The psychological reason we judge groups much more harshly than individuals

New research published in Journal of Personality & Social Psychology finds that people see themselves as moral, individuals as decent, and groups as falling short.

For decades, psychologists have documented the “better-than-average effect,” the tendency for people to believe they possess more positive qualities than others. This effect is especially strong in the moral domain: individuals often believe they are kinder, more fair, and more principled than the typical person. However, most research on moral self-enhancement relies on comparisons between the self and others, leaving an important question unanswered: do people actually see themselves and others as morally good or bad in an absolute sense?

André Vaz and colleagues conducted a series of five studies using different participant samples and experimental designs. Across the studies, participants were asked to estimate how frequently certain everyday behaviors occur, including both moral actions (for example, helping someone in need) and immoral actions (such as littering or keeping extra change by mistake).

Importantly, participants were not only asked about the behaviors of specific targets, such as themselves or other people, but were also asked to indicate the “moral threshold.” This threshold represented the point at which the frequency of a behavior would be considered morally acceptable rather than morally inadequate.

For instance, participants might indicate what percentage of the time someone would need to recycle or help others in order to be considered a morally good person. By comparing people’s estimates of behavior with these thresholds, the researchers could determine whether a person or group was perceived as morally above or below the line of moral adequacy.

The first study introduced this moral-threshold measure. Undergraduate participants evaluated several everyday moral and immoral behaviors and estimated how often those behaviors were performed either by themselves or by other participants in the study. A separate group identified the moral threshold for each behavior. Later studies expanded this design. In one large online study with U.S. participants, individuals again evaluated their own behavior and moral thresholds, but they also judged the behavior of several types of social targets.

These included a specific individual from the study, a non-individuated individual identified only by an ID number, the other participants in the study as a group, and people in society in general. Participants also reported two additional standards: how often people ideally should perform behaviors, and how often they ought to perform them, allowing the researchers to examine how moral thresholds differed from other moral expectations.

Subsequent studies further explored why people judge individuals more positively than collectives. In one experiment, participants evaluated a randomly selected individual from the study or the collective of all participants. The design emphasized the difference between these targets visually, showing either a group of figures representing the collective or a highlighted single individual randomly selected from that group. Participants again estimated how frequently the targets would engage in moral and immoral behaviors and later indicated how confident they were in these judgments.

In the final studies, the researchers experimentally tested a psychological explanation for the difference between individuals and collectives. Participants were asked to consider how uncomfortable or negative it would feel to make cynical judgments about either a specific person or a group of people. These studies examined whether anticipating such negative feelings might encourage people to judge individuals more generously.

Across the studies, a clear pattern emerged. Participants consistently believed that their own behavior exceeded the moral threshold. In other words, they reported performing moral behaviors more frequently than was required to be considered morally good, and immoral behaviors less frequently than would be tolerated. This pattern appeared reliably across different sets of behaviors and participant samples, indicating that people see themselves as clearly morally adequate, morally better than necessary to meet the standard they themselves set.

Perceptions of others depended on whether those others were described as individuals or as groups. When participants judged collectives, such as the other participants in the study or people in society more broadly, their estimates tended to fall below the moral threshold. This suggests a form of moral pessimism about groups of people, implying that the average person does not meet the standard required to be morally good.

In contrast, when participants judged specific individuals, even individuals they knew almost nothing about, their estimates generally exceeded the moral threshold. Participants therefore believed that a randomly selected individual from a group was likely to behave more morally than the group itself.

These findings produced a consistent ranking in moral perceptions: the self was judged most moral, individual others were judged moderately moral, and collectives were judged least moral.

Further studies investigated why individuals receive more favorable moral judgments than groups. The researchers found that differences in confidence about these estimates did not explain the effect; people were not simply more certain about their judgments of individuals. Instead, participants expected that it would feel more uncomfortable or unpleasant to be cynical about a specific person than about a group.

Because judging an identifiable individual harshly might evoke stronger negative feelings, people appear to avoid this emotional discomfort by giving individuals the benefit of the doubt. This tendency leads people to view individuals as morally adequate even while believing that groups of people fall short of moral standards.

Of note is that the studies were conducted primarily in Western, industrialized countries, meaning the findings may not generalize to other cultural contexts. They also relied on a limited set of everyday behaviors, which may not capture the full range of moral actions people consider in real life.

Overall, the findings suggest that people see themselves as especially moral, give individual strangers the benefit of the doubt, yet view groups and society with moral skepticism.

The research “Absolute Moral Perceptions of the Self and Others: People Are Bad, a Person Is Good, I Am Great” was authored by André Vaz, André Mata, and Clayton R. Critcher.