How Bad They Would Have Been: The Role of Counterfactual Thought in Moral Judgments of Actions and Inactions

Three experiments (N = 793) examined the impact of counterfactual thinking on moral judgments of actions and inactions. Actual bad actors were consistently judged as more immoral than counterfactual ones. Other findings include order effects, a replication of outcome bias, and evidence for the attenuation of inactions relevant to actions.