People make moral judgments about others, and new information can cause those judgments to change. Prior work examined moral impression updating after observing additional behaviors, but less is known about moral updating when prior behaviors are reframed, either as more or less moral than on first impression. The present work compared moral updating as scenarios were reframed from moral-to-immoral, or immoral-to-moral. Three studies show that the negativity bias, well-documented by prior work, can be reversed when first impressions are reframed, and partially reinstated if new information is irrelevant. Further, this “positivity bias” is partly explained by the extent to which reframing information elicits external causal attributions. Future research on moral updating may benefit from a sensitivity to such qualitative features of new information.

人们对他人做出道德判断，而新信息可能会导致这些判断发生变化。先前的工作在观察其他行为后检查了道德印象的更新，但当先前的行为被重新定义时，道德更新知之甚少，或多或少比第一印象更道德。目前的工作比较了道德更新，因为场景从道德到不道德或不道德到道德重新构建。三项研究表明，先前工作充分证明的消极偏见可以在重新构建第一印象时逆转，如果新信息不相关，则可以部分恢复。此外，这种“积极性偏见”部分可以通过重新构建信息引发外部因果归因的程度来解释。未来关于道德更新的研究可能会受益于对新信息的这种定性特征的敏感性。