Participants read a scenario in which they witnessed a hypothetical transgression. They were asked a set of questions including one that assessed their willingness to report the transgressor to the police. We manipulated the identity of the purported transgressor as either a stranger or the participant's brother. When the transgressor is one’s brother, two plausible moral goals are pitted against one another: civic duty (to report a transgression) versus family obligation (to protect a family member, even from a social punishment). The scenarios were constructed to be factually ambiguous as to whether or not the purported transgressor actually committed a transgression. Participants could therefore potentially interpret the facts in a way that tended to be exculpatory for their brother, thus maintaining coherence while making a decision based in part on family favoritism (Holyoak & Simon, 1999; Simon, Snow, & Read, 2004; Simon et al., 2015).

Method

Participants

Amazon Mechanical Turk was used to recruit 169 participants (92 females, M age = 35.9 years, SD age = 11.6 years) residing in the United States. In this exploratory experiment, we considered the identity of transgressor and severity of transgression as the two main factors of interest and aimed to collect at least 40 participants for each of the four main conditions. We used TurkGate (Goldin & Darlow, 2013) for all of the three experiments reported in this paper to prevent the same participants from participating in more than one experiment. Ethnicity was self-reported: 77% were European/European American, 12% were Asian/Asian American, 7% were African American/Black, and 5% were Hispanic or of Spanish origin. Participants received $0.70 as compensation for completing the experiment, which took a median of 3.2 minutes.

Design, materials, and procedure

Each participant read and made judgments about a single scenario in which a target person is implicated in a purported crime. The scenarios used one of two basic cover stories (traffic violation or street battery). The rest of the design was a 2 (identity of transgressor: stranger/brother) × 2 (severity of violation: misdemeanor/felony) factorial. About 20 participants were assigned to each of the eight smallest cells (including the variation in cover story). Collapsing across the scenarios, there were about 40 participants in each condition (stranger*misdemeanor = 42, brother*misdemeanor = 43, stranger*felony = 44, and brother*felony = 40). All factors were manipulated between subjects.

Participants were instructed to imagine themselves as the person in the given scenario and to answer the questions after careful consideration. The participants imagined being a witness to a possible transgression. (All scenarios are provided as supplemental online materials; see Author’s Note.) For example, one scenario, involving a street battery incident (misdemeanor), was as follows:

One evening, you are walking home after a long workday. A block ahead, you see a man wearing a red baseball cap, who seems to be arguing with another man. Soon, the two men disappear into an alley. As you walk up to where they were, you see the other man lying on the ground in an alley, covering his face and groaning, though his injury doesn’t seem to be serious. The injured man is drunk, so he may not be reliable or truthful about what happened.

You consider the possibility that the man with the red cap may have attacked the drunken man and then ran away, and should be reported to the police. However, you also consider the possibility that the drunken man may have been trying to pick a fight with the man in the red cap. The man with the red cap may have tried to defend himself, or perhaps hit the drunken man accidentally while trying to run away to avoid a fight.

The purported transgressor (man in the red cap in the above scenario; car driver in the traffic violation scenario) was the target person for factual and moral judgments. The purported transgression was either a misdemeanor, as above (punched a drunken man in the face and then ran away; drove under the influence), or a felony (stabbed a drunken man and then ran away; hit-and-run). To leave the factual details unclear, we provided two possible explanations in each of the scenarios (e.g., the man in the red cap may have attacked the drunken man, or he may have tried to defend himself from the drunken man). Following the description of the scenario, the target person was described as either a stranger or the participant’s brother, depending on the condition. If participants did not have a brother, they were told to imagine they had a brother about their own age.

The participants were told that they saw a policeman a few blocks back, and were asked questions in the following fixed order: (1) “Do you think your brother/stranger actually [committed a transgression?]” (different transgression inserted for each condition), using a 6-point scale (1 = certainly not, 2 = probably not, 3 = guess not, 4 = guess so, 5 = probably, 6 = certainly). (2) “Given what you believe happened, how unethical was the behavior of your brother/stranger?”, using a 5-point scale (1 = not problematic, 2 = slightly unethical, 3 = moderately unethical, 4 = seriously unethical, 5 = extremely unethical). Because the target person’s behavior could only be interpreted as neutral at best, the lowest rating for this question was labeled as “not problematic” rather than “ethical.” (3) “Given what you believe happened, would you report your brother/stranger to the policeman?”, using a 6-point scale, same as (1). (4) “How difficult was it to make the decision to report (or not report) your brother to the policeman?”, using a 5-point scale (1 = not difficult, 2 = slightly difficult, 3 = moderately difficult, 4 = seriously difficult, 5 = extremely difficult). For brevity, the questions and the corresponding mean scores will be termed factual, unethicality, report, and difficulty, respectively.

After the main questions, participants were asked to briefly explain the reason why they reported (or did not report) the target person to the police (answers to this open-ended question were not formally analyzed). Finally, basic demographic questions were asked, including whether the participant had a sibling, and if they did, how close they were with their sibling, on a 5-point scale (1 = very distant, 2 = distant, 3 = neither close nor distant, 4 = close, 5 = very close). Although the hypothetical family member in our scenarios was always a brother, participants were not specifically asked if their siblings were male or female. We were interested in the potential effect of having a sibling per se, rather than the effect of specifically having a brother (vs. sister). It seemed possible that having an actual sibling might make the scenarios in the brother conditions more personally relatable. For participants who do not have siblings, it may be harder to imagine having a brother with whom they have a close bond, or to feel a responsibility to protect the hypothetical brother when he is vulnerable.

Results and discussion

We first conducted preliminary analyses to test the potential effects of scenarios, having a sibling, and closeness with siblings. Using 2 (identity of the transgressor: brother/stranger) × 2 (severity of transgression: misdemeanor/felony) × 2 (scenario type: traffic violation/street battery) between-subjects ANOVAs for each dependent measure, we first found that the mean scores for factual, unethicality, and report were all significantly higher in the traffic violation scenario than in the street battery scenario (significant main effects of scenario, Fs > 4.42, ps < .038, \( {\eta}_p^2 \) < .034). However, the effect of identity was essentially the same across the two scenarios. Accordingly, data were collapsed across scenarios.

About 87% of the participants reported having one or more siblings. Given the relatively small number of participants without a sibling, having a sibling could not be used as a factor in ANOVAs for dependent measures. However, performing the key ANOVAs for the brother condition (n = 83) after excluding participants without siblings yielded essentially the same pattern of results. For participants in the brother condition who had siblings (n = 75), we checked whether closeness with siblings was correlated with the dependent measures. Only the factual score had a significant correlation with closeness (r = −.26, p = .022); unethicality, report, and difficulty did not (|r|s < .08, ps > .50). Hence, participants who reported being relatively closer to their actual siblings showed a slightly lower tendency to believe that a hypothetical brother committed a transgression in the scenarios. To maintain equal samples between cells in the full-factorial ANOVAs, we included all participants in the key analyses.

For the primary analyses, we conducted a 2 (identity) × 2 (severity) ANOVA for each of the dependent variables. The major findings are plotted in Fig. 1a. The identity of the target person yielded a significant main effect for factual score, F(1, 165) = 55.17, p < .001, \( {\eta}_p^2 \) = .251. Participants displayed a stronger belief that the target person committed a transgression when he was a stranger (M = 4.19, SD = 0.98) than when he was a brother (M = 2.83, SD = 1.37). Neither the main effect of severity nor the interactions between identity and severity were significant (ps > .15).

Fig. 1 Means of factual, unethicality, report, and difficulty scores for (a) Experiment 1, in which the scenarios provided factual ambiguity, and (b) Experiment 2, in which the scenarios were factually unambiguous. (A factual judgment was not elicited in the unambiguous case, Experiment 2.) In Experiment 1, family favoritism was observed for factual, unethicality, and report scores. In Experiment 2, family favoritism was not observed for unethicality, but nonetheless was observed for report. Error bars indicate standard error of the mean Full size image

The ANOVA for unethicality indicated that both identity, F(1, 165) = 12.18, p < .001, \( {\eta}_p^2 \) = .069, and severity, F(1, 165) = 8.69, p = .004, \( {\eta}_p^2 \) = .050, yielded significant main effects. Participants judged the behavior as more unethical when the target person was a stranger (M = 3.79, SD = 1.12) than when he was their brother (M = 3.11, SD = 1.41), and when the transgression was a felony (M = 3.75, SD = 1.36) than when it was a misdemeanor (M = 3.16, SD = 1.19). The interaction of these variables was not significant (p = .45).

Similarly, for report, identity, F(1, 165) = 64.49, p < .001, \( {\eta}_p^2 \) = .281, and severity, F(1, 165) = 7.61, p = .006, \( {\eta}_p^2 \) = .044, yielded significant main effects. Participants were more willing to report the incident to the police when the target person was a stranger (M = 4.41, SD = 1.38) than when he was their brother (M = 2.57, SD = 1.61), and when the transgression was a felony (M = 3.85, SD = 1.73) than when it was a misdemeanor (M = 3.16, SD = 1.72). Again, the interaction was not significant (p = .90).

Finally, the ANOVA for difficulty yielded a significant main effect of identity, F(1, 165) = 7.42, p = .007, \( {\eta}_p^2 \) = .043. Difficulty in answering the report question was higher when the target person was their brother (M = 2.42, SD = 1.48) rather than a stranger (M = 1.90, SD = 1.03). Neither severity nor the interaction between identity and severity yielded significant differences (ps > .10). However, the trends suggest that the report question was slightly more difficult to answer in the felony condition than in the misdemeanor condition when the target person was a brother. When the target person was a stranger, difficulty tended to be slightly lower for felony than misdemeanor, presumably because a severe offense led the participants to report with less hesitation.

Given the factual ambiguity in the scenarios, a coherence shift apparently took place: The identity of the transgressor significantly affected all of our dependent variables. The pattern of average scores in factual, unethicality, and report were coherent within each of the brother and stranger conditions, with all three scores significantly lower in the brother condition than in the stranger condition. Even though the observed behavior was identical, participants made more favorable judgments and decisions for their brother than for a stranger.

We then conducted correlation analyses separately for the brother and stranger conditions to further examine the relationships among the four dependent variables. To control for the main effect of severity, unethicality and report scores were standardized within each of the misdemeanor (n = 85) and felony (n = 84) conditions prior to these correlation analyses. As summarized in Table 1 (top), the correlations between factual, unethicality, and report scores were all significant for both the brother and stranger conditions, and did not differ significantly between the two identity conditions (comparison after Fisher z transformation, ps > .80). Regardless of identity, when the target person was strongly believed to have committed a transgression, he was likely to be judged as unethical, and participants were more willing to report him to the police.

Table 1 Correlations between dependent variables in Experiments 1 and 2 Full size table

On the other hand, the correlations between difficulty and other dependent variables were significantly different between the brother and stranger conditions (all ps < .018). Strikingly, all correlations were positive for the brother condition (i.e., the more the brother was judged to have done wrong, the more difficult the decision), whereas all were negative for the stranger condition (i.e., the more the stranger was judged to have done wrong, the easier the decision). This pattern could be due to the participants experiencing greater difficulty when their reluctance to report a family member conflicted with the judgment that he had committed a serious transgression. Conversely, in the stranger condition, fulfilling a stronger civic duty to blame and report the transgressor led to reduced difficulty.