Reframing of moral dilemmas reveals an unexpected "positivity bias" in updating and attributions

People make moral judgments about others, and new information can cause those judgments to change. Prior work examined moral impression updating after observing additional behaviors, but less is known about moral updating when prior behaviors are reframed, either as more or less moral than on first impression. The present work compared moral updating as scenarios were reframed from moral-to-immoral, or immoral-to-moral. Three studies show that the negativity bias, well-documented by prior work, can be reversed when first impressions are reframed, and partially reinstated if new information is irrelevant. Further, this “positivity bias” is partly explained by the extent to which reframing information elicits external causal attributions. Future research on moral updating may benefit from a sensitivity to such qualitative features of new information.