The attribution of morality.

In two experiments, observers received information about a stimulus person and then attributed a given level of morality to that person. Attributions of morality based on the stimulus persons immoral (as opposed to moral) behavior were relatively unaffected by situational demands surrounding the behavior. That is, a person who stole or committed adultery was judged to be relatively immoral, regardless of situational pressures that appeared to facilitate the behavior. Varying the type of situational demand (reward vs. cost) did not alter this basic effect. Unlike morality attributions, causal attributions based on moral and immoral behavior were affected by situational demands to an equal extent. The results also indicated that impressions of morality formed in one context readily generalized to other aspects of morality. For example, a person who committed adultery was thought to be more likely to lie and steal than one who was not adulterous. It is well known that negative information weighs heavily in ones overall impression of a person (Kanouse Hanson, 1972). For ex-ample, a single immoral behavior (such as stealing) is often enough to sour ones eval-uation of a person. Further, this negative eval-uation tends to persist even when the person is simultaneously credited with several very laudatory behaviors (Birnbaum, 1972, 1973). A second well-known finding is that, in gen-eral, dispositional attributions are influenced by situational demands surrounding an ac-tors behavior (Jones, Davis, Gergen, 1961; Kelley Michela, 1980). The extent that sit-uational demands affect the interpretation of immoral behavior, however, is an unresolved