Temporal Distance and Moral Concerns: Future Morally Questionable Behavior is Perceived as More Wrong and Evokes Stronger Prosocial Intentions

Abstract

Prior research on temporal construal has shown that core values become more salient when people think about distant- as compared to near-future events. The present research shows that greater temporal distance of an event also results in greater moral concern. More specifically, it was found that people make harsher moral judgments of others' distant-future morally questionable behavior than near-future morally questionable behavior. Moreover, it was shown that people increasingly attribute distant vs. near future behavior to abstract dispositional relative to concrete situational causes, and that this attribution bias is partially responsible for the temporal distance effect on moral judgments.