Title: Damned if you, but not if you did
Description: Judgments and decisions based on emotion often lead to systematic departures from rational models of behavior. Recent research has found that people's emotional reactions to future events are more extreme than their emotional reactions to equivalent past events (Caruso, Gilbert, & Wilson, 2007; Van Boven & Ashworth, in press). Because moral intuitions are guided by emotional reactions (Haidt, 2001), I suggest that moral judgments will typically be more extreme for events set in the future than for events set in the past. In Study 1, participants felt that they (but not another person) deserved more money for a future day of work than for a past one. In Study 2, participants stated that they (but not another person) would be more likely to reject an unfair split of money next week than last week. Participants in Study 3 rated a price-gouging vending machine as less fair if it was going to be tested next month than if it had already been tested last month. In Study 4, participants confronted with a moral dilemma thought that either of two decisions--both of which led to different negative outcomes--was less morally acceptable in the future than in the past. Both a past and a future version of this same dilemma were presented to participants in Study 5, in different orders. Not only were participants' moral intuitions about the second scenario they read guided by their responses to the first scenario, but their stated support for utilitarianism more generally was stronger among those who first read the past version than among those who first read the future version. Across all studies, participants consistently experienced more intense affective reactions at the thought of the future event than the past one, and some evidence for a causal connection between these emotional reactions and fairness judgments was found.

The results suggest that permission for actions with ethical connotations may often be harder to get than forgiveness, and that moral reactions to one's own or another's ethical behavior can be heavily influenced by the temporal framing of the events in question. To the extent that looking back on past decisions engenders a more rational, deliberative mindset, a past temporal perspective may help alleviate some of the negative consequences that result when people evaluate different courses of action in prospect. As such, the temporal framing of options may be used as a strategy to promote more calibrated assessments of morality and wiser decisions in a variety of domains.