Katherine DeCelles | Indifferent or Impartial? Explaining moral evaluations of the neutral self versus the neutral other

Institute of Personality and Social Research Colloquium

Opposing someone on a contentious socio-political issue often prompts criticism and conflict. People may be tempted to reduce such acrimony by espousing neutrality. Across eleven online and field studies with North American samples, we find that although people commonly express neutrality on potentially controversial issues, observers are highly skeptical of others' neutrality, judging them as equally or sometimes even less moral than those who explicitly oppose them. Unpacking lay beliefs about the reasons driving neutrality expressions sheds light on this disjunction between responses to the neutral self versus the neutral other. Specifically, people render more favorable attributions for their own neutrality (e.g., true indecision) than do observers (e.g., apathy, strategic behavior). Therefore, while neutrality is an often-invoked strategy to manage impressions, it is unlikely to succeed in doing so.

Katherine (Katy) DeCelles is a Professor of Organizational Behavior and the Academic Director of the PhD Program at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, where she is also cross-appointed to the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies. She also holds the Secretary of State Professorship in Organizational Effectiveness, and is the inaugural VMWare Women's Leadership Innovation Lab fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Katy's research seeks to understand the psychological mechanisms that explain how individuals and organizations grapple with interpersonal and societal conflict, crime, and various forms of inequality. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to social science that uses experimental, archival, video and qualitative methods, and is known for her research on conflict in extreme contexts such as in prisons, airplanes, protests, and robbery.