The researchers gave half their participants the bad-guy-to-good-guy bio and half the good-guy-to-bad-guy bio, and asked both groups to evaluate Jim’s overall moral character. Across multiple versions of the study, people assessed Jim’s morality based largely on how he behaved at the end of his life. Indeed, they evaluated a life with twenty-nine years of treachery and six months of goodness the same as a life with twenty-nine years of goodness and six months of treachery. “[P]eople are willing to override a relatively long period of one kind of behavior with a relatively short period of
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