Attentional Reweighting in Adolescent Moral Impression Updating and the Emergence of Permissible Immorality

Moral impression updating refers to the process of adjusting perceptions of others based on their moral and immoral behaviors. Across three studies, we aimed to investigate the developmental trajectory of moral impression updating across adolescence, specifically focusing on the emergence of "permissible immorality"-where prior moral behaviors attenuate the negative impact of subsequent immoral ones on overall moral impressions-and its underlying attention mechanisms, which were explored using a Transformer model. Study 1 examined four age groups (n = 337, 10-25 years), all recruited from urban schools in China and identified as Asian. Early and middle adolescents exhibited more rapid and substantial shifts in moral impressions. In contrast, older adolescents showed a more pronounced pattern of permissible immorality, whereby prior moral behaviors mitigated the impact of later immoral ones. Study 2 (n = 96, 18-25 years) identified boundary conditions for this effect, showing that permissible immorality only occurred when the frequency of moral behaviors exceeded that of immoral ones. Study 3 (n = 480, 10-25 years) employed a Transformer model to simulate attention processes in moral impression updating, revealing that older adolescents integrate recent and historical behaviors more adaptively, while younger adolescents focused rigidly on immediate behavior features. These findings highlight a transition from short-term judgments to integrative, context-sensitive evaluations. Collectively, they indicate that "permissible immorality" may serve as an adaptive mechanism that balances social flexibility with moral consistency.