Willpower as moral ability.

Abstract

Self-control refers to the ability to choose options with greater long-term benefits over more immediately tempting options. For personal choices that do not affect others, self-control is often conceptualized as morally irrelevant. However, four focal experiments and five supplemental experiments demonstrate that self-control success in apparently nonmoral domains enhances evaluations of moral character, but self-control failure is not regarded as evidence of moral corruption. This asymmetry supports our moral-ability hypothesis: self-control is regarded as the ability to bring about intended outcomes, which is believed necessary for moral goodness but not moral badness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).