Moral Behavior When No One Is Watching: an Interview with Jillian Jordan

“For the ‘Signaling When No One Is Watching,’ basically what we were interested in was motivated by previous research suggesting that people are strongly motivated to signal to others that they’re morally good.”

Jillian Jordan completed her Ph.D. in psychology at Yale University in 2018 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Dispute Resolution Research Center at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Her research primarily centers around human morality, with a particular focus on how people’s desire to appear moral to their peers affects their decision-making. Later this year, Jordan will begin work as an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. In this interview, she joins Merion West and Kambiz Tavana to discuss her research, particularly two papers “Signaling When No One Is Watching” and “When Do We Punish People Who Don’t?,” as well as their broader implications.

Dr. Jordan, I want to ask you about two papers you were part of. The first is “Signaling When No One Is Watching,” and the second is “When Do We Punish People Who Don’t?” Can you start by walking me through “Signaling When No One Is Watching”?

For the “Signaling When No One Is Watching,” basically what we were interested in was motivated by previous research suggesting that people are strongly motivated to signal to others that they’re morally good. As a result, one way we try to do this is by punishing people, who are bad—in order to sort of convey to others: “I am not bad.” I wouldn’t say that I’m against punishing, and actually you can trust me to behave morally. So this work raises the question of: Are we just thinking about trying to appear moral in the eyes of others? In context, when people are watching us, do we have the explicit desire to make them evaluate us positively? Or, are people unconsciously trying to signal their moral virtue, even in situations where nobody is actually observing them. So do we have a default tendency to implicitly try to appear moral to others that doesn’t necessarily get turned off if we’re alone. So what we wanted to do is try and provide evidence that when nobody’s watching us—and we find out about wrongdoing—one contribution to our moral outrage (and our willingness to punish the wrong thing) is actually the desire to appear moral in the eyes of hypothetical observers. This might take place even though nobody’s actually watching. So that was our motivation.