Gradual escalation: The role of continuous commitments in perceptions of guilt

Many immoral acts are the result of gradually escalating behaviors. The present work focuses on observers of immoral acts and the role of continuous commitments in shaping their perceptions of another person's guilt. Across four studies investigating how gradual escalations affect moral judgments, participants read a scenario describing an instance of immoral behavior that gradually built in severity. In Study 1, female participants perceived a perpetrator as less guilty when his behavior gradually escalated to rape after explicitly committing to the appropriateness his initial morally ambiguous behavior. The findings from Study 2 suggest that inducing a categorical mindset can counteract this reduction in perceptions of guilt. Study 3 illustrated the power of the categorical versus continuous mindset by examining how a categorical (versus a continuous mindset) impacts perceptions of guilt even in the absence of gradually escalating behavior. Finally, Study 4 extended the findings from the prior studies to a sample of both men and women and investigated the effect of the mindset manipulation on perceptions. Together, these studies demonstrate that the potency of gradual escalations to induce acquiescence to immoral behavior may inhere in their ability to create initial commitments to and continuous perceptions of morally ambiguous behavior.

► Four studies investigate how gradual escalations affect the judgments of guilt made by observers.
► Making commitments to escalating behaviors led observers to later rate actors as less guilty.
► Inducing a categorical mindset counteracted the effect of commitment on perceptions of guilt.
► Continuous commitments explain why gradual escalations reduce the severity of moral judgments.