Reluctance to downplay harm: Asymmetric sensitivity to differences in the severity of moral transgressions

A basic tenet of justice is that more severe wrongdoings deserve greater condemnation and vice versa. However, in five preregistered experiments (N = 3,726), we find an asymmetry in the extent to which people differentiate between harmful acts depending on how they are compared. Participants scale up condemnation from less severe wrongdoings to more severe ones. But when comparing the same acts in the opposite direction, they scale down condemnation much less—and often not at all. Thus, they assign more similar punishments to pairs of violations when evaluating the worse one first or indicating which is “less” wrong, contexts that require downward comparison. We theorize that this happens because scaling down feels like downplaying the lesser harm. Supporting this account, we found no asymmetry when comparing more benign transgressions. These findings suggest that the degree of coherence in the justice system hinges on the direction in which bad acts are evaluated—an often arbitrary factor that should have no bearing on condemnation.