Reacting to Wrong-Doers: Harm Leads to Partner Control and Impurity to Partner Choice

We explore two types of behavioural strategies that individuals use to manage their social partners in response to undesirable behaviour. These strategies are rewarding/punishing behaviour (partner control), and selecting preferred social partners and avoiding the others (partner choice). Past work has shown that partner control and partner choice are functionally distinct but has not investigated whether people use different strategies to address different types of undesirable behaviour. In particular, we focus on the violations of harm and purity from Moral Foundations Theory. Using a selection of harm and purity vignettes, across two preregistered studies we test how different violations result in a preference for partner control or partner choice, while exploring the role of theoretically relevant demographic measures: political orientation, relational mobility, and urban vs rural location. We find that harm violations are more likely to lead to partner control and purity violations are more likely to lead to partner choice. This remained true across demographic measures, while different attitudes towards those violations (moral wrongness, discomfort around the violator, punishment efficacy, anger, disgust) only partially explain the dissociation. Since current theories fail to fully account for why purity and harm result in different strategies, these results point to the need to develop a functional account for why people differ in their responses to different categories of moral violation.