Perceived morality of direct versus indirect harm: Replications of the preference for indirect harm effect

Abstract

Royzman and Baron (2002) demonstrated that people prefer indirect harm to direct harm: ‎they judge actions that produce harm as a by-product to be more moral than actions that ‎produce harm directly. In two preregistered studies, we successfully replicated Study 2 of ‎Royzman and Baron (2002) with a Hong Kong student sample (N = 46) and an online ‎American Mechanical Turk sample (N = 314). We found consistent evidential support for ‎the preference for indirect harm phenomenon (d = 0.46 [0.26, 0.65] to 0.47 [0.18, 0.75]), ‎weaker than effects reported in the original findings of the target article (d = 0.70 [0.40, ‎‎0.99]). We also successfully replicated findings regarding reasons underlying a preference ‎for indirect harm (directness, intent, omission, probability of harm, and appearance of ‎harm). All materials, data, and code are available on: https://osf.io/ewq8g/ ‎