From incidental harms to moral elevation: The positive effect of experiencing unintentional, uncontrollable, and unavoidable harms on perceived moral character

•Unintentional and unavoidable hardships boost volunteers' perceived moral character.•Witnessing a volunteer incidentally suffer elevates empathy for the volunteer.•Differences in perseverance and task difficulty do not explain the effects.•Implications for models of moral judgment and moral praise are discussed.

We contend that unintentional, uncontrollable, and unavoidable (i.e., incidental) hardships boost perceptions of volunteers' moral character because observers have a reflexive positive response to people who endure personal costs while serving others. Five experiments support this prediction. Participants judged a volunteer who suffered an incidental hardship (got stung by a bee, hit by a falling shingle, or unknowingly missed a fun opportunity while volunteering) to have greater moral character than a volunteer who did not experience these incidental hardships (Studies 1-4a). Observers' feelings of empathy emerged as a driver of this positive effect of incidental hardship on volunteers' perceived moral character (Studies 3 and 4a), and the prosociality of the target's activity (volunteering vs. not volunteering) moderated the effect (Study 2). A comparison of judgments in separate and joint evaluation contexts suggested that the effect is not due to a normative belief that volunteers should be praised for enduring incidental hardships (Studies 4a-4b). We address alternative explanations for the findings such as differences in the foreseeability of the hardship, task difficulty, and volunteers' perseverance. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of moral judgment and the processes by which people form impressions of others' positive moral character.