What are some of the psychological and interpersonal implications of studying moral and immoral behavior? Do people who investigate moral goodness tend to become, themselves, better people--ethically speaking? But does exposure to negative behaviors tend to cause people to become desensitized to the negative in the world--until, before you know it, they hear of negative, evil behaviors but have not visceral reaction to them? And, if people "explain" immoral behaviors, do they end up condoning them. Miller and his colleagues suggest they might: First, judgments (without explanation) are rife with despositionality, due to the correspondent inference/FAE
Second, when people start to ponder the explanation, they move away from dispositional explanations to others;--which sounds condoning.

• adjustment to initially extremely dispositional explanation
• perceived likelihood; behavior is more common than initially thought
• exposure and passage of time: softening
• mere exposure; prolonged exposure to information and perp can soften attitude—read enough bios of Jeff Dahmler, might start thinking positively of him; next to a sexual harrasser
• greater complexity creates more convoluted thinking, including counterarguments
• empathy for the perp, relaxation of the underdog fascination
• affect moderates, fades away

Would explaining the action of Bernard Goetz, the so called "subway gunman," prompt you to condone his actions? Or, at minimum, cause observers to believe you were condoning it?

According to Miller, participants that read social-psychological explanations (in which harmful behaviors are explained in situational terms) of harmful acts believed the researcher was condoning of perpetrators whereas participants that read dispositional accounts (where the harmful behavior is explained by the perpetrator's own characteristics) of the same behavior did not hold that same view. This demonstrates the fact that observers are influenced on how someone views a harmful act, which determines whether they view someone as more condoning of a harmful behavior or not.

The important aspect of this topic is to realize that the person explaining/understanding why a person commits a harmful act does not mean they condone the act in any way, as long as the person explaining this harmful behavior does not free the perpetrator from moral condemnation of his/her "evil" behavior.




Another class of consquences of studying negative behavior may be more pernicious. It may, over time, be depressing to study the many harms humans have perpetrated on their fellow human beings. Japanese/American journalist Iris Chang, for example, studied intensively the atrocities of the Japanese in 1937 at Nanking, in China. Her analysis is extremely personal, and she condemns in the strongest way the perpetrators of these crimes. Chang committed suicide in 2004.