworthy examples. Our findings call for some precaution when applying policy measures based on informing people about prosocial and antisocial behavior, especially in cultures in which the moral focus is on rules.