The cost of an expanding moral circle: After living abroad, outcasts matter more but loved ones matter less.

Authors

Daniela Rodriguez-Mincey, Salvatore J Affinito, Giselle E Antoine, Kurt Gray, William W Maddux

Published in

Journal of personality and social psychology. Volume 131. Issue 3. Pages 399-421.

Abstract

People tend to morally prioritize their extremely close others (loved ones; such as family, partners, or friends) while disregarding extremely distant others (societal outcasts; such as pariahs, villains, or criminals). Across seven primary and 15 supplemental studies, we document how multicultural experiences might alter this universal default through moral compression: the simultaneous expansion of moral concern toward societal outcasts and contraction away from loved ones, effectively "compressing" the outermost and innermost anchors of the moral circle closer toward each other. Specifically, we find that greater breadth of living abroad experiences can compress the moral circle through heightened identification with all humanity, an association strengthened by cultural distance between home and host countries. Moral compression reflects a shift toward more impartial moral treatment under cognitive constraints. Whereas centuries of moral thought have idealized an ever-expanding moral circle, we draw from theories of bounded cognition and social identity abstraction to explore a costly trade-off of moral change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

PMID:
42574112
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 11 Aug 2026.

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