Morality judgment: Test of an averaging model with differential weights.

Ratings of persons described by sets of moral and immoral actions were inconsistent with additive and averaging models of information integration. An averaging model with differential weights could not give a consistent account of the effects of both the number of items and the heterogeneity of the items in the set. Highly immoral deeds appear to have an overriding influence on the overall judgment: Having committed one bad deed, a person will be rated bad, with his good deeds having little influence. Morality judgment may thus represent a truly configural process. Recent research with judgments of the morality of objectionable behaviors (Birnbaum, 1972a) suggests that 5s integrate evaluations of immorality in a nonadditive fashion. Contrary to additive or constantweight averaging models, judgments of the overall morality of 2 actions depend upon the range of the values within the set, as well as their sum or mean. The greater the range of the items, holding mean scale value constant, the lower the judgment of morality. The interactions obtained by Birnbaum (1972a) were interpreted as consistent with either a range model (Birnbaum, Parducci, Gifford, 1971) or an averaging model with