From team rationality to morality: Implicit joint plans carry moral force

Collaboration is essential to social life. Sometimes teams, families, companies, and other organizations agree on explicit rules governing such collaboration, and these are backed by moral force: To violate the rule is wrong. Other times, however, we find ways to collaborate on the fly, without rules or norms, or even explicit communication. This often requires inferring a joint plan — imagining “what coordination would we agree to, if we could?” — and playing our surmised role. Is it also considered morally wrong to violate an implicit or inferred joint plan? In five preregistered experiments (n = 1,506), we show that deviating from an inferred joint plan is perceived as morally problematic, even without prior communication or agreement. In other words, just as the agreements we actually make are morally binding, so too are the patterns of conduct that we infer our social partners would agree upon.