Most people do not “value the struggle”: Tempted agents are judged as less virtuous than those who were never tempted

Abstract

Do people judge those who overcome temptation as more virtuous than those who don't feel tempted in the first place? Because prior research provides conflicting answers to this question, the current paper uses an expanded set of methodological and statistical tools to solve this puzzle. First, we replicated results of prior research showing that agents who overcome temptation are seen as less virtuous than non-tempted agents, with 74–78% of people making this judgment. Second, we used participant-generated stimuli and one measure from each of two published papers to rule out stimulus and measurement sampling as explanations for the previous opposite effects. We replicated our original results: 72–75% of people judged agents who overcame temptation as less virtuous than non-tempted agents. Third, we investigated whether judgments were moderated by relationship context. Again, the majority of people judged agents who overcame temptation–that would harm strangers or close others–as less virtuous than non-tempted agents. Additionally, the following interaction effect was the most common (modal) pattern: While judging tempted agents as less virtuous than non-tempted agents within each relationship context, 39% of people judged agents who were tempted to act in a way that would harm close others as even less virtuous than those agents whose temptations would harm strangers. Together, these results provide a detailed moral psychological account of temptation by: resolving a puzzle in the literature, revealing moderation by relationship context, and documenting the pervasiveness of this effect across stimuli, measures, and persons.