Daniel Effron from the London Business School found that we judge one and the same offense less strictly when we meet him repeatedly. The psychologist calls the phenomenon the "moral repetition effect" (roughly: moral repeat effect). In the experiments, the researcher showed more than 3,000 test subjects fictional or real newspaper headings and other descriptions of immoral behavior (for example: "Flight attendants slap seven months old baby because it cried during the flight"). If the test subjects saw such a representation several times, they then found them less reprehensible than violations, from which they only read once.
To check what role feelings play with the moral repetition effect, test subjects should indicate their emotional reaction to what has been read in a further attempt. This also decreased with the repetition of the examples. The onset of emotion weakens our moral assessment, says Effron. If the participants ignore their feelings and only answer on the basis of reason, they did not rate them more often.
