The Price of Neutrality: Why “Staying Out of It” Backfires in Moral Disagreement

People care where others around them stand on contentious moral and political issues. Yet when faced with the prospect of taking sides and the possibility of alienating observers with whom they might disagree, actors may try to “stay out of it”. We demonstrate that despite its intuitive appeal for reducing conflict, opting not to take sides over moralized issues can provoke distrust and disdain, even more so than siding against an observer’s viewpoint outright. Across 11 experiments, we find that attempts to stay out of the fray are often interpreted as deceptive and untrustworthy. When actors choose not to take sides, observers often ascribe concealed opposition, an attribution of strategic deception which provokes distrust and undermines real-stakes cooperation and partner choice. However, we further demonstrate that this effect arises only when staying out of it seems strategic: Actors who seem to hold genuine middle-ground beliefs or who lack incentives for impression management are not distrusted for staying neutral. (The full paper from the Journal of Experimental Psychology)

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We will discuss the episode "The Price of Neutrality" from the Stanford Psychology Podcast at this meetup. Please listen to the episode in advance (51 minutes) and bring your thoughts, reactions, and queries to share with us at the conversation.

Listen here: Spotify | Apple | The Stanford Psychology Substack

In the episode, Dr. Alex Shaw, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago, discusses his fascinating research on why attempts to stay neutral in moral and political disagreements can backfire. His work reveals that when people choose not to take sides on contentious issues, they may actually be viewed as less trustworthy than those who openly disagree. Through a series of experiments, Dr. Shaw and his colleagues found that this distrust stems from observers perceiving neutrality as strategic deception.

Shaw's research explores how children and adults navigate the complex world of social behavior, with a particular focus on morality, fairness, and social judgments.

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Future topics for this series:

If you'd like to suggest a podcast episode for us to discuss at a future event, please send me a message or leave a comment below.

This link here is my own (regularly updated) list of listening recommendations and potential fodder for future discussions (by default it's sorted from oldest to newest but you can change it with the "sort by" button.)

Podcasts we've previously discussed:

• Why Cynicism Is Bad For You (and The Surprising Science of Human Goodness) from The Gray Area
• The Culture Map: Decoding Cross-Cultural Communication from ReThinking