“It’s Complicated”: Two Studies of How Moral Information Shades Teens’ Perceptions of Adult Competence

In Study I, 125 adolescent participants judged targets who committed hypothetical transgressions as less generally/professionally competent than controls or ‘morals.’ This was true for targets associated with two of three very different occupations. In Study II, 88 subjects reported similar results after a quasi-experimental approach employing photographs and vignettes.