The morality of action: The asymmetry between judgments of praise and blame in the action–omission effect Dries H. Bostyn ⁎, Arne Roets Ghent University, Department of Developmental, Personality, and Social Psychology, Henri Dunantlaan 2, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium HIGHLIGHTS • The omission effect is researched on scenarios with positive and negative outcomes. • An omission effect is found for judgments of blame, not for judgments of praise. • A concurrent causality judgment causes an omission effect on judgments of praise. abstract article info Article history: Received 22 October 2015 Revised 17 November 2015 Accepted 23 November 2015 Available online 2 December 2015 Actions leading to negative outcomes (i.e., harm) are seen as more blameworthy than omissions of actions lead- ing to the same negative outcomes. However, whether a similar action–omission effect applies to judgments of praiseworthiness of positive outcomes is still an open question. Drawing on positive–negative asymmetries found in other domains, we hypothesized that positive events would not elicit an action–omission effect for judg- ments of praise, because such positive events do not by default trigger the causal appraisal processes that are cen- tral to the action–omission effect. Furthermore, we posited that when people are explicitly asked to consider causality before or during the judgment, an action–omission effect on judgments of praise could be obtained too. These hypotheses were verified in three independent studies and a meta-analytic analysis. As such, the pres- ent set of studies provides novel insights in the action–omission effect's asymmetry for negative and positive out- comes, as well as an increased understanding of the role of causality appraisal in this effect: judgments of praise are less reliant on causal reasoning than judgments of blame, and therefore also less susceptible to the action– omission bias. © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Omission-bias Action effect Casual appraisal Praise Moral cognition 1. Introduction Actions yielding negative outcomes are judged to be morally worse than omissions of actions resulting in the same negative outcomes (Spranca, Minsk, & Baron, 1991; Ritov & Baron, 1999; Baron & Ritov, 2004; Cushman, Young, & Hauser, 2006; DeScioli, Bruening, & Kurzban, 2011). The present research addresses whether this ‘action– omission’ effect is generalizable to positive outcomes. Although there is a rich research literature on the action–omission effect, no studies that we are aware of have investigated whether judg- ments of praise, similar to judgments of blame, demonstrate an action– omission effect. Intuitively, it would make sense that actions leading to positive outcomes are deemed more praiseworthy than omissions lead- ing to those same outcomes. If it is more blameworthy to ‘kill’ than to ‘let die’ (Spranca et al., 1991) then it is probably also more praiseworthy to actively ‘save someone’ than to ‘let someone be saved’. However, there are some reasons to assume the effect may be slightly more com- plex and does not display this kind of symmetry. First of all, several studies have noted that negative events tend to elicit stronger and different psychological reactions compared to posi- tive events. Negative events and stimuli are more salient, appear to be more potent and tend to trigger more deliberative thought than posi- tively valenced events do (Rozin & Royzmann, 2001; Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001). This ‘negativity bias’ effect has been found in a wide variety of domains spanning from loss aversion (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984) to impression formation (Peeters & Czapinsky, 1990). Given the psychological ubiquity of this negativity bias it would not be unreasonable to suppose that it might affect moral judgment as well. Indeed, some research has suggested different evaluation standards for the morality of negative versus positive ac- tions. For instance, both adults and children tend to engage more fre- quently in judgments of blame than then they do in judgments of praise (Ross & den Bak-Lammers, 1998; Wiessner, 2005) and legal Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 63 (2016) 19–25 ⁎ Corresponding author at: Department of Developmental, Personality, and Social Psychology, Henri Dunantlaan 2, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium. E-mail addresses: Dries.Bostyn@Ugent.be (D.H. Bostyn), Arne.Roets@Ugent.be (A. Roets). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2015.11.005 0022-1031/© 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Experimental Social Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jesp